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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 252700" data-attributes="member: 23">An Audience With… Victoria Wood (10th December 1988) <img src="https://www.comedy.co.uk/images/library/comedies/900x450_eps/a/an_audience_with_victoria_wood.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />A plethora of famous, almost-famous, not-quite-famous and never-famous-but-they-tried “celebs” make up the audience, carefully lit in order for us to see their best self conscious fake laughing at the Oscars faces, which range from the grudging “oh, she’s so clever” slow head shake accompanied by half smile and clap (Jennifer Saunders, Ade Edmonson and Dawn French) to the narcissistic “aren’t I adorable when I’m amused” nose wrinkle (a pair of blonde women in the front row). A big part of the fun of these Audience With sets is the nostalgia of spotting “celebs” you’d long forgotten. To that end, there’s Richard O’Sullivan’s daughter from Me & My Girl and her sassy black friend; agony aunts Claire Rayner and Miriam Stoppard (the former chuckling happily away while the latter licks her lips in an effort not to grin to the point her face cracks). There’s a grubby looking dark haired woman in a black outfit with puffy black sleeves who apparently knew someone at LWT as she was in the front row and kept getting close ups biting down on a finger side on in her mouth (I think she’s Anton Rodgers’s bit from May To December, but couldn’t swear to it).Then there’s the usual celebrity crowd of the time: Joan Sims; Maureen Lipman; Joan Bakewell; Pat Coombs; Bella Emberg; Liza Goddard; Denis Norden; David “Kid” Jensen; the smooth one with the moustache from Crossroads; Corrie’s Kevin Webster; even Michael Grade and Judi Dench are there. And of course there are Vic’s friends: Julie Walters (“Star of Educating Rita. Typhoo One Cup”) and Celia Imrie (“Looking for panto this year, Celia?”). It’s no doubt an intimidating situation for one person to hold the spotlight for fifty minutes but Vic looks anything but and makes it look effortless. She takes hold off the situation by treating it with a degree of contempt: She even pokes fun at the business where various celebs ask prepared-ahead-of-time questions “That’s not one of my questions”, she responds to one. The patter is perfect. Some of the material will be very familiar to anyone who’s seen her live shows, and even her TV shows to this point (the sex on the train story and the denting the viaduct business, among others, were both used in the As Seen On TV opening monologues). But that’s the point. This is a time capsule version of her show, and so there absolutely must be some familiar material. It’s like a music concert: there has to be a mix of old favourites and new material so that everyone gets what they want. Vic is a top raconteur, and no matter how many times some of these anecdotes are told, what impresses is how she makes it sound fresh and spontaneous each time. If you just watch one live performance it all sounds off-the-cuff. But keep watching and the great skill and incredibly hard work behind each line starts to become apparent. It’s clear how Vic’s confidence has grown by this time. The Wood & Walters pilot had four songs crammed into twenty five minutes. Here, in a set that’s double that length, Vic performs just two. The rest is dialogue. There’s no hiding and we get to see her in full flight. Most impressive is the middle act, in which Vic tells one long story which begins with her food shopping and segues to her being pursued, hiding in a department store and ends in a theatre with her watching farce. Along the way comes the legendary “World Of Sacharelle” piece and a song, It Would Never Have Worked. And it ends with a punchline that’s set up in the beginning with her being mistaken from the fat neighbour from Fresh Fields or Dawn French. It’s a breathtakingly artful twenty minutes. The final act is memorably classic, kicking off with “I’m lookin’ for me friend. Kimberleh” to the “little survey” and ending with perhaps her finest rendition of The Ballad Of Barry and Freda.(continued)</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?