Victoria Wood RIP

[poliphilo]

I was watching odd bits and pieces on YouTube last night- including most of Acorn Antiques, after which I went and sat with my mother for a while and watched Channel 4 News and it was impossible to take any of it seriously. No one ever did a better job of exposing the absurdities of TV than Victoria Wood.

She was a brilliant writer; she relished words and enjoyed putting them in unlikely conjunctions;  no one ever did better bathos. She created lovely characters too. As a performer she was immensely generous- happy to shadow other actors- like Julie Walters and Celia Imrie- and give them the best lines. Dinnerladies is one of the great sitcoms.

I could go on. She was a terrific stand-up, a composer of deathless comic songs; latterly she'd begun to make her mark in straight roles.  Usually when we say we're going to miss a performer what we really mean is we liked something they did decades ago but with Wood it's literally true.  She was still a force. We were still wondering what she'd do next...

Comments

[qatsi.livejournal.com]

Quite so.

2016 seems to have been a terrible year for celebrity deaths so far, I am beginning to wonder who will be left by the end of the year. (Just doing a tally on my LJ userpics, I think the living outnumber the dead, but only just).

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

And so the 20th century fades away into the mists of time...