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Profile
HELEN ATKINSON WOOD is an actress best known
for comedy and television presenting. At Oxford University
she read Fine Art and began acting with OUDS. She was a member of the award
winning Radio Active team on Radio 4, which transferred onto BBC television as
KYTV and won a Montreux Silver Rose for Light Entertainment and Best Comedy
Award. The British Comedy Awards have twice nominated Helen Best Female Comedy
Performer. She played Mrs Miggins in Blackadder the Third by Richard Curtis and
Ben Elton and starred in Ben Elton's play Silly Cow in the West
End. She has guested on Food and Drink, This Morning and Have I
Got News For You and QI. Her presenting credits include Style Trial for BBC1,
The Gourmet Guide for GSkyB, C 4's Collectors Lot ,co-presenter of Great Food
Live for UK Food. She had her own series Alfresco for Meridian and Private Lives a celebrity chat
show for ITV.
Biography
Helen went to Oxford University
under the pretence of studying fine art. In fact she wanted to meet brainy boys
and have a stab at some acting.
There she met rubber faced Rowan Atkinson,
and sharing similar surnames they teamed up to take the Edinburgh Festival by
storm. He went on to become a household name and she joined a Theatre in
Education company touring Coventry
in a van.
Four particularly funny boys from Oxford enjoyed a joke
about parodying a local radio station, they shared it with Helen, and called it
Radio Active. Tours of Australia, New Zealand and numerous radio
awards later they transferred the same joke to parodying a satellite television
station and called their BBC telly series KYTV, which won a charming Montreux
Silver Rose for Light Entertainment and Best Comedy Award.
Helen met Ben Elton at the Edinburgh
Festival, in an airing cupboard during a game of sardines. Years later she
appeared in The Young Ones, Happy Families and made her West
End debut in Silly Cow - all written by Ben Elton. Ben Elton
collaborated with Richard Curtis on Blackadder the Third and together they
created the character of Mrs Miggins for Helen, which she relished due to her
fondness for cakes and buns.
Her love of huge wigs stood her in good
stead when playing Anna in Time and Time Again written and directed by Alan
Ayckbourn; Madame Arcarti in Blithe Spirit; Viola in Twelfth Night at Stratford
East; and Beatrice Voysey (her best wig to date) in The Voysey Inheritance at
the Manchester Royal Exchange.
Sadly there were no wigs in John Byrne's TV
drama Your Cheatin' Heart starring Tilda Swinton, so Helen cut and bleached her
own hair, and picked up a fashionable Glaswegian accent which she dropped to
present BBC’s Style Trial.
Helen has moved sideways into television
presenting for Channel 4’s Collector’s Lot and
forwards into the food world which is fortunate as she enjoys cooking and
entertaining. She was twice a guest on the Food & Drink Christmas Quiz; was
a regular panellist on This Morning's Taste Tester along with Egon Ronay,
Antony Worrall Thompson and Nigella Lawson; and tasted wine with Oz Clarke and
Jilly Goulden for the Daily Telegraph. She presented the weekly food show for
Granada Sky Broadcasting - The Goodlife Gourmet Guide, then Alfresco, a series
which Helen fronted for Meridian, looking at
restaurants and cafes in the Meridian region
where you can eat outside. She has also co-presented Good Food Live, for the UK
Food Channel. All the more remarkable that Helen holds a steady eight and a
half stones.
This year Helen took part in the 25th anniversary of Blackadder for
the BBC,
and makes guest appearances on programmes
such as Call My Bluff, Have I Got News For You & QI.
More recently, Helen has been the presenter
of ITV’s hugely successful chat show Private
Lives. Guests for the first series included Matthew Kelly, Anneka Rice, Kit
Hesketh Harvey, Amanda Holden, Diana Quick and Clive Anderson – each talking
about the sides of their lives that the public don’t see.
Helen holds the title of Miss East Cheshire
Pony Club and has been twice nominated by The British Comedy Awards as Top
Female Comedy Performer.
Updated
24/03/2009
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