Q&A: What Wood Victoria Do?

As First Seen on TV

STEVE: Thank you for taking the time to chat to The Recs. We loved Looking For Me Friend and can’t wait to hear about your new show, What Wood Victoria Do? But first, let’s go back to the very beginning. When was the first time you remember watching Victoria?

PAULUS: I would have been ten, and it would have been 1985. My entry level is the As Seen on TV show, and a little bit An Audience with Victoria Wood on ITV, but I’m pretty sure I saw As Seen on TV first.

So all of the sketches, all of the rep company, pretty much established. And, really crucially that stand-up at the beginning of every episode, to camera, when she’s on her own. And I’m really struck by the fashion and the hair and the choices she made. I think if somebody appeared on TV right now that looked like that, we’d assume that this was some comment about their sexuality, because she was wearing men’s boxy jackets and, you know, little leather ties and jeans, spiky hair. And I had spiky, mad hair like that as well, with silly colours in it.

And, of course, we know that she was just wearing what made her comfortable and saying, “Just because Esther Rantzen wears a frock on telly doesn’t mean I have to,” you know? And famously, she used to borrow one of Celia Imrie’s dresses to do That’s Life! in. But by the time she got her own show, I think she was like, “Well, I’ve got my own programme, so I should probably be allowed to wear what I want,” you know?

STEVE: And was it love at first sight for you about Victoria? What was the trajectory of your fandom about her?

PAULUS: Yes, it was love at first sight for Victoria. Not Julie, not Celia, not Susie, not Duncan.

Not that I didn’t admire these people, but I think there are people that like Julie more than they like Vic, actually, and don’t perhaps respect or admire, like I do, the fact that Vic wrote these things for these people.

But yes, I did. I loved her straight away. I don’t know why, because when I was ten, I didn’t know I was… I knew I was different, but I didn’t know the extent of it or why. But…

You know Sesame Street? There’s a recurring thing on Sesame Street with a song that goes, “One of these kids are doing their own thing,” and the screen is split into four. And there’s, like, three kids skipping and one in the corner doing a hula hoop. And I just think Vic was hula hooping when everyone else was doing a skip.

STEVE: Is it that kind of her slight otherness, but that confidence of being completely assured in her own skin and not feeling the need to please? Is that part of the appeal?

PAULUS: That’s really astute, actually, because, as a child and a teenager, and just in case this isn’t overtly clear to everybody reading, I was a flamer of a homosexual, and I’m astonishingly butch in comparison now, he says with a piece of knitwear on.

But I was an absolute flamer. And I was bullied daily. I don’t remember a single day of my life, unless I never left the house where I had at least one comment, if not physical then verbal abuse, every single day.

But never did I stop and say, “Oh, I’ll just wear what everybody else is, and I’ll get a short back and sides, and I’ll be quiet.”

It’s not worth not being yourself in your own skin, and it’s not worth getting ignored either, pretending to be somebody else or lesser than you are. So, yes, and I think that when you watch Victoria, there’s this very strange mix of ballsy and confident but at the same time, having this gumption, this insistence that I will forge ahead.

As Seen on Stage

STEVE: So how do you move from being a fan of her work on television to creating a show, Looking for Me Friend: The Music of Victoria Wood? What was the impulse?

PAULUS: Well, I performed Victoria’s songs, in and out of drag, since the mid-nineties, really, and they’ve always been part of my repertoire as a cabaret performer. But I’d never considered doing a full show about her, or celebrating her. But after her death, I met with Michael, who used to play the piano for me on Looking for Me Friend, and we were talking about, as I said in the show, that she seemed to inadvertently have created a modern version of Polari for eighties and nineties queer kids like Mike and I, and I think perhaps yourself too.

STEVE: Oh, yes. For sure!

PAULUS: Which meant that, I mean, this is not just a queer thing, of course. I have made friends who love Victoria that aren’t gay and that aren’t male, and we still want to shout, “Red cabbage? How much?” across supermarkets at each other. But there’s something about a shorthand, about a shared comedy, about a little private joke. This strange woman that appeared on BBC Two, first on Fridays, then it moved to Thursdays, but not everyone knew, and not everyone got it.

STEVE: Was it always going to be about the music?

PAULUS: Yes. That’s what became clear with Michael and me chatting after she died: a celebration that spotlighted the music and the composing. Because I think it has been relatively overlooked, comparative to her stand-up and her sitcoms and everything else.

I mean, the amount of people that talk about her plays since she died. Those plays weren’t that good. They just weren’t. Especially the recordings of them, the actual productions that I’ve seen on television. And I think it’s weird that she won awards for playwriting so much in the early days, because she’s actually Bob Dylan. She’s actually the people’s poet. She’s the female Alan Bennett.

“She’s actually Bob Dylan. She’s actually the people’s poet. She’s the female Alan Bennett”

PAULUS: And the genius level of, you know, there’s a song called “Love Song” about a widower, a man who’s lost his long-term wife, and it says the most striking things, the most astonishing, heartbreaking things that you would assume only an older person would understand, but she wrote it in her early twenties. And I’m staggered. To this day, I’m staggered that she managed to do that.

STEVE: So I think the first performance of Looking For Me Friend was in 2020. How many performances have you done? Have you counted them?

PAULUS: I think it’s just under 200, and we met around 20,000 audience members in that time.

STEVE: That is a LOT of touring. Do audiences respond differently in different parts of the country?

PAULUS: I’d love to tell you no, but they do. Yeah, they do.

I think the mania starts in the West Midlands, where Julie was brought up. We met her childhood librarian. We performed in her childhood library, and the same woman still works there, Sandwell Library. So from there, and we’ve done Birmingham proper, we’ve done Stourbridge. God love you, Stourbridge. Rest in peace.

And that’s where the mania begins. And any lower, it’s all a bit southern, and it’s all a bit, well, like me, and, you know, I’m the southerner here. And so it’s all a bit Celia, Celia Imrie, after that. The Welsh are great. The Welsh go wild. The Welsh are up for a party, no problem there. Of course, there are pockets of places where we’ve had a really lovely time, but broadly, people are almost completely silent, which is fine, because you get to go home early when nobody laughs.

STEVE: Oh dear.

PAULUS: And then, yeah, Lancashire and Yorkshire, they go absolutely wild. Absolutely. And Scotland too.

STEVE: After 200 performances, you took the decision to rest Looking for Me Friend. Was that a difficult decision, or had it reached a natural end?

PAULUS: To be honest with you, it was sort of run out of venues. Part of the decision was that it became clear that all these venues would definitely have me back. They would definitely have another show about Vic back, but it was probably going to be a hot minute before they took Looking for Me Friend.

Soon To Be As Seen on Stage

STEVE: So, at this point, the question was: what would Paulus do next? As it turned out, you were going to create a brand-new show, What Wood Victoria Do?

Did you have any thought at all, going, “I could do something different”?

PAULUS: No. Nobody thought this was a good idea. Nobody. And maybe it isn’t.

STEVE: Oh, I think it’s a great idea. I love a sequel, though.

PAULUS: No, my husband thinks it’s a bad idea. My director did not think it was a good idea. Everybody was just a bit like, “No. It’ll seem desperate. You’ll be scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

“My husband thinks it’s a bad idea. My director did not think it was a good idea.”

PAULUS: The thing is, you know, she has 400 songs registered with PRS, and we dealt with 21 of them in the original. You can’t be scraping the bottom of a barrel when there are still over 350 to choose from. And I did have that fear a little bit, but, I mean, it was very, very quickly dissipated, that fear.

I had to dig my heels in with the rest of my team and my advisers and go, “No, it’s happening. I’m doing it.” And also, there’s a hell of a lot of merch to shift, so I’ve got to do it somehow.

STEVE: So how do you start with putting a show like this together? Does it start with a list of songs? You think, “I’ve been aching to put this one in. I’ve been aching to do this one”? Or is it more thematically led? How does the creative process start?

PAULUS: I think it probably does start with, “Oh, okay, so let’s find a long list of songs which might be fun to do, which might show some diversity, which would offer…”

I mean, what I really want, one of the things I want to do with What Wood Victoria Do?, is to showcase Vic as a composer, as an arranger and composer, and writer of entire musicals. You could have come to Looking for Me Friend and gone away thinking that she was a piano-and-vocal act only, and that would be wrong.

And that’s what What Wood Victoria Do? affords us. So we have leaned into, like, Acorn Antiques: The Musical!, and we’re using backing tracks with, you know, full orchestrations, as opposed to piano and voice.

PAULUS: So, yes, we start with the songs, and then at some point the Post-it notes and the director show up, and she starts, quite rightly, going, “But which one serves the story?”

And then it doesn’t matter how well you sing it, or how many years you’ve longed to sing it. If it doesn’t serve the story you’ve started to plot, then it goes. You do start with the songs, and then something else takes over completely, and the songs start getting rejected quite brutally, actually.

STEVE: You’ve anticipated my next question, which is: I mentioned the lovely Sarah-Louise Young, who’s probably best known for her show An Evening Without Kate Bush, is your director. How has she helped steer the show?

PAULUS: It’s story. It’s always story with Sarah, and that’s what I need. If it was left to me, I’d blunder on ten minutes late and I’d go, “Oh, we loved her, didn’t we?” And then I’d have a cry, and then I’d sing one song, and then there’d be an interval. But I can’t do that with Sarah. I can’t get away with that. Or I can’t get away with, “All right, why do you want to sing this song?” “Because I sing it nicely.” “No, that’s not an answer.” So it’s sometimes brutal, but it’s absolutely right, and that’s what makes a good script. It makes an enduring story, I think.

And that’s why I’m on draft 20 now of the script. I’ve been writing it since January. We’ve done seven previews, and the script has changed unrecognisably from the first one to the last one. Yeah.

STEVE: Wow. That is a lot of work that goes into it. But then again, when you see your shows, it’s not something that’s just slung together. It makes you think about the songs, about yourself, about your interaction with this person as well, Victoria.

I know that you’ve done some previews, but you’re about to put the show in front of a paying audience for the first time in just under a week. Is this an exciting time, or is it nerve-racking?

PAULUS: I’m an anxious person.

STEVE: Yes.

PAULUS: I’ve always been an anxious person. And I was having a walk in the park today, and I was asking myself if it was possible to let go of some of the daily anxiety I feel, literally just in walking around.

Everything’s wrong. Whatever choice I make, there’s a voice in my head telling me it’s wrong, and that I’m lazy, or I’m stupid, or I’m not being kind enough. And that’s a lot. And I think I just need to let go – because what I learned touring around with Looking for Me Friend was how much love, and admiration, and forgiveness there would be from really big fans.

“What I learned touring around with Looking for Me Friend

was how much love, and admiration, and forgiveness

there would be from really big fans.”

I thought that I’d go out on the road, Steve, and there would just be people at the merch stall after every show going, “So, in verse two, you said ‘of’, and actually it’s ‘and’,” you know? And essentially treating me like I treated people on All Together Now when I judged other singers.

And so it mattered greatly to me to, you know, put my money where my mouth is, to do Vic and all the fans like myself proud, because I know how much she didn’t like her lines being tampered with, you know, and to get it right.

STEVE: Do you get a performer’s sense of what will fly with an audience, or is that something that you only really discover when you’re on the road?

PAULUS: We often say that the missing ingredient is the audience, or, as I loftily call them, the people the other side of the lights. And it’s true. It’s absolutely true. Until you’ve got them in front of you, you don’t know. And my previews have all been in London. You know, two were in my kitchen for two very close pals.

And so, to go to the Victoria Wood Theatre, run by two of her friends who are on the board of the foundation, to do the first official performance is a big difference to doing it in your kitchen to ten mates, you know?

STEVE: Yes, no pressure there!

PAULUS: The response I feel I want to share is that I decided to make Looking for Me Friend as rich as I possibly could, like a fruitcake, just stuffed full. You know, we have rubber gloves in our jacket pockets, and we don’t make any comment on them. They’ve been there for seven years. Mike’s is red and mine is yellow, and I sort of hide the fingers so that it looks as much like a handkerchief as possible. And it’s just there for the people it’s there for. And if you don’t see it, or you don’t get it, you don’t get it.

And actually, the vast majority of people who say, “I love Victoria Wood,” when you ask them about what it is they know, they know the Two Soups sketch and a song called “Let’s Do It”, and that’s it. They don’t know anything else. They couldn’t quote you a single, solitary other thing. And that doesn’t mean they don’t love her. That doesn’t mean that they’re not telling the truth.

And so I realised that it was actually too rich. I am aware that, at its worst, Looking for Me Friend can feel like a private joke that you didn’t get invited to. And I know some people go away admiring what we do and how we do it, but going, “Yeah, I couldn’t get in, quite.” You know, and I understand that. I understand that now, and I understand the fandom a lot better, and that’s been a really interesting learning curve.

Make it simpler. Make it less clever. But just make it accessible. Make it that you don’t need to come with a prior knowledge, because for every one mad Victoria Wood fan, they’ll have a friend that they’ll be bringing along who probably won’t know as much as they do.

STEVE: Naturally, we don’t want to give our readers too many spoilers, but what can you tell us about the show? How much are you prepared to let us in?

PAULUS: Well, talking of accessibility, the last preview, and this is going to sound like a joke, and it’s not, I came out into the bar after the last preview of What Wood Victoria Do?, and in the bar there was an Ita— two Italians, a Canadian, a Mexican, and a Pole. And none of them knew Vic’s work. And we were just saying, “Thanks for coming. How are you? Was the last hour of your life completely baffling?”

And they all went, “No, no, no.” And I was, “Well, but why? Because I know you don’t know any of her stuff, and you’re only here because you’re my husband’s friend.”

And they all said, “Because we’ve all got mothers.” And they were all telling a stranger about their mum or their nan.

STEVE: Wow.

PAULUS: The show’s about emotions, and specifically the emotions we inherit. It’s about anxiety. It’s about depression. It’s about being angry because you’re not allowed to be sad. You know, suppressing emotions to such an extent that they seep out as something else, often something much more confusing to everybody else and damaging to yourself.

And yes, this is a comedy show, and it is full of comedy songs, but that’s essentially what it is.

It’s a play with songs written by Victoria. A play written by me, with songs written by her.

That’s how I feel about it now. I think I know what I’ve made, and it’s taken months to realise what I made.

“It’s a play with songs written by Victoria. A play written by me, with songs written by her.“

PAULUS: So it’s much more theatrical. It’s less of a sort of a cabaret night with me, and a bit more formally presented, I suppose.

And where are we? Well, we are in village halls. We are in gift shops. We are at the WI. We are at the weigh-in of, you know, of Slimming World on a Tuesday night. All those places that we encounter Vic’s people.

Female-led, and led by female voices in particular. Because when I was a little gay boy, growing up in Kent in the eighties, those ladies offered me a seat at their table. Those doors were open to me in a world where very few others were, and where many, many other places were very unkind to a strange child like me. So it’s a celebration of every type of woman Victoria ever conjured, really, crossing over with my own relationships with my mum, and ladies, and aunties, and, you know, people who aren’t your aunt but you call them auntie.

STEVE: That sounds terrific. Looking for Me Friend had, as we mentioned, “The Ballad of Barry and Freda (Let’s Do It)”, which was a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. Is there an equivalent within the show, What Wood Victoria Do?

PAULUS: I thought there was, but I don’t think I’m going to get away with it, am I? I don’t think there is.

I’d love to think that I could deliver the final song, and it was show-stopping and exciting enough, and that I’d given them such a good play, that they won’t go, “Aah!” until I come out again and do “Let’s Do It”. But I’ve got to be prepared to, and I really don’t want to. But I will, if you cheer loud enough.

So the play will end, and I will bow, and if you go nuts, I’ll come out again, and we’ll have a chat, and we might sing a really long song.

But yes, yes, I have put together a number which I think almost stands up, and it’s called “Count Your Blessings”.

STEVE: Final question, then. Who would enjoy What Wood Victoria Do?

PAULUS: Based on my Canadian, Polish, Mexican, and Italian friends, anybody. Anybody. It’s a gentler show. It’s a more considered piece in some ways.

I think people assume my shows are cabarets because I’m known as the Cabaret Geek. I don’t think Looking for Me Friend is a cabaret, not in a purist sense, because it doesn’t speak to the now.

But What Wood Victoria Do? does. It asks: how have we survived without her? What advice can we take to carry on getting through our days without her? And if she were here, what would be her take on air fryers, or dry robes, or whatever? So, in some ways, it has more cabaret elements, but in others it feels much more like a play to me.

That doesn’t really answer your question. Who would enjoy it? Everybody, because I’m excellent. It’s accessible to all, and it will be the evening of your life. I don’t know.

STEVE: I think that’s a great answer.

'What Wood Victoria Do?' Tour

Paulus will begin the 'What Wood Victoria Do?' tour on Friday 25 September 2026 at the Victoria Wood Theatre, Windermere.

Followed by dates at London Crazy Coqs, Lichfield Garrick, Bakewell Town Hall, Birmingham Old Joint Stock, Hull Truck, Sale Waterside Arts, and many, many more.

For more info, head to Paulus' website!

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