Wood, Victoria - Victoria’s Empire

8:00am Thursday 3rd May 2007

FRESH from her return as the new face of Asda, Victoria Wood is back on the BBC with a TV series Victoria's Empire, and this, the accompanying book of the show.

In both, we join her as she travels to far flung corners of the globe to investigate the legacy of Queen Victoria's Empire - from Fort Victoria in Ghana, to Victoria in Nova Scotia and Zambia's Victoria Falls.

Wood is one of the funniest and most-likeable people in the country and this sounds like an original and revealing journey, so it's a bit disappointing to find that the book is nothing more than a messy, dull afterthought to what might be an interesting TV show.

Victoria herself seems only to have penned pithy introductions to each chapter and location, which are more concerned with poor hotel service and airport lounges than her reflections on British colonialism.

What makes up the substance of the book in between seems to be a transcript of the TV series, interspersed with tedious textbook extracts about the places visited - these only marginally more enlightening than the revisionist history books from the 1950s that Wood derides in her prologue.

Clearly planned as a visual piece of work, the words fail to bring to life the colourful characters Wood met on her journey and their vivid accounts of the after-effects of the Empire.

In fact, the photos offer a far more engaging narrative, and hopefully indicate that the TV series will do far more to tackle a complex subject with care, and even humour.