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JANICE TURNER | NOTEBOOK

Ozempic craze would be perfect for Victoria Wood’s wit

The comedian mined a rich seam of material from weight battles. Surely she would have a field day with today’s diet drugs

The Times

What would Victoria Wood have made of Ozempic? Her biggest laughs came from the ludicrous lengths to which women go to lose weight: the faux science, stupid diets, bossy exercise classes with names like Fatitude. Her tone was warm but never cruel, since this was her battle too.

Wood was branded “larger-than-life funny-woman” right until her death in 2016, her monumental talent shoehorned into that comedy staple: the superficially jolly but secretly sad fat girl, confidante of the pretty female lead, who slinks home to hit the Häagen-Dazs alone.

That species is now all but extinct. Among the funny women who have recently shrunk are Melissa McCarthy of Bridesmaids, Mindy Kaling, Rosie O’Donnell, Gavin and Stacey’s Ruth Jones, Rebel Wilson, Dawn French and the This Morning presenter Alison Hammond, who has shed an amazing 11 stone.

Many attribute this to exercise and willpower, just as facelifted stars put their new look down to a dab of Nivea. Women are coy about semaglutides because they’re seen as cheating: fatties must suffer to be thin, but the truth is that stars made famous by playing loveable big girls become rich enough to buy the bodies of their dreams.

Yet the drugs themselves are an untapped comedy seam. The tightening of online prescription rules means patients must prove they’re sufficiently obese, with photos of their bodies and bathroom scales. Cue women stuffing T-shirts with towels to create makeshift fat suits, or weighing in wearing a rucksack full of books. Wood could have spun this into comedy gold — but would she also have taken the drugs?

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Milibands’ nimby nerve

There is rich irony in Ed Miliband’s wife, Justine Thornton, objecting to a “bulky” development on her street in the exclusive north London enclave Dartmouth Park. Her husband’s government not only wants to override all nimby housing “blockers” but has scrapped the much-heralded Building Beautiful initiative, which decreed all new homes have architectural merit.

From the developer’s images, the planned block seems to echo the road’s Victorian vernacular quite well and is only five floors high, exactly the “gentle density” we’re told provides extra housing without uglifying city streets. The Milibands ought to check out the soulless 20-storey towers (with very little affordable housing) planned for Peckham, dwarfing a 200-year-old town centre. Locals are aghast at how it will destroy the character of the area. Miliband would probably tell them to suck it up: “aesthetic concerns” are a luxury for the rich.

My Viking blood

My husband’s birthday present to me this year was a DNA test and this week, receiving the results, I punched the air. My genes are mainly solid north country yeoman stock — but 6 per cent of me is Danish. Yes, I always knew it! I am a Viking!

Long ago, as a Times columnist, Michael Gove wrote that everyone has an inner nationality. (With his love of rigour and Wagner, Gove’s was German.) But I’ve always identified as Danish: I love its belief in functional, long-lasting style over flashiness; the quirky, colourful clothes at Copenhagen fashion week designed for women with shoulders like me (not tiny bird-like southern European frames); its egalitarian yet muscular politics, excellent coffee and bread, saunas, bicycles, the sensible marital arrangement of one bed, two duvets; and Mads Mikkelsen and Claes Bang, its beautiful, well-made men.

During the Scandi noir/hygge craze, I was repeatedly sent to report on Denmark and always felt uncommonly at home. I was also invited to dinners at the Arne Jacobsen-designed Danish embassy in London and I was amused at how the rakish former ambassador Claus Grube ignored the indoor smoking ban “because we are on Danish soil”. In Copenhagen strangers always addressed me in Danish. Yes, OK, it might be because I’m a generic white European woman. But could it be that they sensed I am, like them, Viking born?

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