Wood and Walters

A play by Victoria Wood. Maureen has been faithfully attending the slimmers' club for months. Now the weeks of endless crispbreads have paid off - but is her optimism misplaced? Sequel to Wood's earlier play Talent, featuring the same characters of lifelong friends Maureen and Julie.

Acorn Antiques: The Musical! is the all-singing, all-dancing and fully overalled stage version of the beloved TV spoof. The triumphant West End production brought together Julie Walters (Mrs Overall), Celia Imrie (Miss Babs) and Duncan Preston (Mr Clifford) - the original cast of the series. It was directed by Sir Trevor Nunn ("Les Miserables", "Woman in White", "Starlight Express") and written by Julie's understudy, the award-winning Victoria Wood. Filmed during the sell-out run at the beautiful Haymarket Theatre, the musical features an all-star supporting cast of Josie Lawrence, Neil Morrissey & Sally Ann Triplett.

A play by Victoria Wood. Frances is 28, single and happy, despite ritual interrogation from her family as to why she's not married. Then she meets Jim, and finds she has decisions to make.

Victoria Wood was a series of six one-off situation comedies written by and starring Victoria Wood in 1989, who took a break from sketches, two years after her very successful and award winning series Victoria Wood As Seen on TV. Wood appeared as "Victoria", a fictionalised version of herself, in all six episodes - in The Library it was said that she "worked in TV" and in Over To Pam characters appeared to recognise her celebrity and in the final episode, Staying In, she was taken to a party to perform as a comedienne and was expected to go through her stand-up 'routine'. Her character often broke the 'fourth wall' of TV and spoke directly to the camera, but not in every episode. Bored with the sketch format and with a yearning to recapture previous success as a playwright, Wood came up with six individual sitcoms as a compromise. She admitted to finding the writing difficult. Though Wood was written as the central character, other lead parts were written with specific actresses in mind, like Julie Walters and Una Stubbs. "I want people to like me and the people who play my friends, and not everybody else" she said. Screenonline says of the shows "Modest in ambition and scale but rich in wit and acuity, the six playlets showcase Wood's eye for human foibles and her distinctively eccentric characters.".

Jackanory is a long-running BBC children's television series that was designed to stimulate an interest in reading. The show was first transmitted on 13 December 1965, the first story being the fairy-tale Cap-o'-Rushes read by Lee Montague. Jackanory continued to be broadcast until 1996, clocking up around 3,500 episodes in its 30-year run. The final story, The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne, was read by Alan Bennett and broadcast on 24 March 1996. The show returned on 27 November 2006 for two one-off stories. The show's format, which varied little over the decades, involved an actor reading from children's novels or folk tales, usually while seated in an armchair. From time to time the scene being read would be illustrated by a specially commissioned still drawing, often by Quentin Blake. Usually a single book would occupy five daily fifteen-minute episodes, from Monday to Friday.

Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV is a British sketch comedy series created by and starring comedian Victoria Wood with Julie Walters, Celia Imrie, Duncan Preston, Susie Blake and Patricia Routledge. The show broadcast on BBC Two between 1985 and 1987, and included sketches that became famous in the United Kingdom; these included one-offs like Two Soups and regular features such as Acorn Antiques, as well as musical performances by Wood including her most well-known number, The Ballad of Barry and Freda.

Over half a million people packed into over 200 venues throughout the country during 1997 to see her best show ever. This tour included an unprecedented fifteen night sell-out run at the Royal Albert Hall, which the media hailed as the best stand-up show of the decade. With her cheek, charm and dazzling wordplay, she reduced her audience to a state of delerium. Recorded during her record-breaking tour, Victoria Wood Live is your opportunity to see the queen of humour at her most brilliant.

Case Histories is a British drama television series based on the Jackson Brodie detective novels by Kate Atkinson. It stars Jason Isaacs as Jackson Brodie.

Unexpected events occur when Pat, a glamorous British-born star of American soaps, returns home to plug her auto-biography on television and meets, for the first time since they were teenagers, Margaret her plain and frumpy younger sister. The meeting is painful for both women highlighting the vast differences in their lives and resurrecting painful memories of their unhappy childhood with an uncaring, errant mother. The tabloid press smell a juicy story and a race ensues to trace the whereabouts of the long lost parent.

Starring Victoria Wood, Julie Walters, Celia Imrie, Duncan Preston, with the snobby continuity announcer played by Susie Blake, Acorn Antiques was a mini soap opera set in a shop on the outskirts of Manchesterford. Viewers were gripped with the everyday dramas that beset Miss Babs (Celia Imrie), Berta (Victoria Wood) and the glamorous Mrs Overall (Julie Walters). Now each thrilling episode is available together for the first time on DVD, including "Babs and the Cup of Coffee", "Mrs Overall and her Apron" and the memorable classic "Berta coming through the Doorway". Re-live the drama as Mrs Overall serves up another batch of macaroons and Babs discusses the future of the shop. What will be this week's riveting cliff hanger? Will the set survive? Written by Victoria Wood, Acorn Antiques was Produced and Directed by Geoff Posner and first transmitted as part of Victoria Wood as Seen on TV… in January 1985.

Victoria Wood presents the true story behind Britain's timeless comedy. Includes footage of the cast on location and incredible personal tales about the making of the series. Was Arthur Lowe really just like Captain Mainwaring? Why did the warden always end up in the water? And how did Corporal Jones find a bomb down his trousers? Find out why Dad's Army was the Queen Mother's favourite show.

A magazine-style television series on BBC1 which was broadcast from May 1973 to June 1994, presented by Esther Rantzen, with various changes of co-presenters. The show presented hard-hitting investigations alongside satire and occasional light entertainment.

An adaptation of Raymond Briggs' children's classic that mixes live action and CGI animation to follow the adventures of a family of green monsters who live in the slimy underground world of Bogeydom. Fungus and his wife Mildew suspect their son Mould is illicitly dabbling in human culture, sparking a family argument that sees the boy flee to the surface. Above ground in Daventry, Daryl Hedge's go-getting wife Wendy won't let him forget it that he is unemployed, while his daughter Lucy has fallen for a disagreeable older boy called Dean.

Dinnerladies is a BBC sitcom written by and starring Victoria Wood that chronicles the antics of a group of workers in a canteen in the north of England. Bren tries to maintain a semblance of order in amongst the chaos, while dealing with the canteen supervisor, slightly sex-obsessed cancer sufferer Tony. Dolly and Jean are the bickering menopausal older women, always at odds but best friends beneath it all. Then there's thick-as-two-short-planks Anita, and the terminally uninterested Twinkle, more concerned with having a good time than anything else. Making up the motley crew are military man handyman Stan, all rules and regulations, and ditzy Philippa, who never seems to get anything right.

Over three episodes, Dawn French interviewed some of the most prolific and celebrated female comedians of the time. Later in 2006, several of the interviews were shown in full. The interviewees being: Whoopi Goldberg, Catherine Tate, Kathy Burke, Julie Walters, Victoria Wood and Joan Rivers.

The story of one of Britain's most famous pianists, Joyce Hatto, and her husband William, from their meeting in post-war London to her death in 2006 - after which her recordings were discovered to be one of the biggest hoaxes in classical music history.