by Jo Brand
As far as clothes for me to wear that day are concerned, so I don’t have to turn up on the Getting On set with just my pants on, I plump for the least creased stuff on a mountainous pile. Leave the house at 6 a.m. in just about an alert enough state to drive. For this second series, Getting On is filmed in a deserted hospital in Plaistow in the East End of London, which involves going through the dreaded Blackwall Tunnel under the river.
The Blackwall Tunnel has the accolade of being jammed from five thirty in the morning till nine at night. I regret having to move our filming base from the previous hospital in Wandsworth, which was a lovely twenty-minute nip from home, whereas this journey takes an hour or even more at this time of the morning. I put the radio on and while in handy jam near my house, pour out very strong coffee from my sad old-lady flask to continue my alertness. Also have a back-up can of Red Bull if necessary.
I always drive myself everywhere as I like driving, I know all the routes round London better than a cabbie, I can have the radio on a station I like and, misanthrope that I am, I don’t have to talk to anyone because I am miserable and half dead in the morning and this doesn’t sit well with a cheery driver who’s been up two hours more than me and is keen to chat. I flick about on the radio between Chris Evans’ show on Radio 2 and Radio 4, when a report about either business/finance or Europe comes on and sends me back to Chris as I’m likely to drop off to sleep again.
6 a.m. I drive through a silent Peckham and Greenwich and head towards the Blackwall Tunnel. Oh, what a surprise — there’s a traffic jam up ahead of me. We queue up to the lights for about 200 yards while I try to answer some texts from yesterday that I’ve forgotten about. A man behind beeps me because I haven’t edged up twelve feet when the traffic has moved. Crawl onto the A2 and start heading towards the Tunnel. Not my favourite journey this, and I always find myself fantasising about water coming in or a fire when I’m down there, and look for secret doors I could escape out of. It’s so long too. Seems to take ages to get through. Once on the other side, at least I am heading against the flow of the rush-hour traffic. It only takes me ten minutes to get to the hospital from here. I pull into a parking space, say hello to the security guy and head in ten minutes early.
One of the marvels of filming is the breakfasts. As I come into the communal area I see, as usual, a veritable Roman-eat-till-you-explode feast of sausages, scrambled egg, beans, toast, mushrooms — the full English — and manage to grab a couple of sausages before I am hauled into make-up by Christine the make-up woman.
My make-up routine for Kim, the slobby, jaded nurse I play is mercifully short, because we are trying to make the series as naturalistic as possible, so I just have a tiny bit of foundation and some eyebrows, and then I’m ready for action. Gathering more sausages en route, I make my way to the set, which is a perfect replica of a ward in a downmarket, slightly under-funded NHS hospital.
8 a.m. The first scene is a nice little one where I have to smoke in the toilet and speak to my husband ‘Dave’ on the phone. The toilet’s reasonably big but not massive, and I am plonked rather uncomfortably on the edge of it so they can get me into shot. Also, it’s absolutely bloody freezing, especially as I have a thin cotton nurse’s dress and some alluring popsox on and have to pretend I’m in an overheated hospital. Everyone else seems to be wearing outdoor coats and jackets, the bastards.
Rather gloriously we have to do several retakes, which means several fags, a nice little break. Peter (Capaldi), the director and the cameramen Casper and Gary, a right cheeky pair, are located just outside the lay with Doug the delightful sound man, and we have a good laugh as I try and blow smoke out of the tiny open window. It’s amazing how long these things take and I suppose half an hour later we finish and everyone moves onto the next scene.
I am not in the next two scenes so I get to wander about and have seventeen more sausages, read the papers and not do anything I’m supposed to be doing, like refreshing my memory for the two shows of the Book Club for Channel Four that I’m recording that evening. I take occasional trips to the lovely temporary toilets that are outside in the cold as none of the toilets inside are working and we have no water either.
I am then back on for three more scenes in a row which take place at the nurses’ station, where I have to talk to Jo Scanlan, who is playing Sister Den, about dolphins, and then have an argument with Vicki Pepperdine, Dr Pippa Moore, about some money she owes my husband. We initially film one scene as written and then do the same scene again a little bit more freely I can’t help myself, I keep trying to put in one-liners, which I know I shouldn’t because they look too contrived and will not get into the final edit, but it’s a knee-jerk reaction, I’m afraid, and not being a proper actor but a comic, it’s also my default position.
1 p.m. The midday meal comes upon us and I’m feeling knackered already as, however early I have to get up, I still can’t go to sleep at a sensible time so I reckon I’ve had about five hours which is not enough for me. I need about twenty.
After eating, we piss about for a few minutes until we are called to have our make-up checked and go back to the ‘ward’. In the afternoon we do more stuff at the nurses’ station with me on the phone to someone who’s looking for a bed and then me trying to get Sister Den to do my annual appraisal for me.
5 p.m. I have a special dispensation to shoot off early and get to Kennington in South London for two episodes of Book Club. I drive out of the hospital and try to take a short-cut and mess up and find myself in an area I don’t recognise without a main road in sight. I then have to use my satnav, which tells me I am heading in exactly the opposite direction to where I’m supposed to be going. This has added a good ten minutes onto my journey and always happens to me when I’m supposed to get somewhere quickly.
Finally I am facing in the right direction and arrive in Kennington half an hour later than I’m supposed to. I stop at the shop and buy an evil-looking little bottle of something that’s supposed to wake me up, but just makes me feel mildly irritable and anxious instead.
6.15 p.m. I arrive at Cactus TV in Kennington and am whisked into another make-up room where I am transformed from grubby nurse into international beauty … ish. I then get shooed up the corridor into the studio because I am so late, where my fellow conspirators await me. They are Dave Spikey (him off Phoenix Nights and a good egg to boot), Laila Rouass (off Footballers’ Wives), very beautiful but such a down-to-earth laugh that you don’t want to smack her in the gob with the envy of the aging stout old woman, Gok Wan, a one-man tornado of sound and light who, as an ex-fatty feels like and is a real ally and Nat Parker, the actor who plays the lead in the TV series The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, who is a like-able gentlemanly aristocrat with a twinkle in his eye.
Our special guest is Martine McCutcheon who I have bumped into over the years on such diverse shows as Jools Holland’s Hootenanny and Comic Relief and she has her own book out to promote — The Mistress. We are reviewing a novel by Liz Jensen called The Rapture which I liked even though the plot went a bit bonkers at the end, so we discuss the book in a pretty relaxed way and try to find positives about it because we are not there to slag everything off.
By this point, the sofa on which I am sitting is temptingly comfy and it wouldn’t take much for me to lie down and never get up again. I have a slight headache — that gritty-eye feeling you get when you’re tired — and an inability to read the autocue with any degree of professionalism. It all seems to whiz by mercifully quickly and then we have a break between shows.
8 p.m. I go back to my dressing room for a wee and start to nod off on the toilet, not a good sign so I down my second little bottle of evil highly caffeinated energy drink and this seems to help. It also helps nipping outside for a fag with Gok, since if anyone can wake me up, it’s him. He speaks at 900 miles an hour and I find myself being pulled out of my comatose state in an attempt to follow his very funny discourse about his family This and my magic liquid seem to have pulled me back into t
he land of the living and I feel I can soldier on a bit more. I’m desperate to go home after the second show, but I have agreed to do a gig for some people from the Labour Party at 10.30 that night, giving me half an hour after the show to get my stuff together, drive over there and find the venue.
The next show sees Stephen Tompkinson as our guest and we are reviewing a sweeping novel set in Ethiopia and America in the 1930s called Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. It’s very good so it’s not difficult to find things to say about it. Stephen is good value for money chatty and relaxed, and I have to be careful that I don’t get so relaxed I start to keel backwards.
10 p.m. After the show has finished I rush to my dressing room and carefully fold my clothes — do I bollocks. I stuff them all into a carrier bag, because much as I would like to think of myself as one of those people who has designer clothes carriers, I simply am not and never will be. I was always the kid who turned up at school with my packed lunch in a Sainsbury’s bag and suppose I always will be.
I get into the car feeling like a limp old piece of rag and seriously consider cancelling the Labour Party show. But I find I just cannot do it. My mum instilled the Protestant work ethic into me when I was a nipper and I am one of those people who still go to work if I am half dead. So I program the satnav for the Brompton Road and set off at rally-driving pace to try and find a night club called The Collection in SW3.
The first bit goes OK and I arrive at the Brompton Road in about twenty minutes and feel rather pleased with myself. Then, of course, I can’t find the bloody venue. I drive up and down three times trying to spot the place. Finally, I start to panic and wonder if I’m ever going to get there. My satnav keeps saying, ‘You have arrived at your destination,’ and I keep replying, ‘No, I haven’t, you silly old cow. Do something.’
Eventually, I call someone at the Labour Party who says they’ll get someone to call me, as I drive aimlessly up and down in the worst mood imaginable. Eventually someone does phone and says they have saved a parking space. They assure me that I am near by, and that someone else has been dispatched to find me. I pull into the kerb and in my wing mirror see some poor bloke in a suit legging it up the road at a hundred miles an hour. He is a Labour Party guy not some besuited psychopath, so I let him in the car and we do a U-ey right in the middle of heavy traffic and I relish doing some rude signs as other drivers beep at me. We finally arrive outside the venue at number 264 and I have to park in a tiny space in front of a fifteen-strong welcoming committee. Inevitably I fuck it up and have to go in and out a few times. And then I am hardly out of the car when they descend on me, little knowing that I want to punch the first one who comes near me, I’m that stressed. I manage to smile through heavily gritted teeth and am escorted in.
10.45 p.m. It’s even worse inside. There are hordes of people, all pissed, and the music is deafening (said grandma). As I’m late, I have about two seconds to prepare and then am shoved onto a makeshift stage to do my fifteen-minute bit. It goes by in a blur. I do some jokes about Cameron I have literally written on the back of a fag packet on my way, and then segue into my usual material which I know works.
Thank God, although it is noisy they are very friendly and seem to like me — which is fortunate because they were going to get it with both barrels if they didn’t. I come off stage and am surrounded by alcohol fumes leaking out of very close faces. The owner asks me to come to a table with him for a drink, but I can do no more of anything sociable and plead exhaustion, although I can see he doesn’t really believe me. However, I am past caring and head for the door, being waylaid every few feet or so to say hello to a very nice bunch of people. It’s me that’s the problem.
11.45 p.m. As I drive off I could cry I am so tired, and when I get home I drop everything on the floor, climb into bed and pass out like I’ve been punched unconscious.
Just a small matter now of having to get up at 5.30 a.m. again …
Friends are enormously important to me, especially longstanding ones, because they are the people who knew me before all this comedy stuff and therefore I value their opinion on things like whether I have turned into a showbiz arse or not.
Because of the immense cultural weight placed on being a so-called ‘celebrity’, people do react differently towards you, there is no getting round it. And so from the moment when I realised I was now someone whom people recognised off the telly I found myself becoming warier and warier of those individuals who wanted to be my friend.
I know this is unfair of me and too cynical, because on the whole, most people are friendly honest and trustworthy — but when you look at those little messages in the tabloids that exhort you to phone in and grass up some celeb who’s done something interesting, in some cases only pick their nose in the street, I feel it’s important to be on your guard a bit. Add to that features like ‘Spotted’ in Heat magazine (a secret guilty pleasure of mine), which allows people to describe someone famous they saw and what they were doing, it does make you feel slightly under scrutiny The irony of these items is that, most of the time, it’s so dull. Are we really interested in the fact that Jimmy Carr was spotted talking into his mobile phone on Oxford Street? Not exactly an unusual thing to do, is it? Now if he’d been shoving it up someone’s … well, you get the picture.
First of all, let’s take those people who approach you at events. They often seem keen to let you know that:
You’re Not As Great As You Think You Are.
Well, it may come as a surprise, but I don’t think I’m that great. I’m pleased and proud of the way my comedy career has turned out, but I like to think I’m not smug. However, there is a natural assumption on the part of some people that I must be flawed in the personality department. That may well be true, but I don’t believe I am a diva in any way This is because I did a ‘normal’ job for years and I know what it’s like to earn a low wage for huge numbers of hours in a stressful job.
Secondly I am perfectly well aware that some people may think I’m a demanding, petulant pain, so I actually go out of my way to prove them wrong. Even when I am feeling tired, fed up and ill, I still make an enormous effort to be polite and friendly This doesn’t wash with some people. They push and push, or they throw an insult out of the blue at you, which belies their initially friendly attitude. I did a book signing recently and a woman who had queued for ages, finally got to the top of the line and informed me while I was signing her book that I was ‘crap on QI the other night’. I just smiled and said, ‘Oh, thanks,’ which I think wrong-footed her a bit, but inside I was thinking, Oh, why don’t you just fuck off, you stupid cow.
I myself wouldn’t dream of being so rude to someone I don’t know — and if you are thinking — Yes, you would, on stage — that is a completely different matter altogether. It’s a performance and it has very little to do with me as a person, in the sense that all comedy performances are exaggerated versions of life. So when strangers say to me, ‘I don’t like you,’ (which, believe you me, they do), or conversely ‘I’d love to be your friend,’ they don’t really mean me, they mean my stand-up act. This assumes that I go round all the time with the ‘comedy’ switch permanently turned on. Well, I don’t. That would be too bloody exhausting for words and would royally piss off everyone I know.
I think a lot of people are rather disappointed when they meet me and when our ensuing interaction is not at the performance level of stand-up comedy.
One has a choice when one joins the world of showbusiness — to throw oneself headlong into it, or to observe from the sidelines — and the latter is what I chose to do. I have a slight horror of parties, full stop, let alone showbiz parties. I am regularly tongue-tied at these sorts of events as I cannot produce the sort of small talk that seems to be required unless I’ve had eight pints of lager, and then I tend to do and say quite a lot of things I regret the following day It’s just easier to steer clear of them.
I have made some very good friends from the comedy circuit over the years when we
all started off, but on the whole I am not to be found at Elton John’s annual shindig or premières and the like. I did once get invited to a party by Morrissey whom I love, but I think he was seriously disappointed in the real me.
I feel much happier with a small group of long-term friends because I can relax, trust them, be myself with them and have a laugh.
My three best friends are Betty Griffo and Edana, whom I have known since 1979 — hundreds of years. Betty, who lives round the corner from me, is the only one of us who managed to use her psychology degree to find a job in the field, and she now works as a senior psychologist. It’s an absolute joy having a good friend so close at hand. We speak most days, and although we have enormously stressed lives, see each other all the time. I don’t think I could survive if she wasn’t around. I know I can tell her anything and she is absolutely trustworthy in every way, and we are as we always have been, completely in tune with each other.
Griffo lives in Swansea, which is a pisser, because I don’t get to see her nearly as often as I’d like. She decided quite early on that she wanted to be an actress after we’d left college and has carved herself a fantastic career in an arena that is enormously competitive and cruel at times. We do our best to text/email/talk on the phone whenever possible. We work together too, as often as we can, and she recently played the part of the union rep in the comedy Getting On.