Is a play written by Victoria Wood

Talent is a play written by Victoria Wood, first performed in 1978. It centres on two friends, one of whom is about to enter a talent contest in a run down nightclub. Commissioned for the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, it received much acclaim and transferred to a London run in 1979. That same year a television adaptation was broadcast. It was the first time Victoria Wood and Julie Walters appeared together on TV.[1]
A mixture of dialogue and music, one of its tunes inspired The Smiths song Rusholme Ruffians.[2] The script was published by Methuen in 1988, along with another play by Wood, Good Fun.[3]

Contents

• 
  1Origins
  
• 
  2Plot
  
• 
  3Stage version
  
• 
  4Television version
  
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  5The Smiths
  
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  6Song List
  
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  7References
  
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  8External links
  

Origins[edit]

After receiving much acclaim for her writing and performance in a 1978 revue at The Bush Theatre titled In at the Death, Wood was commissioned by then theatre director David Leland to write a play for Sheffield's Crucible Theatre.
The initial commission was for Wood to co-write, with fellow revue writer Ron Hutchinson, a play about strippers. According to Wood: "The Bush Theatre was over a pub which had strippers and Ron and I spent twenty minutes one evening watching a large girl in boots walk out of the ladies' lavatory, take off her clothes (she kept on her boots, the floor was filthy) and walk back into the ladies lavatory again. Then Ron said he was too busy to do this play, and David asked me if I would do it on my own. Not knowing anything about the world of the stripper and having all the investigative zeal of a defrosting beefburger, I decided to try and write up an idea of my own. The idea came quite easily, though typing it out was quite difficult."[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). She said: "I had always been fascinated by talent contests and had entered quite a few in my late teens and early twenties. I never won, though in a Birmingham nightclub I once came third on the clap-o-meter... I was also interested in the relationship between attractive sparky girls and big fat plain ones."[3]

Plot[edit]

Talent centres around two friends, the plain, overweight Maureen, and her more glamorous friend Julie Stephens, who has entered a talent contest. 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. With her for support is the awkward, frumpy Maureen, long in the shadow of her slimmer, better-looking friend.
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)."[4]