"Actor: Bryan Burdon"

• Victoria Wood - At The Albert Hall - Live | DVD | (25/11/2002) from £11.52   |  Saving you £5.73 (55.85%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Victoria Wood Live at the Albert Hall provides proof, if any were needed, that after two decades at the top of her profession, Wood is one of a small handful of British comedians of either sex capable of filling the country's largest venues. For the consistently high quality of her penetrating observations of the mundane she has no equal. Recorded in 2001, this performance has all the hallmarks of her microscopic examinations of life's perplexing minutiae and trivia. From her recent hysterectomy to Paul Daniels, from the NHS help line to wheelie bin covers, from Americans in Disneyworld to the ageism of catalogue mailing lists, nothing escapes Wood's attention. Not even in-vogue authors: she refuses to read "Captain Corelli's friggin' Mandolin" as it sits reproachfully at her bedside. Wood even provides her own interval act: a devastatingly accurate parody of a vulgar, second-rate cabaret singer shot to stardom on the wings of a cruise ship docu-soap. Jane McDonald's sense of humour will never face a harder test. More poignant are Wood's observations on parenthood and marriage, with all the physical ailments of middle age ("We've only got one fully operating leg between us"). She has since separated from her husband, the magician Geoffrey Durham. Fans will await the impact of that on her stand-up material with some interest. --Piers Ford

• Victoria Wood - An Audience With Victoria Wood | DVD | (16/09/2002) from £6.79   |  Saving you £3.20 (47.13%)   |  RRP £9.99

  As Victoria Wood once said, "There's nothing you can't say if you say it in the right way". And she goes on to prove that triumphantly in An Audience with Victoria Wood, recorded in front of fellow celebs (whom she sends up effortlessly, describing her long-time collaborator Julie Walters as "the lady with the split ends"). Victoria Wood may be the queen of suburbia but her endless takes on the finer details of banality have an acuity of which Alan Bennett would be proud. Most people cannot do monologue without lapsing into self-consciousness. But she's just brilliant. Her depiction of a nervy woman attempting to conduct a survey in the street, for instance, is priceless: "Here's my ID. Yes, I do look rather startled. It was taken in a photo booth and someone had just poked an éclair through the curtain". She's like Joyce Grenfell on speed. And it's that surreal juxtaposition of the commonplace and the wacky that makes her routines anything but. Even when she takes up residence at the piano, belting out home-made ballads (and this video includes the famous "Let's Do It"), she's both touching and amusing. At one point, she suggests that the British are no good at having fun. Get this video and prove her wrong. --Harriet Smith