Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down

by Jo Brand

  To my family, for shoring me up during the process

  I’d like to thank my family for being a great big lovely bolster separating me from the more chilly parts of the outside world, and for putting up with me while I was trying to write this as I was a right grump. I’d also like to thank my friend and agent Vivienne for being supportive, honest, and reading each bit that I sent her straight away, rather than pretending her email wasn’t working. And of course I’m contractually obliged to thank Martin my editor … I’m sure we’ll be speaking again soon. Thanks too to Alan Davies and Mark Kelly who filled in the gaps of my fading memory. And finally I’d like to thank you for buying it — or running the risk of nicking it, if that is what you did — and I truly hope it’s a good read with some laughs.

  Hello, readers — and welcome to Part 2 of my memoirs, covering the period from my first gig as a professional comic through to the present day.

  I’ve called them ‘memoirs’ because, rather than being a chronological account of my life, they’re a collection of the bits and pieces of my existence that I can remember — and believe you me, I’m stunned I have recalled so much, given that my memory has been shot to pieces since I had children, and it wasn’t that great before either. I imagine that, at some point, some scientist or other has said that we only remember the exciting bits in our lives, and let’s hope that’s true, because you certainly don’t want to know about the great cup of tea I had in April 1994 in a café in Wisbech or my favourite episode of Casualty.

  So I hope this hotchpotch of musings is to your taste, and I can assure you they are certainly not as intellectually challenging as Proust (in case you are a bit weird and actually thought they might be). And if you start reading and think, God, this is dull, you can always pass it on to someone you don’t like.

  It’s April 1988, and I am on Channel Four live on Friday Night Live. I’m on a raised platform in front of a crowd of the thinnest, youngest, most attractive people I’ve ever seen who are staring quizzically at me. This may well be because TV directors of live shows tend to put the chubby, not so attractive ones at the back. A part of me feels slightly smug that for once I am not at the back … I’m in the front, so bollocks to them.

  My first couple of lines work well and there is some laughter and the crowd starts to relax a bit. I’m beginning to relax too despite the fact that my arm is going up and down in a chicken-flapping-its-wings style with nervousness. I drone on in my monotone voice …

  Then a voice cuts through the crowd. ‘Get off!’

  My first feeling is one of indignation. I’m actually doing all right, so what’s that all about?

  Because it’s live TM the fear is multiplied a hundred. fold. Any mistake you make, a small fluff or whether you spectacularly and waterfall-like actually wet yourself, will be captured for eternity — and so the pressure on you is huge. There will not be the comforting thought of a film editor whooshing away your moment of humiliation. This is it.

  What do I do? It is a male voice heckling me, surprise surprise, and it is my natural inclination to get into a slanging match with him. After all, this is what we comics are supposed to do best. However, this is live telly and my set is timed to the second. If I start getting stuck into a heckler, that will eat up my time and the whole thing will be thrown out of kilter. I stare in the general direction of the heckler and say, ‘Thank you,’ and move on. Afterwards, however, I’m really pissed off and want to get the heckler into a corner and lamp him. My first-ever appearance on TV and he nearly ruined the whole thing.

  I hear through the grapevine that some staff from LWT have been sacked that day and he is among the disgruntled sackees. I feel slightly less homicidal towards him. I suppose at least it wasn’t that personal.

  In a strange karmic twist, some years later I meet the heckler at a TV studio in Southampton. He is now the presenter of a live magazine show on which I am appearing.

  ‘I was the one who heckled you on Friday Night Live,’ he says, with a smug grin on his face.

  ‘And now you’re presenting a live show, how would you like to be heckled?’ I enquire.

  And I rather meanly leave it at that, implying that I am going to heckle him back, but not bothering, hoping the anticipatory fear will be enough to ruin his day.

  Having taken the plunge in early 1988 and left my job as Senior Sister at the Maudsley Hospital — my little safety net, though I suppose most people wouldn’t see a twenty-four-hour Psychiatric Emergency Clinic quite in this way — I am suddenly out on my own.

  Obviously it’s a bit of a risk, to leave a secure job which I liked and strike out into the murky waters of possible nothingness. Although a nurse’s salary wasn’t much to write home about, at least it was regular and there was always the possibility that my burgeoning comedy career could take a nose-dive before it had even begun. I had been a nurse for the last ten years, six of those years full-time in the Emergency Clinic dealing with every possible psychiatric crisis you could imagine, from extreme psychosis to drug withdrawal to personality disorders. I had a mortgage to pay on a flat and plenty of outgoings.

  Comedy, by contrast, was a hand-to-mouth existence in which, at the end of every show, you got a little brown envelope with cash in it or just a handful of notes. I wasn’t sure there would be enough bookings to justify my leaving a secure job, so I asked my mum and dad what they thought about it, and they were pretty positive. They could see I’d done my time in a stable job, and to some extent were there as a safety net. They weren’t loaded, but they would ensure that I wasn’t on the street in a sleeping bag eating out of skips round the back of Sainsbury’s.

  Friends were also very supportive and thought it was hugely exciting. One particular mate had encouraged me right at the beginning by reminding me that I was never going to do it if I didn’t take the plunge, and this next stage, of sloughing off my job, was something most of my friends urged me to do.

  Added to that, I was bloody knackered and I really wanted some lie-ins. Given that most of the jobs I had done up until that point had involved shift work, I fancied a bit of staying in bed till midday with nothing to do until the evening. Comedy also seemed to me to have a built-in social life, and comics seemed like interesting people. I was aware of the dearth of women and wanted to get out there and do some material for the female audience. It wasn’t a particularly difficult decision. I’ve always been somewhat of a gambler because I don’t think those huge decisions are irreversible: you can always go back. So while many people are lying awake at night turning a problem over and over in their mind, I am one of the lucky ones who snores their head off, happily oblivious of life’s possible pitfalls.

  Back to Friday Night Live, the comedy extravaganza on Channel Four which is the show for all ambitious alternative comedians to aim for at the time. The compere is Ben Elton, the politically motivated, sparkily relentless nemesis of Margaret Thatcher — every right-thinking alternative comic’s sworn enemy.

  The show is a hotchpotch of stand-up comedy, sketches and music. I’d found my way onto it because I was invited to attend an audition at the Brixton rehearsal rooms to prove to some people behind a desk that I was worthy of four and a half minutes of jokes on live telly.

  There’s nothing more demoralising for a comic than an unpissed, unsmiling panel of judges in broad daylight staring at you as you struggle through your routine doing your best to keep it upbeat. It has to be said, though, that in my case my delivery was about as upbeat as a funeral sermon, given that I had slipped into an approximation of the way the football scores are read out through a combination of nerves and ignorance. I was finding it impossible to sound like anything other than a depressed bloke with an inability to man
age verbal light and shade. However, despite this they booked me and the experience was exciting and terrifying in equal measure.

  Of course, having never done telly before I was swept along in a miasma of glamour and fear, doing a sound check, sitting in my dressing room telling myself all the clichés such as, ‘You’ve made it’ and stuff like that whilst glaring at my overlit face in a light-bulbed mirror. I was sandwiched between the Pogues and Mark Thomas, dressing-room-wise. A strange place to be. I reckon the Pogues had had a half or twelve, as at one point what sounded like a bar-room brawl erupted in their dressing room involving shouting and the sound of wood splintering. I would have been disappointed if they hadn’t, though.

  On the other side, with my door slightly open to catch the maximum effect of my virgin telly appearance, I could hear Mark Thomas negotiating with the producers about the level of bad language he was permitted to use. I’m sure I heard the sentence, ‘If you get rid of a “wanker” you can have two “toffee bollocks”.’ Aah, the poetry of comedy.

  Mark Thomas was always an electrifying presence on the comedy circuit. I remember seeing him very early on at the Comedy Store before I dipped my toe into what can be the terrifying cauldron of death on a Friday night. He seemed so big, self-confident and he filled the stage. I think the audience was probably a bit scared of him, and I recall thinking to myself that perhaps his approach was the way forward, like a no-nonsense teacher — don’t give ‘em a chance.

  After my appearance on Friday Night Live which everyone seemed to agree had gone OK, I sat back and waited for the offers to flood in. Quite what sort of offers I expected I’m not sure, but whatever they were in my head, they didn’t flood, they didn’t even trickle. So it was back to the circuit for a bit, to practise my act around the London comedy scene.

  One great thing did come out of Friday Night Live and that was that I got myself an agent. Naively, I didn’t even realise it was something I should do, and my idea of an agent was a short balding American bloke with a very loud voice and a big cigar, going on endlessly about percentages and auditions.

  Vivienne Clore approached me after the programme and asked if she could take me on … as it were. I can’t remember much about our initial conversation and my powers of judgement were not up to much as I had no idea what I was looking for. But Vivienne seemed articulate, intelligent, cynical, a bit scary and good fun. And at the time that was good enough for me.

  Vivienne is still my agent so I obviously made a good choice… for me. Agents seem to come in all shapes and sizes. Some are like over-attentive parents, constantly on hand to sort out the smallest problem in your life; others are like your mates, who go out on the town with you, get pissed, take drugs and sleep with you, while others are like the head of a Mafia family You can take your pick. Vivienne and I have become good friends, but are not in each other’s pockets, which I think is important. I can’t envisage ever being unfaithful to her.

  Vivienne has always been incredibly professional and comes from a big ‘talent’ agency The Richard Stone Partnership. She’s been very supportive towards me and has religiously turned up at every single Tom, Dick and Harry of a programme, however potentially rubbish it’s been. But the other thing I appreciate is her honesty.

  It’s very hard when you work in telly and get to a certain stage in your career to get an honest answer. Now I realise I haven’t got to the Madonna part of my career (and never will) where I do exactly what I like and no one can give me any advice about the direction in which I am going. On the whole, if people think that something you have done is complete rubbish, their preferred approach is to pretend that it (and you) don’t really exist, rather than telling you the truth. This makes it very hard to get an objective opinion.

  Of course, Vivienne doesn’t go in for personality-destroying invective. If something hasn’t gone well or has been definitely dodgy, she will acknowledge that and suggest changes. Similarly, my husband will tell me if something wasn’t so good. Basically however famous you are, if you retain any vestiges of true perspective, you will know yourself when you’ve been shite.

  In those days, there was a certain hierarchy of clubs —

  the little sweet ones in the back room of a pub and the bigger, higher earners like the Comedy Store and Jongleurs, which had more of a ring of glamour about them and meant you didn’t have to change or put your lipstick on in a toilet, kitchen or corridor.

  When I came onto the comedy circuit in 1986, it had been going for a few years already.

  My friend Mark Kelly, with whom I write, remembers that when he started in 1984, there were only a handful of venues. Added to that, in the early days, the circuit seemed to have room for acts that were not just pure stand-ups. You could see a number of poets and also other people who were more like performance artists than stand-ups.

  My top six acts, for their weirdness, were:

  1. Tony Green and Ian Hinchcliffe

  These two heckled me off at my first-ever gig. Tony Green did a character called Mad Jock Macock, which I feel is self-explanatory, while Ian Hinchcliffe would do things like eating glass, stripping naked and rolling on the floor on broken glass. Didn’t float my boat, but we all have different tastes.

  2. Kevin McAleer

  Kevin was an absurdist whose act at the time consisted of a slideshow — although the only slide I can remember was one of a baby owl with huge eyes. Audiences seemed mesmerised by Kevin’s strangeness and he sat among the stand-ups like your bonkers uncle at a family party.

  3. The Ice Man

  The Ice Man truly was a performance artist. He would try to melt a huge block of ice in a variety of ways including fire and salt, whilst a tape of opera and sounds of the sea played over it. He had two other acts: one in which he would build a crane, and another which consisted solely of him dragging a huge anchor chain across the stage. Can’t see that on Britain’s Got Talent… or can I?

  4. Arloe Barloe

  This man did an act with huge extendable arms. I can say no more than this.

  5. Fanny Farts

  Never has the phrase ‘It does what it says on the tin’ been more apt. This woman, FF, was a regular for a while at the Tunnel Club in Greenwich, and she blew raspberries out of her vagina. The capricious audience at the Tunnel would love her or hate her, depending on what mood they were in. It wasn’t pornographic in the sense that she felt compelled to display said vagina, but several people had a word with Malcolm Hardee — who ran the gig and who had a propensity for pulling in the most outrageous acts he could manage — and said they weren’t sure he should be booking the woman.

  6. Chris Lynam

  Chris looked like a malevolent elfin teenager with a huge mass of dark backcombed hair, eyeliner and the general demeanour of someone who was out of control. Some of his act consisted of eating a bar of chocolate by smearing it all over his face or simply abusing the audience as if he was a pissed tramp. His pièce de résistance, however, was shoving a firework up his arse, setting fire to it and standing looking at the audience with a cheeky grin whilst the firework disgorged white hot flames into the air. Yes, I think he did burn his bum a few times, but people loved it. I remember working with him at a pub in Wandsworth, and for some reason he threw a shoe into the audience and by accident it hit a woman on the head and caused copious bleeding. Made a change, I suppose, to reverse the process… and have the act chuck things at the audience.

  Performance Poets

  It may be hard to believe now, but on the early comedy circuit, performance poets were big news. Many stand-ups started as poets and then switched to pure stand-up, among them Mark Lamarr and Phill Jupitus. Jenny Eclair also started with a bit of poetry; so did the sharp-as-a-knife Mandy Knight, whose poetry was dark, enormously funny and beautifully put together, as was she.

  Then, as the circuit grew and became more stand-up orientated, and as bigger, more commercial clubs began to spring up in Central London, like Jongleurs and the Comedy Store, the fringe elements of al
ternative comedy started to fade away.

  John Hegley seems to be the only comedy performance poet who is still going strong, and thank God for that, because it would be morally wrong if he disappeared. If you are a comedy performance poet who is still happily performing and are miffed that I have only mentioned John Hegley, please feel free to write to me and have a right go.

  Many acts on the comedy circuit in the early days had silly names, myself included (The Sea Monster). This was not just because they liked having a silly name, it was because many were on the dole and wanted to hide their identity, so they weren’t taxed on the extra quids they earned for performing. Legend has it that one performer was called into the dole office and told, ‘Look, I saw you on television last night, so it seems unlikely that in the future you will be able to draw state benefits.’ He considered himself told.

  The weird and wonderful venues flourished, stewarded by the equally weird and wonderful. I remember one club run by Tony Allen, a towering, grizzled figure on the circuit for a while who many people named ‘The Godfather of Alternative Comedy’. Tony’s club was in an old church in Notting Hill and used to get quite an ethnically mixed audience, unusual since most comedy clubs tended to be relentlessly white.

  I did the club one night and was heading to my car, always alert for potential danger, when I heard a roar behind me. I looked round to see a massive black guy running up the street towards me gesticulating wildly and shouting. Oh shit, I thought. Is it going to be a robbery or a sexual assault? There was no point in running as he was legging it up the street at the speed of light. My hands closed round my car keys instinctively as I planned to poke him in the eye if he started anything. Pathetic, really — he was so big I would have needed a bloody ladder. So I just stood there and awaited my fate.