As she awaited my arrival for a chinwag in 1989, Victoria Wood's face was hidden behind a fully outstretched copy of the Guardian. She had suggested a cosy Italian restaurant in Soho and sat with her back to the clientele. People who would "recognise" her at the time were prone to asking: "What's it like being married to Lenny Henry?". Becoming "a face" meant Wood felt "less able to observe people but not less able to listen". Indeed she'd recently enjoyed, silently, for an hour and a half, a crossed line on her telephone.

We bonded over the choice of the same "pizza vegetariana", discussing vegetarianism, veganism and animal liberation in earnest. Her only joke on the topic was: "I'm all for killing animals to turn them into handbags. I just don't want to have to eat them."

Victoria claimed that her career got underway when "I was a barmaid in a pub where BBC producers used to drink and one of them invited me to a party, just as a stray woman, and for some reason I ended up playing the piano." Her comedy often made reference to food – in circumstances of lust ("Smear an avocado on my lower portions"), death ("72 baps, Connie – you slice, I'll spread!"), dating ("I'll have a pint of Babycham, pork scratchings and a yellow cherry") and love ("She only married him because he was pally with a man who made chocolate misshapes").

After some TV appearances she had, though, found herself in a Birmingham bedsit, gripped by lethargy, except for pondering and eating. Appearing before sizeable live audiences, she was currently finding pleasure, of sorts, in concluding with a lighting blackout on a tragic reference to a death. "By the time they've realised what's happened," she said, "I'm in the dressing room having a nice cup of tea."