Thursday, April 21, 2016

My hero / Victoria Wood by AL Kennedy


Victloria Wood in 2002. Photograph: The Independent/Rex/Shutterstock


My hero: Victoria Wood by AL Kennedy

A writer with an exemplary, generous eye, she was transgressive, warm, intelligent, surreal and bloody funny – she could gently overturn the world


AL Kennedy
Thu 21 Apr 2016


Y
ou may be old enough to remember when Victoria Wood appeared on New Faces on ITV. It was 1974 and Wood was transgressive, warm, intelligent, subversive, joyous, surreal and bloody funny. My gran knew she was funny, my mum knew she was funny, I knew she was funny. Everyone did. For more than four decades she gave us that: the unforeseen, triumphant joy of real comedy, heart and mind.


When most TV comedy was still using female performers as busty set dressing, Wood was in charge of her funny; its sheer quality setting her beyond all usual restrictions. When posh boys riffed on life’s absurdities and scholarship boys joined them – there was Victoria Wood. When much working-class and club comedy was caught in a headlock of self-loathing, misogyny and general hate – there was Victoria Wood. Like all genuinely transcendent comedians, she was completely herself, saying what she felt was true. Gently, self-deprecatingly, she could overturn the world, be northern, be female, be Ann Widdecombe dancing. She was part of the creative impetus that broke UK writers and performers through into that wonderful, crazed explosion of “alternative comedy” in the 80s.
As a writer, Wood created extraordinary roles – often for women – and had an exemplary, generous eye for other talented actors and comics. She put the music into beautiful and useful lines, whether in a drama such as Housewife, 49 or a song such as “Let’s Do It”. She could be real without dragging humanity in the gutter, she could be angry without bullying, she could be serious without being smug. She lit my world and I thank her.
THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016



Posted by at
Labels: , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)