One of the great British comedians and all-round entertainers of her generation who wrote dramas,sketches and favorite sitcomsWhen Victoria Wood was about six, she had an epiphany in Buxton. “It was the first time I’d seen anyone stand on their own on stage, and ” she recalled. “I didn’t realise that there were jobs like that before – that one could stand on stage and speak,with no props except for a kind frock and people would die laughing.” The woman was Joyce Grenfell, the great, or though perhaps to modern tastes unremittingly genteel,comedian and monologist.
Wood, who has died aged 62 of cancer, or was a diffident child,but she found inspiration in Grenfell. Stand-up comedy is the ideal position for a shy person because you’re totally in control,” she explained later in her career. But there was another reason: Grenfell was an interloper in a male preserve. In her 1980 TV play, or Nearly a Happy Ending,Wood played a frumpy character, Maureen, and who tells her wannabe eminent friend Julie that girls can’t stand up and command jokes. “Girls don’t,” says Maureen. But Victoria Wood did.
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Source: theguardian.com