Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down

by Jo Brand

  However, almost as soon as it had been transmitted, I got a call of the piss-taking variety from my friend Mark Lamarr, and realised I hadn’t got away with it. I allowed him his victorious phone call and then thankfully it was never mentioned again.

  I did quite a bit of TV with Mark, as I suppose at the time we were part of a group considered the hot young things. It has to be said he was much hotter than me as he was so young, barely twenty, whereas I was a bit lukewarm, being the grand old age of thirty.

  At the time there was much socialising and staying up late, taking part in titanic drinking and card sessions. For a long time our card game of choice was called Black Maria, a very nasty affair which involved dumping the person next to you right in it. Of course, fuelled by drink, this was cause for much falling-out and rowing, but it all added to the fun of it.

  I remember once when we had stayed up all night and Mark and I were due in Manchester early afternoon to do a TV show that night, which was a showcase for stand-ups. We realised we weren’t going to be able to get any kip at all so, fuelled with a packet of ProPlus, the students’ friend, we drove up to Manchester with the increasing ingestion of the aforementioned stimulant making us ever more wired and ever more grumpy. This may be the reason that I can’t actually remember anything about the show at all, apart from the fact that Steve Coogan, John Hegley and Hattie Hayridge were in it. Not exactly the height of showbiz dissipation is it, ProPlus? At the time it was our only option apart from fifteen espressos.

  These first TV appearances were a real learning curve. First of all, they were not like doing stand-up in a club. The audiences were more distracted because there was so much going on in the studio: cameras and cameramen! women moving about, the floor manager exhorting people to laugh/clap/cheer louder, and make-up people coming on constantly to add a layer of powder to the more sweaty ones amongst us. This made it difficult for the acts and the audience to really ‘gel’ and so a lot of the time one tended to feel one only had 70 per cent of their attention.

  I found this difficult to get used to at the beginning, because it is easy to forget that actually your performance is for the viewers, so how you are doing with the audience is in many ways irrelevant. It’s important to look straight down the barrel of the camera and give it everything you’ve got, regardless of the fact that the studio audience may be looking at you like they want you hung, drawn and quartered.

  On these early occasions I came up against wardrobe people who wanted to change me from a lifelong scruffbag into a middle-aged Tory matron. It was hard for me to be dressed up like a Christmas tree and decked out with sparkly accessories because I felt utterly ridiculous.

  As a woman who spends roughly 0.003 of a second on my hair and make-up in the morning, the idea of sitting in front of a mirror for up to half an hour while someone slapped God knows what on my face and hair was anathema to me. I just wanted to wear my scruffy black clothes and a slash of red lippie and go into battle with that, but instead I was battered, pummelled, waxed, had my hair pulled about, curled, straightened, moussed and sprayed — and by the time I tottered on stage I felt like a chubby tower of chemicals.

  I eventually got used to this and have tried over the years to claw back a little bit of my own taste from the unrecognisable person who used to emerge from the make-up and wardrobe rooms. To be honest, if I ever catch a glimpse of my old TV appearances, I simply don’t know myself.

  One thing which was a help to me in my early telly career was being recalled to do more of Friday Night Live. (If I may blow my own trumpet very briefly here for one second, I was the only one.) This was a huge boost to my confidence and, I think, probably resulted in extra work starting to come in on TV and radio.

  Other comedy and cabaret series I did at the time were Up the Junction, filmed at the Junction Folk Club in Cambridge and compered by Will Durst, a good solid political American comic who I liked, apart from the fact that at the end of the show he would say, ‘You’ve been great, I’ve been Durst!’ which made me very embarrassed for him because English audiences much preferred their comedy down-to-earth and non-showbizzy.

  Also, I did a show in Soho a couple of times called Paramount City which was a straightforward stand-up show compered by the delightful Arthur Smith. I have always thought of Arthur as the Sid James of alternative comedy owing to his rich London accent and craggy features.

  In the early days I also did Saturday Zoo, on which Jonathan Ross was the presenter. Originally a researcher, he had been pushed forward from the bowels of the production office and he ran Saturday Zoo as if he was a natural.

  I have always admired Jonathan Ross, given that again, like Russell Brand and Ricky Gervais, he came from an ordinary working-class background and didn’t have an Oxbridge badge to smooth his passage into TV He is very bright, has an eclectic knowledge and is charming and friendly. There is really only one thing about him that irritates me — and plenty of other people — and that is his attitude towards attractive women on his radio and television show, which can be patronising beyond belief!

  When I’m watching or listening, I see it as an unavoidable trial to get through, as he regales each female guest with honeyed words about how gorgeous they look — at which a sizeable proportion of the female population, judging from the straw poll I’ve done, feel like they want to vomit and consider reaching for the off button. I can’t think why, but he doesn’t do this to me and treats me as an equal. I know some women are flattered by this kind of quasi-pervy admiration, but I bet there are a few who smile and accept his compliments through gritted teeth and wish he’d move on from treating them like they’re a tasty morsel to be eaten with the eyes.

  Over the years, women who resent being assessed on their appearance have been categorised as unattractive, resentful old harridans who are envious of other women’s beauty. To anyone who thinks this, I would say, ‘Grow up,’ and incidentally I have the same attitude towards women who like certain footballers because they look nice or have sexy legs. I find this equally patronising and this attempt by women to equal the score by objectifying men strikes me as silly.

  This was the point in my career when I began to meet proper grown-up stars. I remember having a coffee outside the production office once and wondering what a little girl was doing there. The little girl in question was facing away from me and appeared to be wearing quite adult clothes. Then she turned round and it was Kylie Minogue. I could not believe what a tiny little perfectly formed person she was, and being introduced to her I felt like a giantess with sausagey fingers and a socially unacceptable bulk — which is exactly the line many of the tabloids took when I started to appear on telly.

  One of my less happy memories of TV was The James Whale Show. James Whale was a controversialist whose raison d’etre appeared to be to slag everyone off. His show was a mix of interviews, chat and music with regular guests. Jim Miller and I were booked to do a song, so we did a pastiche of a song called ‘Summer the First Time’, a romantic song about the first sexual encounter between a young man and an older woman. Of course we had comedied it up and filthied it up. One of the guests on the show was DJ Mike Read, who had been responsible for banning Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s slightly rude single ‘Relax’ from the airwaves, so he sat through our song with a stony expression on his face looking like he’d sucked a lemon. And at the end of the song, just to land ourselves in it even more, I announced, ‘Oh, look! There’s James Whale’s wife over there grazing.’

  I hadn’t realised that James’s wife really was at the show and probably wouldn’t have done it if I’d known. James Whale was furious, but it was not an attack on his wife — it was an attack on him. I have always felt that if you dish it out big time, you have certainly got to be able to take it.

  I found myself in a similar position when I was on Wogan, the telly show, with David Sullivan, the newspaper porny man. As is so often the case when one meets people of his nature — well, what do I mean by that? What I mean is that he seeme
d like a perfectly pleasant bloke.

  But I have a problem with the porn industry, and however much people may argue that …

  · It’s just a bit of fun.

  · The women in it earn a packet (as opposed to putting their mouths round one).

  · The women have control.

  … none of this balances the fact that …

  · The image projected of women in porn is not a ‘bit of fun’ for the readers who absorb it and use it to justify treating women with contempt.

  · Only the top porn stars earn a packet’. The rest are exploited and desperate, and if you have ever watched cheap porn, you can see that. They are either thin as sticks, look stoned or look like robots.

  · Again, only the elite few have control; the rest grin and ‘bare’ it.

  So despite Mr Sullivan’s surface charm, I felt I could not just sit back on a sofa with him and nod sagely as if I agreed with his existence. So, I felt it my duty to have a go and banged out some jokes about the size of his tackle and generally tried to take the piss out of him. All right, I accept it wasn’t the most sophisticated attack, but I was obviously not there to outline the academic feminist argument in its fullest sense, I was there to do comedy and that’s what I tried to do.

  Sister Frances

  Sister Frances is a sitcom that never was, a funny (I thought) show about nuns that sadly didn’t ever make it past the pilot.

  As I mentioned earlier, pilots demonstrate the approach TV companies take to new comedy. They are able to get an idea of how the show will be without having to actually commit themselves to a series. They make pilot shows basically because they like the idea but are a bit worried that the transition from the initial idea and script will result in the programme being crap — and fair dos, it can happen.

  I wrote Sister Frances with a comedy writer called Sue Teddern who was coming at it from a very different angle to me. Her approach was more traditional, I suppose, whereas I constantly have to rein myself in or else the result would be so dark, people probably couldn’t cope with it. This was before Nighty Night and the like.

  We negotiated with ITV who said they wanted something for the late evening, post watershed. So that was what we did — quite rude, quite dark. Having produced this, they then changed their minds and said it should be more whimsical and quirky and suitable for 7.30. So out came a fair bit of filth and some of the darker moments, which was a shame as my comedy is much more suited to late night.

  I find writing stuff and the process of refining it pretty exhausting. Once I’ve written something, I can’t see the point of constantly going back to it because I always think that makes it worse. Still, we hacked away at it, Sue saying things to me like, ‘You can’t have a dead nun in a cupboard,’ and me saying things to her like, ‘Why do Terry and June have to come in at this point?’ For all our differences, we got on well and finally came up with something we were happy with.

  We got a cast together including my lovely friend Morwenna Banks who is very funny indeed, and Honor Blackman who used to be in The Avengers and agreed to be the Mother Superior. Sister Frances was filmed in a studio with an audience and of course, although you have rehearsed it endlessly, it’s always quite a scary experience to get your first audience sitting in front of it.

  Sadly, it didn’t go brilliantly — I thought because we’d had to cut some of the more grown-up stuff. I found myself at one point, dressed as a nun, in Mother Superior’s office with some exercise equipment, thinking, Oh bollocks, this isn’t working at all.

  Sister Frances was not commissioned in the end because the channel felt it was too tame for a time slot of 110.30 p.m. Well, that was the first we’d heard of it going back to its original late slot, and I was bloody frustrated about this because I would have beefed it up big time, had I thought we could get away with a lot more.

  So, we all moved on, but I was well pissed off about it because it seems we couldn’t even communicate between ourselves what time of night the bloody thing should be on.

  Oh well, thank the Lord for Through the Cakehole.

  Through the Cakehole was a comedy series with sketches and stand-up that I did for Channel Four, and which I think I got on the strength of me staggering onto the stage at Edinburgh a couple of times. I did the show through a production company called Channel X which was part-owned by Jonathan Ross and a couple of other telly types (who were very normal and nice for telly types) called Katie Lander and Mike Bolland.

  I wrote the series with my friend Jim Miller and the enormity of it only struck us when we started doing it. Filling six half-hours of comedy is not easy. We wanted to have a long-running serial within it, so we came up with Drudge Squad, which to this day is my favourite thing I’ve done on telly.

  Drudge Squad was supposed to portray the life of a woman with a slightly useless husband as she attempted to juggle her job as a police detective and her role as a mother. My sidekick was played by my friend Maria McErlane.

  Drudge Squad centred round the minutiae of a mother’s life, like nappies hanging up to dry in the back of police cars, the main characters turning up late owing to crises at home, and various items of domestic apparatus being used to handcuff prisoners.

  We managed to get a few car chases in, which I’d really wanted to do, and did a lot of the filming on a rather scary estate in Acton, just hoping we wouldn’t be surrounded by a gang who nicked our cameras and all our worldly goods.

  I think my favourite day on Drudge Squad was the day we managed to drive a car into the sea. I have no idea why the production team agreed to fork out the money for this, as it must have cost a bloody fortune. In the car were myself, Maria and Simon Clayton who played my husband Dave. We were in a battered Ford which had a chain attached to the back of it to drag us out in case it all went horribly wrong and we all started drowning. Maria and I were extremely excited and looking forward to it, whereas poor old Simon obviously thought it was all going to go pear-shaped and looked slightly sweaty and terrified.

  We drove down a sort of concrete ramp and in we went to a pretty millpond-ish sea. We got in pretty deep and the car began to sink as we desperately tried to deliver our lines in a reasonably professional way. Before we could actually drown we managed to get out of the car and wade back chest-deep in waves, still delivering lines. The car was dragged out by the chain and back onto the slipway. There had been some camera or sound problem so the director asked for another take. Mmm — wet car, no chance. Amazingly, the car started first time when I turned the key in the ignition and in we went again, Simon not best pleased at having to reprise his performance.

  The rest of the show was a collection of higgledy-piggledy sketches. Among my favourites were:

  The Bernard Manning Sketch

  In this sketch we populated an entire country village with black people and I, as the only white person, drove through it as a series of black faces looked with shock at me. Being a typical English village it looked completely surreal. The punch line to the sketch occurred when I walked into the local pub, again populated only by black people, and marched up to the bar taking down the hood on my coat as I did so. The barman looked at me and said, ‘Oh thank God, we thought you were Bernard Manning.’ Tense atmosphere then changes into a party one.

  Fat People Sketch

  Four of us, me, Ricky Grover, JoJo Smith and ‘The Man with the Beard’, stand-up Kevin McCarthy, were stuffed into the tiniest Fiat imaginable and just drove round looking for eating opportunities. We took over an ice-cream van and were just allowed to do what we wanted. I’m not sure the sketch came out particularly funny, but the four of us had such a good laugh doing it, and I would like to thank Channel X for their indulgence in allowing us to get away with it.

  The Gold Blend Coffee Couple Piss-Take

  This was a sketch I did with actor Kevin McNally who went on to greater things like The Pirates of the Caribbean. This was the slobs’ version of the romance between the golden pair via instant coffee.


  I knocked on a door looking shit wanting to borrow some coffee and it was answered by Kevin, unshaven, in his pants and looking god-awful. At this point an exchange followed between us which mined the depths of filth and double entendre around the topic of tea bags and coffee.

  This was perhaps the most difficult sketch I’ve done in terms of trying to keep a straight face. Kevin looked so brilliantly awful and pervy that every time I opened the door, I just could not hold back my laughter. After several takes I realised I was really irritating everyone, but unfortunately that only made me worse. Suffice to say it went on for ever and I did eventually get bored with laughing.

  Other sketches included actors Helena Bonham Carter, Craig Ferguson, Gary Webster off Minder and Martin Kemp, former heart-throb from Spandau Ballet. I was very impressed that any of these guys were happy to do a daft sketch show with an unknown comedian in it, and I found them all charming, unstarry and easy to work with. I know you’d like me to say they were a pain in the arse and demanding. But they weren’t.

  We did two series of Through the Cakehole and I found it very hard. The main problem being that by the time a channel has decided that they actually want a series, the time available to write it has shrunk to virtually nothing — maybe a few weeks. At one point Jim and I rented a house in Suffolk for a week to force ourselves away from the local joys of pub quizzes, friends and general entertainment. But there is something about being holed up together when you have to write comedy under duress that makes any potential comedy ideas just leak out of your head. It was a fractious time and after a few days we were both on the point of what your tabloid newspaper would call ‘a breakdown’. We had cabin fever, couldn’t think of anything funny, rowed and felt a bit helpless.