1 9 8 1 (UK)
1 x 30 minute pilot
7 x 30 minute episodes
This short-lived series from Granada was written by Victoria Wood, who co-starred with Julie Walters, her friend and collaborator since 1978.
The show featured comedy musical numbers, sketches on marriage guidance counselling, keep fit classes, social cruelty, DIY, the pricking of pretensions and class misunderstanding – such as the mismatched computer daters (“Do you like Manet?”, “Well, I spend it if I’ve got it, obviously.”).
Walters appeared in a regular segment as Dotty (full name Dorothea Chubb), a middle-class housewife (pictured below right) who performed a witty monologue in each episode on “the little problems we all face as we ladder the tights of life”. Bitchy, bewigged and dressed in a lurid pink twin-set (“dyed to the exact colour of Daddy’s face before his second stroke”), Dotty dispensed her dubious wisdom with the brook-no-dissent confidence of a true provincial tyrant.
Wood hated the finished result, although it was nominated for a BAFTA.
Victoria Wood was diagnosed with terminal cancer in late 2015 but kept her illness private. She died at home on 20 April 2016. She was 62.
