Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down

by Jo Brand

  I don’t dismiss all that wonderful literature out of hand, however, as I think novels like Pride and Prejudice are glorious and so is anything by Charles Dickens, although the many working-class characters in his novels tend not to be shot through with a political ethos.

  I’d urge you to have a crack at The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It’s very sad and depressing in parts, but it gives you an invaluable glimpse into the lives of working people, before we had unions to protect them. And although unions these days, having been somewhat decimated by Margaret Thatcher, are frowned upon because of their excesses, to me they retain an essential role for the worker who needs to be shielded from the completely profit-orientated approach of big business.

  Blimey, you’re probably thinking, you sound like a Commie. I am not a Communist but I feel very strongly that any civilised society should have in place organisations that look after the lives of so-called ‘small’ people who don’t have any power or protection.

  A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

  And so to Dickens. I find it very hard to pick out a favourite as I particularly love Great Expectations, David Copperfield and Barnaby Rudge, but A Christmas Carol is such an optimistic book, and its images filled my childhood. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that the main character is Scrooge, a grumpy mean-spirited misanthrope who treats his employees and everyone else he comes into contact with like dirt. The story is about his metamorphosis from miser to cheery philanthropist and general good geezer through his contact with a series of ghosts who show him his past, present and future. From talking about the struggling working classes as a group he thinks ‘should die and decrease the surplus population’, he turns into a beneficent old man keen to help those who are finding life intolerable.

  If only it were so easy to get the bad-tempered old self-servers in our society to read this and change their lives in the way Scrooge did, but I still hold out some hope. Programmes like Secret Millionaire (although obviously there is a slightly cynical televisual edge to them), in which some loaded person is sent off to a grim part of Britain to find out about the lives of poor working, and unemployed, people also adds to the stock of encouraging a kinder attitude to what many people would have us think are feckless cheating ruffians.

  The Faber Book of Reportage, edited by John Carey

  This bloody marvellous book is a series of eye-witness reports of events in history told from various viewpoints. So there are such diverse pieces as Charles Dickens witnessing a hanging, reports from soldiers in the First and Second World Wars, and some heartbreaking accounts of children working in factories in the Victorian era.

  The earliest reports go all the way back to Pompeii and the devastation caused by the eruption of Vesuvius, and come up as far as the unseating of the shoe-loving Imelda Marcos and her husband as they are chucked out of power in the coup in the Philippines.

  My favourite piece is the report of a group of rowdy women in medieval England who would go to jousts dressed up as men and generally cause trouble by getting pissed and being lary. Nice to see some medieval ladettes giving it large.

  The pleasure gained from reading this book was increased tenfold when I was on a Radio 4 programme about favourite books in which three of us swapped books and then commented on each other’s choice. One of the other guests was Jonathan Meades, an author and what they call ‘a cultural commentator’, and he had a right good old sneer at my choice of the book of reportage, rubbishing its historical validity because each piece was a subjective view. As I tend to think of ‘cultural commentators’ as rather smug types like critics (who are they to tell the rest of us what we should and shouldn’t think, anyway?) it made me feel even more fond of this book.

  Moments of Reprieve by Primo Levi

  This again is an optimistic book which covers one of the most shameful periods in our global history, the genocide of the Jews by Hitler during the Second World War. You may find it difficult to imagine that anything positive could come out of this truly harrowing and agonising time. The book is set in Auschwitz and consists of a series of essays by Primo Levi, who himself had been a prisoner in that concentration camp. It details significant moments when a ray of hope shone into his life of struggle and degradation due to small acts of kindness from the other people there, whether it was another prisoner saving tiny bits of food for him, or a normally brutalised guard committing an uncharacteristic act of compassion. I found this book a fascinating read in its attempt to glean some small comfort from the all but destroyed altruism of certain individuals.

  Primo Levi suffered terrible ‘survivor’s’ guilt in later life, and ended up killing himself, many years after the war. However, this book and the others that he wrote on the same subject are a small pool of light in the gloomy theatre of human brutality.

  In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill

  Are you depressed enough now? Well, don’t be too hopeful that things are going to take an upward turn just yet, because this book, by one of my favourite authors, Susan Hill, is not exactly full of laughs. It’s set in the English countryside in a place very similar to where I grew up, and details the life of a woman whose husband is killed in a tree-felling accident right at the beginning of the novel.

  The rest of this beautifully written story takes us through her grief and then eventual acceptance of her widowhood. It’s the sort of book you can immerse yourself in, particularly if you love the countryside as I do, since every page brings some new and exquisite description of the changing face of rural life throughout the seasons.

  As my mum said to me once, ‘Don’t read The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas if you’re feeling depressed.’ I did, and true to her prediction I felt a whole lot worse, so this is not a book to read if your life is a bit grim. Save it till you feel better and then you can wallow in its misery.

  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

  I’m sure this book contributed towards me wanting to become a psychiatric nurse — not so I could become like Nurse Ratched the psychopathic nightmare who runs the ward, you understand! No, I suppose I wanted to be an antidote to her.

  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest details the admission of one Randle McMurphy to a psychiatric unit in America — a complex man, I would say, with a personality disorder — who proceeds to lay waste to the rigidly organised totalitarian regime of the ward created by Nurse Ratched. His cheeky, unorthodox troublemaking throws the ward into confusion as narrated by a Native American patient who, wordless and inscrutable, floats on the periphery of the action and observes the descent of McMurphy into a kind of hell.

  This is a gripping description of the isolated universe of the psychiatric hospital in those days when the staff could pretty much do what they liked to control unacceptable behaviour. It’s also really funny and touching, and is to me the definitive handbook of how not to be a psychiatric nurse. Of course, the iconic film starring Jack Nicholson, which sees the action from a different perspective is easily as good as the book — a rare phenomenon in cinema and literature — and Jack Nicholson will be forever linked with the cheeky McMurphy for me.

  1984 by George Orwell

  George Orwell has written so many great books that I find it difficult to choose a favourite. I love Animal Farm, a demolition of the totalitarian state if ever there was one, and Down and Out in Paris and London, with which I have a vague connection in that the ‘spike’ or doss house in which the narrator stays was in fact in Camberwell, and was a place to which we would refer rough sleepers from the Emergency Clinic.

  I chose 1984 though, because it’s a literary classic and contains pertinent warnings for us all as we move towards the future. There are so many words and phrases in it too, which have become part of our everyday language, such as ‘Thought Police’ and ‘Big Brother’. The novel tells the story of the hapless civil servant Winston Smith as he attempts to fight the power of the all-seeing Big Brother and gain some individuality and freedom. One very telling piece in it describe
s the newspapers that are read by the ‘proles’ — the amorphous group of so-called ‘lowlifes’ who scrabble around on the fringes of society poor and under-educated. These papers are more like comics and take the minds of the proles off anything more important that may be going on. Weirdly, apparently when the Daily Mail serialised 1984, they left out this bit.

  I championed 1984 in one of those BBC The Nation’s Favourite-type shows, and I think 1984 came third or fourth. I made a programme about it and we did much of the filming in a disused tube station near Green Park in Central London. God, it was terrifying being that far underground in the dark with cobwebs and dust. I was pleased to get back up and breathe the air, even London’s dirty polluted sort.

  The infamous Room 101 came out of Orwell’s time at the BBC, and we managed to visit it halfway through its demolition and redecoration. No rats there though, thankfully.

  The Children of Dynmouth by William Trevor

  William Trevor is a lovely Irish writer whose writing I find easy to read and quirky The Children of Dynmouth is an arresting novel about a very strange, rather disturbed teenage boy who lives in a typical, sleepy Dorset seaside town whose occupants are seemingly content and unsullied by scandal. Our anti-hero Timothy Gedge decides he wants to win a prize in the tableau competition at the church fete, so having decided he is going to portray the Brides in the Bath murders, he sets about gathering the various bits and pieces he will need to achieve this aim. As he has no money he needs to beg, steal or borrow a bath and a wedding dress among other things. He does this through a series of encounters with the town’s occupants, in which he uses information about them to persuade them to cough up the goods, and in so doing pruriently uncovers the seedier side of the so-called respectable town-dwellers’ lives.

  I have always thought that beneath the veneer of respectability of some of our more picturesque areas lurk many unsavoury stories waiting to be told, and in this novel, elderly spinsters and old colonels alike are shown to be hiding secrets they would rather not reveal. Don’t read this if you are posh and well-respected and hiding an unpleasant secret, as this will only depress you.

  It has to be said, spare-time-wise, I have pretty undemanding hobbies. Books, films and theatre are my big pleasures, and over the years I have spent many happy hours sat in cinemas in the dark crying, laughing and stuffing very unhealthy food down my gullet … bliss. Here are my favourite films.

  Local Hero

  This Bill Forsyth film is an absolute joy with a cracking soundtrack by Mark Knopfler. It tells the story of an oil company executive visiting a beautiful coastal village in Scotland to try and persuade the villagers to allow their unspoiled region to be used for a new oil plant. They are offered huge sums of money and are all keen, apart from one old geezer who has lived on the beach itself for years.

  This is a perfect film for me as I remain anti-American to my core: their aggressive brand of expansionism and the ruining of the beauty of many natural areas has often pissed me off over the years. Eventually in the film, the boss Burt Lancaster comes over to try and persuade the old man to cave in and we are treated to an array of wonderful comedy characters played by actors including Denis Lawson and Peter Capaldi.

  Many years after I first saw the film I met Peter Capaldi at a ‘do’ at the London Studios and got the opportunity to tell him how great I thought he was. I never find it easy to do this as it always sounds so wanky. However, we eventually got to work together on Getting On as he directed it, and it was a real pleasure to spend time with the comedy genius who plays one of my favourite characters, Malcolm Tucker.

  True Stories

  True Stories is a film made by David Byrne of Talking Heads, and it features him as a cowboy-hatted stranger visiting a small town called Virgil in Texas which is preparing for some celebrations for the 150th anniversary of its founding. It was one of the very early roles for the magnificent John Goodman from Roseanne, who plays a lonely bachelor looking for love, and the film builds to his performance of a song at the celebration. The film is an idiosyncratic visual and musical feast, which completely confirms David Byrne’s genius. Every song is memorable and it’s a very funny and touching film.

  Cabaret

  This is Liza Minnelli’s finest moment, playing Sally Bowles, an American performer in Berlin in the thirties, in the film based on the novel Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood. The songs are so evocative, and as a relationship develops between her and a slightly staid English teacher played by Michael York, we follow the progress of the rise of the Nazi Party whose increasing threat and inexorable march towards power is not only reflected in the action of the film, but also within the songs that Sally Bowles sings at the Kit Kat Club, a down-at-heel cabaret filled with an array of unsavoury characters.

  The performance of Joel Grey as the maitre d’ is unforgettable, and I rewatch the film every few years to soak up its genius. I remember once being in a car going to a show out of town with Hattie Hayridge, and we were playing the soundtrack in the car. When it got to the song ‘Tomorrow Belongs To Me’ which is sung in a chilling scene outside a country tavern and encourages, one by one, a series of Aryan young men to stand up and pledge themselves to Nazism, I’m afraid Hattie and I started doing Nazi salutes … much to the puzzlement and dismay of the occupants of the car next to us at the traffic-lights.

  A couple of years ago, I went to see Julian Clary play the maitre d’ in the West End. It was a great performance and I also got to see Julian’s bum, which is not something huge numbers of women can say I’m sure.

  Great Expectations

  David Lean’s iconic version of the Dickens novel was a big feature of my childhood, mainly because the chilling opening scene in which Pip meets the criminal Magwitch in a graveyard scared the shit out of me and stopped me sleeping for many nights. John Mills is absolutely delightful as the grown-up Pip, and the images of the film have stayed with me for many many years and fostered a love of Dickens’ novels that I certainly didn’t have when I first saw it as a seven year old.

  To Kill a Mockingbird

  Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, a lawyer representing a black man accused of rape in 1930s Alabama, is my all-time favourite character. Considering most of the output of studios of the time was unchallenging, morally bland stuff about lurve or adventure, this film is a ground-breaker in so many ways and it opened the debate about racism for many Americans whose shameful history needed to be explored.

  All the performances are amazing, from that of the little girl called Scout to the accused Tom Robinson, and if you’re not a reader prepared to tackle the book, at least see the film.

  Terms of Endearment

  Terms of Endearment is in some ways one of the most slushy films of the last fifty years, but it is also hugely funny as well, featuring an Oscar-winning performance from Shirley MacLaine as the tight-arsed, snobbish mother of the central character played by Debra Winger, who is dying of leukaemia; and Jack Nicholson as a pissed, sardonic ex-astronaut. In parts it is heartbreaking and in others hysterical as Shirley MacLaine’s dignity is endlessly compromised by Jack. Makes you want to hunt down and marry a pissed ex-astronaut.

  Riff Raff

  Riff Raff, directed by Ken Loach, is a film by that most unusual of creatures, a film-maker with a political conscience. It’s set in London in the Thatcherite era and tells the story of a group of builders converting a wrecked NHS hospital into luxury flats. It stars Robert Carlyle, Ricky Tomlinson and Emer McCourt and has a strong political message underlying the many unparalleled comical scenes. The foreman is the best swearer in the business and equals Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It for his obscene rants about laziness. I have a tenuous connection with Emer McCourt who played Robert Carlyle’s girlfriend Susan, because she ended up directing Human Traffic, a film in which I had a don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-me part. In fact, you did miss me, because I was edited out of the final cut. No idea why assume I was shit, don’t ever ask about those things.

 
; Twin Town

  I am a huge adolescent, because there’s nothing I like better than relentless, creative swearing, and you get massive amounts of it in this very funny Welsh film. Starring Rhys Ifans, it tells the story of twin brothers attempting to get justice for their father who has been injured in a work accident. There are drugs, local gangsters and Welsh male voice choirs, a cameo by Keith Allen whose brother Kevin directed it, and an hysterically funny scene with my very good mate Griffo playing a prostitute. It’s bloody brilliant, and if you want to upset your slightly uptight grandma, send her a DVD for Christmas.

  One of the great joys of living in London is the number of theatres that are on our doorstep. To be honest, I don’t get out much, but I do try and make it to the theatre as often as I can. First of all, it’s such a unique experience: no one show is the same as another, and the actors are right there in front of you, sweating their bits off to bring you a transcendental experience that I find stays with you much longer than a film does. Also, there’s nothing quite as bad as bad theatre — it’s really, really, really bad. But when it’s good it’s unbeatable.

  Going to the theatre should not be a posh/middle-class thing either, but should be there for everyone. I know that prices are prohibitive, but when I was a nurse I used to go because I would rather have seen one play than five films.

  Plays that have left me spellbound are: