Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down

by Jo Brand

  Gordon Brown

  Poor old Gordon Brown, on the other hand, does not easily do that media thing. As a person I admire him enormously, because I think his heart is in the right place. He has a strong sense of what is right democratically, and I believe genuinely wanted the best for the country and all the people who struggle with their lives. But something happens when you stick a camera in his gob that turns him into a different person. And these days people want their politicians looking like handsome estate agents in sharp suits. Gordon Brown, because of his rather hesitant manner and slightly strange mannerisms, was dismissed by a large number of the electorate as a bit of a weirdo.

  However, all my meetings with him have shown him to be a warm, humorous, intelligent and dedicated person. I’m not convinced he’s a bully, although I do reckon he’s got a scary temper on him, but I haven’t seen any evidence of that.

  The first time I was due to meet Gordon Brown properly. I was at a charity event at Downing Street, but also due at a Labour Party dinner across Town that I had been asked to arrive at on time. As the minutes ticked on, several aide types came over and said to me and a couple of other comics, Lee Mack included, ‘The Prime Minister will be over to meet you in a minute.’

  Eventually it got too late, and when an aide came over for a third time and said it was going to be another five minutes, I had to say I couldn’t wait. Lee Mack thought it was hugely amusing that I blew out the PM, but truth be told I was dying for a wee as well so I had to move. Oh, how the great moments in one’s life are scuppered by the bladder.

  I also did a couple of women-only fundraisers organised by Sarah Brown, who is as composed, quietly humorous and generous as she appears to be. These events were again to raise money, but also to encourage more women to get stuck into politics. Those attending were a mixture of women celebrities, prominent Labour Party women and a sprinkling of wealthy women.

  To digress for a minute, at one such event I was compering, I sat next to a very rich woman who asked me whether I did birthday parties. In all honesty, I don’t really like doing birthday parties because the guests all tend to know each other, and that changes the dynamic of the evening — since there is always the lurking possibility that they will turn on you as one. However, I did not immediately dismiss the idea, although as this woman was hugely glamorous, about twenty-two and absolutely dripping in squillions of pounds’ worth of jewels, I couldn’t imagine that an act such as mine would really fit in amongst the glitterati of Belgravia.

  ‘Who did you have at your last birthday?’ I enquired. ‘Stevie Wonder,’ came the answer. I gulped inside. My appearance at that woman’s birthday party was never going to happen.

  I was granted a private five-minute ‘hello’ sesh with Gordon Brown last time I did a women’s fundraiser for his wife. In the room were me, Alesha Dixon and Gordon and Sarah, plus some security bods and the inevitable photographer. We had a relaxed chat and I marvelled that these moments were probably repeated endlessly throughout the lives of politicians and must be like a living hell.

  At Christmas one year, Jack Dee and I did a show on Radio 2, and just as a laugh, I asked whether Gordon Brown would contribute a comedy line for it. To my surprise he agreed, and the producer and I went to Number Ten to record the line, which included a self-deprecating comment about being dour. After we’d done it, Gordon said he was off to a party for Labour supporters at a hotel in Central London and asked if I’d like to come with him. I said I’d love to, and was then invited to travel there with him in his official car.

  We were led down through the bowels of Downing Street, exiting at the rear straight into his waiting Jag. We both sat in the back, security men in cars at the front and behind, and flanked by outriders on bikes. It was one of the most exciting experiences, driving through the centre of Town extraordinarily fast, chatting to the PM and wanting to wind the window down and shout, ‘Hey, look, everyone — it’s me!’ But I didn’t, of course. Just sat there trying to look cool and behave as if I did that sort of thing all the time.

  I found it really sad watching Gordon and Sarah Brown and their children leave 10 Downing Street. The election, if one could manage to be objective, was very interesting because, given how unpopular Gordon Brown was, one would have imagined that David Cameron would walk it.

  However, I think people were suspicious of Cameron; he’d not had a very good press in terms of how posh he was, and his and Boris’s link to the Bullingdon Club in which a load of over-privileged youths smashed up a restaurant and then paid for the damage, didn’t show them in a very pleasant light. So where did the votes go, that Cameron didn’t get? To Nick Clegg, who had suddenly acquired the status of a celebrity following the television debates? But no — the Lib Dems lost seats. They went, I presume, to cushion what could have been a much worse Labour defeat. So then the negotiations began, and to be honest, I never had any faith in the Lib Dems coming to any agreement with the Labour Party.

  And so we were presented with a Tory/Lib Dem coalition. Will we have the harshness of the Tories, leavened with a bit of Lib Dem niceness? So they’ll bring back hanging but they’ll allow people a scented candle while they’re being executed? I have to try not to think that we’re being ruled by a bunch of Eton toffs or else I’d get too depressed. I predict the Lib Dems’ input will get teenier and teenier until you can almost hardly notice it. Promises made before the election have already been broken, and I wonder how long it will take the British people to get sick of the draconian measures the Tories are taking to correct the deficit.

  I don’t think in politics that there are any definitive answers. For instance, who caused the global economic crisis in the first place?

  It depends on who you vote for.

  Local Politricks

  And, of course, here in London we are being ruled yet again in a micro-way by the Tories, as a bunch of nanas voted Boris Johnson in as London Mayor for some reason. This floppy-haired, overgrown schoolboy was not my choice, and one can only hope that he puts his foot in it a few more times. He does occasionally seem like a young Duke of Edinburgh in the gaffe department.

  But why did people vote for him?

  People I know who did so, in the main, said they voted for him because he seemed like a laugh on Have I Got News for You. Well, so did Tom Baker — but I’m not sure I’d want him as Mayor of London. And Boris lives in North London, so he’s obviously rubbish.

  Celebrity-type exposure is encroaching more and more on politics these days. Politicians are on entertainment shows and celebs are going into politics. It’s a rum old situation which, carried to its logical conclusion, may mean that (God forbid) Piers Morgan or Simon Cowell could end up running the country if we’re not careful —in which case I would indeed emigrate.

  Do I Hate Men?

  I’m often accused of hating men by the usual array of right-wingy tabloidy types who find it easy to slot me into that box so that they can hate me back.

  It’s interesting how, for thousands and thousands of years, in our society, men have had the upper hand — and as soon as women start to claw a bit of power into their lives, a number of men feel it’s too much. Of course I don’t hate men as an entire group — that would be utterly ridiculous, unless I was a separatist feminist lesbian, which I’m not.

  I always used to do a line in my set in which I described the continuum along which feminism seems to run these days. At the one end it takes in what are called ‘lipstick feminists’ — women who have feminist ideals but want to do the whole feminine bit as well — right along to the other end where you find your male-clothes-wearing, short-haired, Doc Marten-sporting man-haters. The thing is that, emotionally, I am probably more up the end of the lipstick gals, but I look like I’m right down the other end with the dungaree-wearers.

  The five top things men do that annoy me are:

  1. Consume pornography

  2. Treat women like second-class citizens

  3. Intimidate women when they are in gro
ups

  4. Good men tolerate bad men treating women like shit

  5. The vast majority cannot help themselves equating good looks with attractiveness

  As a woman who has never — and will never — look like a model, one is constantly made aware of the level of one’s attractiveness by those men who feel it’s OK for them to randomly comment on a woman’s position in the ‘How-attractive-you-are-to-me-love’ chart of female looks. Well, would you believe it, guys, quite a lot of us don’t like that. And it’s particularly galling, if you try to make a point about women being patronised, intimidated or not taken seriously, when the answer that comes back is:

  ‘Oh, you’re just jealous because you’re ugly.’

  This is so frustrating because I can hardly counter with, ‘Oh come on, boys, look at me — I’m beautiful, admit it.’ The interesting thing is that I know lots of really gorgeous-looking blonde women who are sick to bloody death of being treated as if they’re thick as shit. And if you look at it, female types have, over the years, been divided into very clichéd groups to satisfy the easy categorisation of us lot.

  So for example you have:

  · The bimbo

  · The slag

  · The nympho

  · The harridan

  · The gold digger

  · The frigid cow

  · The lesbian (if you make it apparent you don’t fancy them)

  Ooh, how flattering it is, to hear one’s gender divided into such positive categories. The division of men into categories like this does not seem to exist, but I wish it did. If I got the opportunity I would have:

  · The woman loather

  · The bed notcher

  · The five-year-old child

  · The ‘I need a housekeeper’ bloke

  · The eternal band member

  · The useless Herbert

  I’m not saying that there aren’t nice blokes around, there are plenty. but I’m sure men don’t want to be reduced to a few pejorative phrases and neither do women.

  Going back to the intimidation theme for a moment, here is a typical story. Recently I was in my car at the traffic-lights about midnight on the M11 link road and a young woman was in the car in front. A car containing two men drew up alongside her and the bloke on her side put down the window and began making the international sign for blowjobs at her. I was appalled and so angry. If I’d had a flamethrower in the car I would have used it. That sort of intimidation makes me so mad. I followed the two cars for a bit, in case they were going to do anything else, but thankfully a little further on, they turned off looking for pastures new.

  It is incidents like this one and those from my own experience which continue to fuel the feminist principles I have — and that ain’t never going to change. I really wish for more power for women to fight against this sort of bullshit, even though some people think that turns you into the anti-pleasure, anti-sex ball-breaking harridan described earlier in this book. Well, it doesn’t, it just makes me want to even the balance and I suppose brings me back to the joke I did once about women being armed. If we women had the physical ability to look after ourselves, perhaps that would improve things a little.

  As women’s place in society seems at present to be regressing to what it was before the sixties and feminism happened, I have no idea what it’s going to be like in the future. There are so many cultures impinging on ours that I believe have a dodgy attitude towards women, that it remains to be seen whether the end result will be a demotion of women’s place in society and we’ll end up back at home slogging our guts out domestically. being exploited and unable to put a foot outside the front door.

  Do I Love All Women?

  No, of course I don’t, because that would be as bloody ridiculous as hating all men. I find it really interesting these days that young women cannot bear to be associated with feminism and are embarrassed to be called a feminist, for the reasons stated on page 276.

  The Spice Girls and ‘girl power’ made an attempt to improve things, but a group of young women who made pots of money aren’t a very realistic role model for the rest of womanhood. In these days, when women can not only work but run a family as well, it seems to me that more and more responsibility is being heaped onto them and eventually they may just explode with the pressure.

  However, that’s not to say it’s all bad. Changes are occurring.

  In the days when I was a child, to be honest I hardly remember seeing my dad. He would disappear in the morning and then reappear in the evening just before we went to bed, and although he was around at the weekends and came on trips and holidays, he was quite distant compared to my mum. These days, dads are much more hands-on. The once exclusively female group who dropped children off for school has now opened up to include more than a smattering of men. One hopes that in this age of one step forward, two steps back gender relations, scores will eventually even between the sexes, and that some sort of parity will be achieved.

  Your first appearances on telly are so exciting because you can’t quite believe you’ve wiggled your way into that flickering box that always sat in the corner of the living room throughout your childhood. Television has always been magical to me, and I can pretty much sit and watch any old bollocks from dawn till dusk. As a child I drew the line at The Budget, however, and used to be really pissed off when that was on because it meant they took Crossroads off the telly.

  For those of you who don’t remember Crossroads it was an early soap which revolved round a motel set outside Birmingham (oh, the glamour). Many people say that Victoria Wood based Acorn Antiques (the very, very funny piss-take of a soap opera) on Crossroads, which was famous for its microphones in shot, scenery moving and enormously long pauses between the interaction of some characters. My dad’s friend from school, Ronald Allen, was in it playing David Hunter, and there were many memorable characters who just stayed in my head.

  In my first year as a solo stand-up without the safety net of my psychiatric nursing job, I managed to make five appearances on TV and two of these were pilot shows. A pilot is a possible series which is given money to make just one show, see how it goes down with telly execs and the audience, and then it may be taken up and an entire series made. As you can imagine, hundreds of pilot shows fall at the first hurdle because the great idea in your head doesn’t somehow translate into a workable piece of telly.

  The two pilots I did both disappeared without trace. The first one was a sort of bohemian sketch show, the line-up being Hattie Hayridge (stand-up), Patrick Marber (stand-up, now writer), Vicki Lickorish (kids’ telly), Paul Medford (actor), Josie Lawrence (actor, comedian) and James Macabre (stand-up). The show was a series of sketches, some music, and we went in every day for two weeks to a rehearsal room in Brixton, to work on it. We were a fairly diverse group and for some reason the show didn’t work. Either it was because we were all so different, the chemistry wasn’t there — or possibly just because the show was shit. Who knows?

  It did not get commissioned, but in some ways this was probably a good thing as it set me down the road of reality. Decisions on what’s going on the box and what isn’t tend to ultimately be the decision of one person —and therefore come down to personal preference. To put it bluntly, if someone doesn’t like you, you’re out.

  Then there is the problem of TV execs changing jobs every five minutes. You just manage to get something commissioned and then that person leaves and another one who can’t stand you comes into the post. Or perhaps they simply want to stamp their own mark on the channel — in which case they clear out all the pending stuff and you are flushed down the toilet with all the other hopefuls.

  The other show, for which I had much higher hopes but which also never went further than the ‘possible’ stage, was a comedy about a DSS snooper looking for people illegally claiming benefits. It revolved round a comedy club and starred Tom Watt (him off EastEnders who used to play Lofty and is now a sport radio pundit) and also Jerry Sadowitz, whom Tom was pursuing. The fil
ming took place in Birmingham and was my first taste of what a pain it can be to film things like dramas. The problems are: it takes so long to set up cameras, get the sound right, have everyone in the right place, and make the audience behave normally i.e. not mouthing Hello, Mum! at the camera when it sweeps past. In fact, it all takes so long that eventually one starts to slip into a coma of boredom. I found the whole thing frustrating and irritating, which must be why I’ve never gravitated towards a career in drama and films. Oh all right then, I haven’t ‘cause I’ve always been pretty rubbish at acting.

  Much of my early telly was just due to me saying, ‘Oh God, yes please!’ because I wanted to be on telly, thought if I turned it down they wouldn’t ask again, and the money was pretty attractive too. That meant that I did make some pretty massive errors of judgement, not least a show called Only Fools and Turkeys in which I was a commentating Christmas fairy sitting in a café in West London. First of all I was dressed up as a fairy (looked bloody ridiculous, of course — and that was the point, I assume), then I was placed on a stool in a café by the counter to deliver a series of monologues to camera.

  Well, I thought at least they might shut the café to make filming a bit easier, but oh no, they didn’t bother.

  So there I am sat on a stool, dressed as a fairy, looking like a twat, and just to add that extra frisson of joy, building workers are tramping in and out to get their bacon butties and making their feelings about the way I look perfectly clear. Christ, the humiliation. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, I had assumed that the piece would be buried in the schedules around about teatime as it was a children’s show and no comics would ever see it as they don’t tend to get up till the news.