Wood & Walters do Family Planning

What is there to say about one of the greatest British comedic writers and performers that has not already been said?

☞ by Benjamin Daniels in Videomatic

The great Victoria Wood.

What is there to say about one of the greatest British comedic writers and performers that has not already been said?

Because her writing was so warm and tinged with British surrealism, as demonstrated in this wonderful clip from her joshing about with the equally wonderful Julie Walters, her ability to reflect the best and worst of the British back into themselves was sometimes missed.

But, apart from her effortless ability to toy with cadence (something which she struggled long and hard with, as she revealed in later interviews), Wood was also a canny critic of the British class system and how the upper working and lower middle classes bumped against each other.

Again, as demonstrated here in a sly swipe at governmental bureaucracy and that most wonderful of British institutions, the Nanny State.

Wood was also able to hone in on the British obsession with sex and the sexual politics of marriage, always wrapped in a charming and disarming whimsy that almost, but never quite camouflaged what she was alluding to. She was saucy was Victoria Wood and her (British) audience loved her for it.

She was also funny. Not amusing or ticklish, but laugh out loud and be thrilled at what she was encouraging you to laugh at.

She is also sorely missed and the world is a colder, harder place without her being in it.

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