A fat lot of Wood

As a long-standing fan of magic tricks (well, why pay extra for a seat?), I've seen some jawdropping feats of jiggerypokery in my time. Penn and Teller once taught me how to fold a £10 note so that the Queen appeared to be greeting an eminent Victorian in a Monica Lewinsky sort of way, an Indian fakir in Bombay showed me a wallet "made from an elephant's foreskin" that expanded into a briefcase when stroked, and I'll never forget David Nixon's failed attempt to escape from a sealed box (an admittedly ambitious stunt, seeing as how he was in the crematorium at the time, the Redeemer having claimed him for a sunbeam two days earlier).

However, the greatest trick I ever saw involved The Great Soprendo (alias Geoffrey Durham), and was performed not by the oil-slick-in-a-sequined-suit himself, but by his partner Victoria Wood.

"Piff Paff Poof," she went, then made 25 stones of ugly fat suddenly disappear by heading straight for the divorce court and applying for a decree not-so-nisi.

Ms Wood has miraculously shed some of her own fat, too, and seems slimmer and happier as a result, but her professional output in recent years has been anything but magical. Her songs have become formulaic and unmemorable, her scripts sound increasingly like reheated morsels from Alan Bennett's table, and Victoria's Big Fat Documentary (BBC1) suggested that her once-sharp intellect is also going through a mid-life crisis.

"Worrying about my weight has dropped off my radar," she informed us on Friday night, then went on to berate the movie and television industries for being full of slim and beautiful people, despite having earlier admitted that "we don't want to see a load of old spud faces" on the cinema screen.

Precisely. The entertainment business is a competitive one, and just as you don't find many corpulent polevaulters at the Olympics, so you won't find many obese actresses landing the lead roles in Hollywood blockbusters, and to expect anything else is... well, fatuous.

Seldom have I seen a more half-baked and self-contradictory thesis advanced in public than during this first meandering instalment of Ms Wood's two-part examination of dieting and body image. "I've got no answers," she told us at the outset, yet repeatedly recommended long walks and denounced fast food, while her insistence that weight doesn't matter and that obese women can be beautiful was at odds with her admission that "it's not cool to be fat, and it's certainly not sexy... you're a bit of a joke".

Worse, at a time when the medical profession is warning of an epidemic of obesity-induced diabetes in this country, she blithely talked about body weight as though it was merely a lifestyle choice But what she didn't mention is that obesity is a major cause of heart disease, which nowadays kills more women than all types of cancer combined.

To bulk out this emaciated structure, every C-list celeb who has ever oscillated between fat and thin was asked to contribute their opinion.

So it was that Vanessa Feltz got in front of camera to tell us how much she hates having her picture taken, and assured us that she'd only ever embarked on her health and fitness video campaign "because I desperately needed money... my husband had just left me", thus contradicting what she'd said at the time (which was that she'd dieted in an attempt to save her marriage).

Anne Diamond bewailed the cruel way that the press had commented upon her transformation from ectomorph to endomorph when she'd entered the Big Brother house (coverage she'd promptly cashed in on by releasing an exercise video), while Ann Widdecombe smugly told us that weight loss is all about control and self-discipline.

By now, I didn't know which was more disagreeable: Wood's cowardly response to the politician (polite to her face, snide in the safety of the voice-over booth), or the sight of the former prisons minister (who once praised the shackling of heavily pregnant prisoners in hospital labour wards) telling us coyly that "I'm not scary, I'm really not", and trying to reinvent herself as the nation's favourite maiden aunt. She may try, but she'll always be Doris Karloff to me.

In her Eighties heyday, Wood excelled at the parodic documentary, but 20 years on she's unintentionally making a mockery of the genre. There are few more depressing sights than that of a comedian getting all serious on us, and her brusque dismissal of WeightWatchers-style slimming clubs and diet books was crass and unhelpful, because many overweight people don't have the resources that she does, and need the boost to morale and discipline that these groups and regimens offer.

Moreover, many of Wood's funniest songs and sketches used to revolve around the problems of being overweight, so to claim now that weight doesn't matter rings as false as the old editions of That's Life! that she used to appear in, when Esther Rantzen would try to bring the audience to tears with tales of overweight girls who'd been teased and bullied at school, then cut to a series of tawdry jokes about the intrinsic hilarity of fat women, featuring the Roly Polys. So she can put that in her pipe and smoke it.

Or, if she's given up smoking as well, she can put that in her Nicorette patch and stick it on her arm. Incidentally, whatever they say, smoking does cure weight problems. Eventually.