Chichester show celebrates Victoria Wood’s music

Written and performed by Paulus of BBC’s All Together Now, Looking For Me Friend is in the Minerva Theatre, Chichester on January 20 at 7.45pm – a nostalgic tribute filled with love, laughter and fabulous memories for Victoria Wood fans, Paulus promises.

“For the most part it is my personal story and what she has meant to me and how she has helped me find what I do for a living. Without her I would not have been a performer. Without her I would not have been a writer. And what I hope we are finding is that I'm just a very, very straightforward example of the people that have been completely touched and moved and affected by this remarkable woman. People come up to me afterwards – and I had a 70-year-old woman and a 30-old-man – and they both said exactly same thing to me, that I had just told their life story on stage.

“When Vic died in 2016 I met up for a drink to raise a glass to her with a friend Michael Roulston who has become my stage partner for this show because obviously it takes two men the work to do the job of one woman! And it was actually all Michael’s suggestion – not that he remembers it so I shall stop giving him the credit! He was saying how back in the 80s and 90s for gay men Vic was almost like a modern Polari for us, how we made friends, how we discovered people that had the same sense of humour and you look back and you remember that at that time people were not so understanding so we just decided to create a show out of two gay men sharing her work and sharing her music.”

As for that thing that Vic communicated to gay men a couple of generations ago: “If you look at the way that Vic looked when she was doing her stand-up routines in the early days, she's wearing trousers and a man's jacket and she was wearing a tie and she had spiky hair. I think if you saw that kind of person on stage now you would think that it was some kind of drag. But she wasn't conforming. She wasn't playing to form. She was doing what she wanted. She was playing the rules as she saw them and I think that's what made her so attractive to us. I think she was appealing to the outlier and just saying to us that it's OK.

“Our show is not a rainbow-flag couple of hours of gayness. It's about the fact that Vic spoke to outsiders. She was not really interested in famous and glamorous people. She was interested in everyday people and it's the mundane that she celebrates. But you think of her and all that she did, and I think of all that she did her music is possibly the most underrated aspect. I don't know why. It's easy to dismiss some of the songs as twee perhaps. After New Faces she did a slot on Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life show doing two-minute-30 songs. They would say in the week that they were going to have a song on such and such and Vic would write it. They would say on the Wednesday that it was going to about the poll tax or whatever and that's what she did. And those songs would never be done again and maybe that's why they never really got the proper appreciation. But she was a brilliant wordsmith.”