'Beat me on the bottom with a Woman's Weekly....'

If ever there was a line that sums up the comedy of Victoria Wood, for me, it's this one. It's the climax of her legendary song The Ballad of Barry and Freda, also known as Let's Do It. It's a bit daring but also really rather homely in a way and of course it includes Victoria's beloved brand names. She always thought brand names were funny, probably because they're so specific. You could say magazine but 'Woman's Weekly' is better, you could say toilet cleaner but Harpic is funnier... but it was because she made them funnier.

Over the years I've seen many drama groups doing an evening of sketches and pick some of Victoria's, thinking they would be sure fire winners, only for them to fall flat and not even raise a titter. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing flawed with her sketches - they're brilliant, it's just they need to be done by Vic or one of her regular ensemble of actors. The comedy is all in the delivery.

That's the genius of Victoria Wood, you just can't imagine anyone else doing it, something I've been reminded of whilst listening to a collection of some of her best sketches and songs from Victoria Wood As Seen On TV on a new double green and brown coloured vinyl LP released today on what would have been her 70th birthday. In someone else's hands those sketches and songs would have seemed too clever by half instead of witty, too sarcastic instead of acutely observational, and the shy girl at the piano too introverted instead of appealingly vulnerable and warm.

It was Victoria's warm and witty lyrics that led her to win her heat on the ITV talent show New Faces in 1974, losing out in the next round, a monthly all winners final, which meant she didn't progress to the grand final at the London Palladium. Off the back of her TV appearance though she did sign with an agent, on a contract she says she didn't read because she was too shy to question it, 'I thought, it'll look so rude; it'll look like I don't trust him. God knows what it said.' The norms and conformity of manners and shyness wasn't just in her comedy, it was in real life too.

Her act was mostly at the piano at this point and cabaret work followed, along with replacing Jake Thackray for a fortnightly stint singing her comic songs on the BBC TV Sunday night consumer show That's Life, a format which mixed catching out rogue traders, cheery vox pops on the street with the British public, dogs that could say 'sausages' and Esther Rantzen holding up rude shaped vegetables. If ever there was a combination that was ideal for Victoria Wood this was it, but she always felt she never really fully capitalised on what should have been her big break. But by the time her run on the show had ended it was 1976 and she was still only 23 years old.

A turning point in Victoria's career was her play, Talent, which started life in Sheffield when the Crucible Theatre, flush with funds after hosting The World Snooker Championship, commissioned a season of new writing. In 1979 Granada made the TV version and cast a young actress called Julie Walters. Victoria and Julie had briefly met before in 1970 when Vic had applied for a drama course at Manchester Polytechnic and Julie was showing potential students around, but this was the first time they had been seen on TV together.

The play was a success and Victoria received letters of congratulations from prominent figures in acting, and playwright Alan Plater became a fan. Off the back of the success of Talent, in a move that could have totally changed the landscape of British comedy had she not turned it down, she was offered a place on a new satirical sketch comedy show Not The Nine O'Clock News. Victoria didn't want to join a team and the spot went to Pamela Stephenson instead.

For Victoria it was all about writing and performing her own comedy, but she still didn't feel confident enough to carry the title of a show on her own, hence Wood And Walters, made by Granada with a pilot in 1981 followed by a series in 1982. Victoria and Julie had worked together before on Talent and prior to that in a show called In At the Death at the Bush Theatre in London and this show was almost like a dry run for what was to come with more successful offerings at the BBC.

In 1983 she embarked on her first solo tour, Lucky Bag, which spawned an album and book of the sketches and songs and it was whilst honing her craft as a stand-up, or sit down comedian really as a lot of the show was at the piano, she had the beginnings of the ideas that would lead to the show which is still much loved and often quoted by anyone who was a student in the mid-1980s.

Victoria Wood As Seen On TV ran from 1985 to 1987. There were two series and a Christmas special and the sketches and songs predominantly celebrated Vic's love of television. It was in this show that she not only introduced us to characters like Patricia Routledge's Kitty, Julie Walters as Mrs Overall, Miss Babs and Mr Clifford, played by Celia Imrie and Duncan Preston and Susie Blake's snobbish and acerbic continuity announcer, but to the actors themselves, as her own personal cast of repertory players, many of whom would stay with her throughout her career. Everything was poked fun at, nothing was safe; there were spoofs of daytime TV, adverts, documentaries, the aforementioned continuity announcer and of course soap operas.

Vic, by her own admission watched a lot of Crossroads, the teatime soap set in a rundown Midlands' motel with notoriously dodgy sets and low budgets meaning it was shot 'as live' with botched lines and entrances often left in, as second takes couldn't be afforded. This led to the creation of Acorn Antiques - the spoof soap that gave us one of Julie Walters' most famous characters - Mrs Overall, the char with the tray of coconut macaroons and a thick Brummie accent.

So enduring was Acorn Antiques, Victoria reprised the characters in a musical version in 2005 with Mrs O tap tap tapping away in big production numbers. Julie Walters says that she gets recognised in life for two things, her Oscar nominated role in the 1983 film Educating Rita and as Mrs Overall in Acorn Antiques. Vic played Miss Berta in the sketches but never shied away from giving other actors some of the best lines. She was incredibly generous when it came to writing parts and laughs for other actors and one of her most famous sketches doesn't even have her in it at all!

I find it impossible to order soup in a restaurant without doing the line, 'Two Soups'.

The sketch is actually called Waitress and was inspired by Vic and Julie visiting a near-deserted cafe on a wet afternoon in Morecambe, but this classic sketch didn't look like anything much on the page to start with.

Victoria and director Geoff Posner had their doubts that it would work, but the key to the comedy was Julie's performance and that the double swing doors, supposedly to the kitchen, had to be a long way away from the two diners, played by Celia Imrie and Duncan Preston, both of whom couldn't get through the rehearsals without corpsing. Even in the take used in the show it's possible to see them holding back the laughter just enough to get through and Imrie has said she had blood in her mouth from biting the inside of her cheek so hard. It is the mark of Victoria's generosity as a comedy writer that she would give this gem to three other actors and not even want to be in it herself.

In 1988 she performed a one hour special for LWT that would be seen as her tour de force and add to her haul of BAFTAs from As Seen On TV.

An Audience With... was a series of one-off specials where a performer would chat, sing, tell jokes and take questions from an invited celebrity audience. Many had gone before such as Dame Edna Everage, Billy Connolly, Peter Ustinov and Kenneth Williams, all who'd had roaring successes with theirs. Victoria's was slightly different. The questions from the audiences were basically feed lines into jokes or routines and she sent the whole concept of the 'celebrity audience' up - in her opening monologue when she says, "I should explain there is supposed to be a celebrity audience here tonight but so far they're not here" and "We've not done bad here tonight. Who have we got? Some friends of Wincey Willis and some people from Guildford, well that's not bad. They're all up there in the balcony the people from Guildford, we don't show them because they're not famous". Bearing in mind the audience was a who's who of late 80s comedy and light entertainment, it was a brave start and the celebs roared with laughter.

She drives through the hour with new routines, observations and some of her well-known songs and looks confident and self-assured in front of her peers. Her love of brand names takes on new life when she invents her own perfectly plausible make up and skin care preparations in Welcome to the World of Sacherelle. It's striking how physical her comedy is, especially when she demonstrates the dumb waiter machine in a seaside bed and breakfast - the type with the candlewick bedspreads with the bald bits where people have picked it off - and when a fella's inflatable 'girlfriend' is punctured in a pub with a dart. This physicality is even more remarkable given that Victoria was 6 months pregnant at the time and keen to keep the news from all but her very close circle of friends. I love how, after the sketch with the woman doing surveys in the street, she tosses the clipboard away knowing all she has to do is the last song and she's done it.

And what a song! She closes the show with the musically complex and increasingly fast tempoed, Ballad of Barry and Freda and brings the house down.

The show was a triumph but afterwards she and husband Geoffrey Durham were not happy with it and didn't think it had gone well, so they were flabbergasted at the reaction both on the night at the drinks party afterwards and then later from the press and public. The show won two BAFTAs in 1989, for Best Light Entertainment Show and Best Light Entertainment Performance.

The 1990s saw two big stand-up tours and West End residencies including her 15 night sell out shows at the Royal Albert Hall in 1996 and a brief return to the TV sketch format in 1992 for a Christmas special, Victoria Wood's All Day Breakfast, but by the mid-90s Vic's mind had turned to comedy drama.

Pat And Margaret was a long held ambition for Victoria, her own original film script, which was made for TV by the BBC in 1994. It starred many of her regular cast of trusted actors; Celia Imrie, Duncan Preston and Anne Reid along with Julie Walters as Pat to Victoria's Margaret. The tale of two long lost sisters reunited on a Surprise Surprise style show called Magic Moments taped into the ever-increasing zeitgeist for reality TV. Once again Vic's love of television and keen observational eye could see the way TV was changing, where the public were the stars and how this could be an area of conflict for drama. And in it you can see the very early seeds of some characters that were to evolve later on in her writing.

It was the first time Vic and Julie Walters had acted in a drama together since Nearly A Happy Ending in 1980 and, as always, Julie shines as the vain and egocentric Pat. While she was writing it, Victoria called Julie and said "I'm writing a monstrous part for you. A horrible megalomaniac called Pat." Julie was delighted, as she always was when Vic wrote for her - she has been quoted as saying about her dear friend "I remember thinking the heavens had sent her to me". The part was indeed a gift but Victoria relished exercising her own acting chops as the downtrodden Margaret and showed us glimpses of what was to come with later more dramatic roles, and in what many would see as a reverse of fortunes, it was Victoria not Julie who was nominated for the Best Actress BATFA the following year for her part.

Then, in 1998, Victoria confounded us all again and did something new for her, she wrote a sitcom. She had been on a 68-date tour of the UK and then took the show around Australia and New Zealand so, when she returned, it was back to writing. This show is, in my humble opinion, her greatest work.

dinnerladies (with the small D she insisted on) is set in a Manchester canteen of the factory of HDW Components. We have no real idea what it is the factory does but the sheds hum with activity and the girls, led by canteen manager Tony, feed the faces of folk who work there.

The action never leaves the canteen and kitchen set and it is a true ensemble cast led by strong female actors many of whom Vic had worked with before, like Celia Imrie, Julie Walters and Anne Reid along with Duncan Preston as one of the 'token males', Stan the handy man.

For some of the cast, this show was their first job straight out of drama school, with Vic spotting the talent of a young Maxine Peake, or it was their first big break on TV as with Shobna Gulati, who plays the naive Anita and has gone on to star in Coronation Street and many other TV dramas.

But for me my favourite piece of casting in this comic masterpiece is Thelma Barlow, who had a renaissance after years in Coronation Street as dithering Mavis Riley, and it makes me ache that she didn't leave the soap years before and spread her comedy wings. Never once do I think of Mavis when I watch her as the gloriously snobbish, weight obsessed Dolly Bellfield and her and Anne Reid, as sparring partner Jean, have dialogue and timing to die for. One of the most beautifully written gags of modern British sitcom is this Dolly and Jean exchange:

Dolly: Who has sex on Christmas morning?

Jean: The Dalai Lama.

Dolly: Well, he must peel his sprouts the night before.

I have been a Victoria Wood fan all my life but for me dinnerladies is perfection, with each of the 16 episodes having an overriding narrative arch that brings the whole story to a satisfying conclusion for all the characters.

She plotted the whole thing out on a magnetic wall chart, knowing how it would end before she'd started - but, as she was writing it, she wasn't sure it would work. When Jennifer Saunders launched Absolutely Fabulous, Victoria thought she'd missed the boat considering it 'what a sitcom should be' and that now she'd 'lost her edge'. But when the cast first got together at the Groucho Club in Soho to do a readthrough of Series 1 the room rocked with laughter. However, Vic also realised she'd over written each episode by 7 minutes and had to go away and edit them down.

The shooting style of dinnerladies broke the mould when it came to comedy because Victoria wanted to film it twice, making it one of the most expensive British sitcoms ever made. She had become fascinated with how they shot sitcoms in the US, where they'd film the final dress rehearsal so they could refine the gags and see where the laughs came, but rather than do that Vic wanted to actually run it in front of a live studio audience twice. That and the last-minute editing and line changes meant the cast were on a knife edge and, although they knew the lines and characters were a gift, they were very stressed; "If you saw behind the flat of dinnerladies you'd see Julie and me taking Rescue Remedies. It was like being on a skating rink" said Celia Imrie.

There was another Christmas special in 2000, Victoria Wood With All The Trimmings, and a final stand-up tour in 2001, including 12 nights at the Royal Albert Hall, but dinnerladies was her last big true TV comedy project and after that she mostly worked on drama.

In 2005 it was back to the theatre but this time with a musical, which she described as her Mamma Mia. Acorn Antiques The Musical was directed by Sir Trevor Nunn at the Theatre Royal Haymarket and, although it received mixed reviews, Celia Imrie won an Olivier Award for Best Performance in a Supporting Role in a Musical. The script was revised before it went on tour but it signalled the last time Victoria worked with both Celia and Duncan Preston.

From then, Victoria's work was much more drama based. The 2006 award winning ITV television film Housewife 49, based on the wartime diaries of an ordinary Lancashire housewife and mother, Nellie Last, had been a back burner project of Vic's since she was given a copy of Last's diaries in 1982 by Keith Waterhouse, and cemented her in the minds of the British public as a serious actress, when she won the Best Actress BAFTA for the lead role.

Then in 2011 another drama, for the BBC this time, based on the early life of Morecambe & Wise, telling the story of how the pair met and teamed up through to their first ill-fated dabble into television with the series Running Wild. In Eric & Ernie, Victoria played Eric Morecambe's formidable mother Sadie Bartholomew, a woman without whom British comedy would be a very different place.

From 2011 to 2014 she worked as writer and eventually director on That Day We Sang, based on a true story of the reunion of the Manchester Children's choir, set in 1969 with flashbacks to 1929. It was commissioned as a stage play for the Manchester International Festival in 2011, a new cast took over in 2013 at the Manchester Royal Exchange and finally Vic directed the TV version with Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton in 2014. Vic was not in it, preferring now to be behind the camera.

Apart from popping up on a celebrity version of The Great British Bake Off for Comic Relief in 2015, her last appearance on TV was in that same year in a 3-part version of the children's book Fungus The Bogeyman.

Victoria Wood was a very private person. Very few people knew she was ill and when on 20th April 2016 it was announced she had died I didn't know what to do with myself. I was utterly shocked. I knew she'd been born in Lancashire, had been married to Geoffrey Durham (known mostly for his stage persona as the Spanish magician The Great Soprendo), I knew that they had a daughter Grace and a son Henry and were now divorced, but I didn't know a great deal else about Victoria Wood. I only knew she was a vegetarian because she'd written the forward to Delia Smith's Vegetarian Collection.

What I knew was her comedy. I knew I could quote it. I knew that I couldn't order two soups without laughing, or asking 'Is it on the trolley?' when I wanted a dessert. I knew to never touch prawns ('do you know they hang around sewerage outlet pipes with their mouths open?'), and I knew that if I was relaying a tale and went off track, I'd come back by saying 'back to the story, I'm being chased by the man from the supermarket'. I definitely knew all the words to The Ballad of Barry and Freda and even though I knew it was coming, 'beat me on the bottom with a Woman's Weekly' would make me howl with laughter every time.

The day Victoria Wood died I went shopping. I put an avocado and a copy of Woman's Weekly in a trolley, took a picture and posted it on social media. There was no caption, because there was no need. Everyone knew it was a tribute to her, such was the greatness of her comedy and her place in the hearts of the British public.

Happy 70th birthday Vic, think on and look sharp.

See also: Victoria Wood quiz