Mid Life Christmas

Although regarded as a national treasure and a magnet for BAFTA awards, I always found Victoria Wood to be an acquired taste. Then again I remember Granada Television desperately flogging the Wood & Walters comedy show to an unimpressed public in the early 1980s.

By 2009 when her Mid Life Christmas was broadcast, it was clear Victoria Wood's creative juices were running dry and at 60 minutes this felt a lot longer.

The pastiche of Cranford was something French & Saunders did years earlier on other similar themed BBC costume dramas. Although I did like the 'smirking' area outside the inn and needlepoint texting.

The middle aged Olympics was uninspired. The mockumentary on Bo Beaumont the actress who played Mrs O in Acorn Antiques was just OK.

The best bit was the dancing on the Apprentice set by Margaret and Nick. The programme finishes with one of her most famous ditties, Let's do it with a CGI dance routine.

However this special left even her fans subdued.

This was probably Victoria Wood's last major TV venture before her death in 2016, and like 'Love Happy' for the Marx Brothers, 'Atoll K' for Laurel and Hardy, and 'Night Train to Murder' for Morecambe and Wise, it is a sad ending. It really does feel as if Wood's invention has run dry and she has nothing more to offer: the costume drama spoof is a retread of her Jane Austen spoof from the 'With All the Trimmings' show of a decade earlier, and far less witty; she resurrects one of her best-loved characaters of a quarter century before; and the Mid-Life Olympics is not sharp enough to skewer our obsession with sport and TV pundit-speak (judging from the 'Making Of' documentary a fair bit of this ended up on the cutting room floor).

It was a sad day when Victoria Wood died, but reading the comments under her newspaper obituaries I couldn't help but have the nagging feeling that most of them referred to her glory days in the 1980's - thirty years earlier. Had she been given a longer life she may have been able to open up in new directions. This show just exposed that the humour that had won her so much affection had really lost its edge. To use the phrase the English use to avoid being too cutting, it's "not bad".

A very diverse collection of sketches,most of which were amusing, and a few laugh out loud, the historical parallels with modern life were very clever and funny, excellent writing, and well performed, I found it entertaining.