- "No! That's reality! Join me in fiction!"
- ―Vanessa to Dennis
Vanessa Wilcock-Wynn-Carroway, or simply just Vanessa Carroway, is a member of Cornley Drama Society, who appears in The Goes Wrong Show. She is portrayed by Bryony Corrigan.
Personality[]
Vanessa is an example of an Ascended Extra, who before The Goes Wrong Show appeared as stagehand and minor/ background characters. As one of the most normal members of the cast, she often is the "Straight man" who is mildly frustrated or anxious when things go wrong, but does not get angry like Chris Bean. She often desperately tries to keep the show on track such as protesting "Santa's" offer of a sherry due to her character being just a little girl. When things goes wrong she seems unsure what she should be doing and isn't good at improvising which often results her doing things like just reading anything that's put in front of her like the telegrams in "The Pilot", going ahead and killing her child in "The Lodge" when Jonathan is unable to get on the set to stop her, or pretending to drink from a bear statue in "90 Degrees" when she fails to get Dennis to pass her the beer. (She does manage a good ad lib in The Nativity when they end up with nine Wise Men at the stable - "Its like MENSA here")
Although usually good at remembering her lines, she gets into difficulties when they are in a foreign language, so it is unfortunate that in The Pilot (which, until a change in scheduling forced by the 2019 General Election, would have been her first appearance) she was cast as a linguistics expert and had lines in French, Spanish and German.
She does have an impressive singing voice and is able to keep up when the backing track is turned up too many octaves in The Spirit of Christmas. (Vanessa's actual first appearance). In "The Cornley Drama Festival Part 2" she is paired to dance with Chris in his ballet, and dances very well before she is thrown into a camera.
Relationships[]
Dennis Tyde[]
Out of the cast members that appear in The Goes Wrong Show Vanessa is the one that gets most flustered with Dennis's weird behaviour or when he forgets his lines or gets confused. This may be due to the fact that she's the newest member of the group and the other have gotten use to him. In "90 Degrees" , in which they play a married couple, there is a scene where Vanessa's character asks Dennis to pass her a can of beer that's on a table next to him but due to her American accent he thinks she's asking for him to pass him the Bear statue which is next to the Beer. Vanessa makes several attempts to get him to understand and pass the right object just after multiple tries before she just resorts to pretending to drink the Bear statue. They also play a couple (divorced) in "The Trial" and, a brother and sister in "Summer Once Again".
In The Most Lamentable... Dennis forgets characters' names and mixes up the character names with the cast names resulting in Vanessa trying to explain the difference between fiction and reality to him. In The Cornley Drama Festival Part 1, Vanessa tries to improvise a proposal scene with him, but Dennis doesn't realise she's acting, causing him to believe she's genuinely proposing to him.
Robert Grove[]
In "The Cornley Drama Festival Part 1" Robert runs an acting class where he lines up the rest of the Society's from best to worst based on their acting skills. Robert places her at number four meaning that he judges her as a good actor though she is possibly counts as number 3 after Chris is moved down the line.
Roles[]
- Belle - The Spirit of Christmas
- Camille Leclaire - The Pilot (Not the Pilot)
- Becky Sandhurst (Prosecutor) - A Trial to Watch
- Emma - The Lodge
- Mrs Hargreaves - Harper's Locket
- Renee Burgess - 90 Degrees
- Wise Man/Shepherd/Donkey - The Nativity
- Mother - Summer Once Again
- Queen Isobel - The Most Lamentable...
- Stu Malone/Mackenzie - There Is No Escape
- Herself/Ladybug - The Cornley Drama Festival Part 1
- Herself/Mum/Mrs Carmichael - The Cornley Drama Festival Part 2
Songs:
Trivia[]
- Vanessa is the only principal character whose surname was not revealed, however on 13th August 2020 Henry Shields stated on his Twitter that the latest script had it written as "Wilcock-Wynn-Carroway, because it's silly".
- She is one of the most helpful (but breaks character often because of it) because when the piano catches fire in The Nativity, she is one of the first to react with a fire blanket and a bucket of sand.
- Her last name "Carroway" is similar to Caraway House, the location of the Goes Wrong Show episode The Pilot (Not the Pilot).
- Vanessa was not Bryony Corrigan's first character in the Goes Wrong Extended Universe, as she was a Stage Crew Member in Peter Pan Goes Wrong. It is possible that Vanessa was the same character as the crew member and decided to go into acting, the same as Annie. We are not told what any of the other members of CDS do for a living, but it is also possible that the BBC receptionist portrayed by Bryony Corrigan in "A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong" is Vanessa - as a BBC employee, she would not have been let in on CDS's plans to hijack the production. However she neither acknowledges that she recognises any of the CDS, nor allows them access, when they try to enter the studios.
- Zoom Goes Wrong depicts her as living with her boyfriend, played by Peter Hannah (Corrigan's real-life partner). Hannah's character has not appeared in any Mischief media to date other than this video, and no reference is made to Vanessa being in a relationship on The Goes Wrong Show, other than her accidental (and very expensive) engagement to Dennis in the "Cornley Drama Festival Part 1".