Talent (play)

"[3] Wood gained the idea for a play set around talent contests, based on her own experiences entering them (she had won ATV's New Faces three years earlier).

According to Screenonline: "Julie is one of the hopefuls - a 24-year-old secretary and young mum caught between her youthful dreams of showbiz glamour and the realisation of her more likely future: soul-crushing domesticity and drudgery with upwardly mobile boyfriend Dave.

But Bunters nightclub holds few prospects for Julie - just a grotty dressing room, a surprise encounter with Mel, the flash, sportscar-driving boyfriend who abandoned her as a pregnant schoolgirl eight years ago, and the unwelcome attentions of the oily compere, who precedes his seduction by telling her, "you have got a mediocre voice, a terrible Lancashire accent, no experience and no act," before enticing her with the promise of a spot on the Des O'Connor Show (moments later, he is groping a bemused Maureen and offering her twenty minutes in the back of his white Cortina).

The cast was Hazel Clyne (Julie), Victoria Wood (Maureen), Roger Sloman (George Findlay), Bill Stewart (Arthur Hall), Eric Richard (Mel), Peter Ellis (Compere).

"[3] The show had a London Transfer to the ICA, beginning on 31 January 1979, with Bill Stewart and Peter Ellis being replaced by David Ellson and Jim Broadbent.

The cast was Vikki Stone (Maureen), Stephanie Briggs (Julie), Harry Dickman (George Findlay), John Walters (Arthur Hall) and Charlie Carter (Mel/The Compere).

The play was revived in 2021, at the Sheffield Crucible (this time on the main stage), in a production directed by Paul Foster and with Lucie Shorthouse as Julie and Jamie-Rose Monk as Maureen.

[6] The television critics were unanimous in their praise, and Wood received congratulatory letters from actor John Le Mesurier and fellow northern writer Alan Plater.

According to the band's biographer Johnny Rogan "He paid her the ultimate 'compliment' by hijacking her song 'Fourteen Again' and transforming its sardonic nostalgia into a lacerating satire on mind-numbing proletarial leisure.