Victoria Wood: stiletto in an oven glove

Even if you didn’t have an Auntie Dot in Cockermouth (the one who ate a raffia drinks coaster, mistaking it for a high-fibre biscuit), it was impossible not to feel Victoria Wood got you, somehow. Her death in 2016 triggered an outpouring of grief commensurate to her talent, but it also revealed how intimately, how individually, she was loved. Lazily viewed as the cosiest of national treasures, Wood was finer and fiercer than that: she distilled something essential about British character (national, regional, sexual), and her forensic skewering of middle-class aspiration, high and low culture and any and every class of stupidity managed to remain warm: a spectacular balancing act.

Mainly, though, she was wickedly, consistently, funny: Acorn Antiques alone merited a damehood. I could paste 800 words of randomly selected Wood lines here and you would enjoy it more than anything I could write. That is unfortunate for me, but it is a far bigger problem for her biographer Jasper Rees: you can’t possibly be as funny as Wood, so how best to honour her?

With meticulous thoroughness is one answer: Let’s Do It is nearly 600 pages long and copiously footnoted. Rees interviewed Wood frequently in her lifetime, spent two years on research, using Wood’s own audio and written notes, and interviewed more than 200 people (from her children and perennial collaborators to occasional accompanists). It shows — which sounds like a backhanded compliment but isn’t, really: this is an immersive, authoritative book.

Some of the story is familiar. Wood herself played her isolated Bury childhood and uneasy adolescence for laughs, growing up in her bedroom with ‘a piano, a television and a sandwich’. It seems self-evident she was shyer and less overtly sunny than her public persona.