by Jo Brand
Rescue came in the shape of our mate Jeff Green who came for a visit and lifted the highly charged atmosphere. Everyone calmed down and the work started again, although we did stop in the evening to have drinks and play Scrabble. There had, I felt, been a slightly weird atmosphere in the cottage where we were staying, and one night as Jeff and I picked out letters for Scrabble, I got consecutively E V I L. Well, it was shaping up to be the opening of a horror film. I then picked three anonymous vowels. Jeff picked his letters. The first three were E V I … My heart skipped a beat and I held my breath … An M appeared. We all had a good laugh and told ourselves retrospectively that we knew we were being ridiculous.
The series got written, as did the next one, in a completely random and chaotic way. I suspect the general public may have visions of comedians sitting in some luxurious office surrounded by lackeys supplying coffees and any other requirements, but in my case it was late-night sessions with a notebook, a bottle of brandy, smoking my head off and watching some crappy late-night programme about students trying to cook.
Getting On is a series about nurses looking after the elderly in the NHS. I have already written a little about it in the chapter called A Day in My Life. I had always wanted to do a comedy that could also make people sad as well as laugh, and as there are so few programmes with old people and middle-aged women in them, I really wanted to go down that road.
My friend Vicki Pepperdine lives just down the road from me and had done some great comedy stuff like The Hudson and Pepperdine Show on Radio 4. In fact, I met her because she used to live next door to my best friend Betty and we’d chatted over the wall a few times. We punted some ideas to the BBC, none of which were received with anything other than indifference, so one day we sat around brainstorming ideas for shows which would contain a few old bags (ourselves) and we also got Jo Scanlan in too. She was a friend of Vicki’s and they worked together on a fantastic comedy called Coming Soon on Channel Four, which was about a theatre group touring Scotland. It also starred David Walliams and Ben Miller, and was so funny I couldn’t believe it when it finished prematurely and didn’t appear again. Jo is also in The Thick of It, the incomparable political comedy from Armando Iannucci.
We felt that although the NHS had been done to death in comedy form, there was still room for a realistic, downbeat comedy which tried to remain faithful to the way the Health Service is these days, so we got together a proposal for the series and contacted a production company called Vera, with whom I’d made Through the Cakehole 800 years ago. We had one of those lunchtime meetings that people in telly have and which in some ways is just an excuse to have lunch and one wonders if anything is really going to come out of it. However, the MD Geoff Atkinson, who is a lovely person, was very keen and so we thought we’d move it on to the next stage.
A meeting was arranged with Janice Hadlow, who at the time was the Controller of BBC4. (Have I said I love that word ‘controller’ — it’s so 1984, isn’t it, and makes me think of Thomas the Tank Engine’s Fat Controller. Before I read the books to my daughters, I always had the emphasis wrong and thought he controlled fat, rather than being a Controller who happened to be fat.)
As luck would have it, BBC4 were doing a season on the elderly and Janice thought that Getting On would fit very well into that season. After some discussion, they finally let us know that they were happy to commission three episodes and see how it went. I was ecstatic. This was something I really wanted to do, so we set about getting a loose script together, around which we could improvise and see how it went.
I have to apologise to Jo and Vicki at this point, but I had so much other work on, I left them to do a fair bit of the donkey work sketching the ideas into script form. Many of the areas we covered were things that had happened to me as a nurse or in hospitals, and so we decided to kick off the series with having an unidentified poo on a chair and the rigmarole that now surrounds sorting it out bureaucratically.
We were so pleased that Peter Capaldi had agreed to direct it because we thought he would give it that realistic feel that we were after. If I’d been after glamour, I wasn’t going to find it on Getting On. I played Kim Wilde, a put-upon, knackered, slap-dash middle-aged nurse returning to nursing after having had children. Incidentally I realised this is the name of a well-known pop singer. I mentioned it to her when we worked on a Christmas show. She said she’d be happy to appear as a patient! Vicki played Dr Moore, a snooty, hypocritical and ambitious doctor, stuck in a backwater hospital and desperate to progress in her career. Jo was Sister Den Flixter, capricious, lazy and longing for love. And of course we had the gorgeous Ricky Grover playing Hilary Loftus the nurse manager — pompous, spouting psychobabble and unsure of his sexuality.
Having got loose scripts together, we finally moved towards filming. We had hired a hospital ward in the Bolingbrooke in Wandsworth and all met at seven on a Monday morning, cold and shattered, ready for filming.
The cliché that filming is glamorous is completely wrong. Mostly you have to start so early that you’ve had no sleep the night before and you look and feel shit. As we were actually in a hospital there was none of the Winnebago bollocks for us; we were in a small office with some nice hospital armchairs. In fact, the only thing that was perfect was the food. Breakfasts totalling roughly 115,000 calories were provided so that by the end of a three-week shoot it was perfectly feasible that you would have put on 27 stone. Added to this, at lunchtimes there were real proper puddings like treacle tart and jam roly-poly, and it’s always bloody difficult to run away from them. Add on top sweets-a-go-go available all over the set, and bugger the Winnebago, we had everything we needed.
We got our uniforms on and I looked in the mirror with the bare minimum of make-up on and thought, God, that’s horrendous. However, I was supposed to be a middle-aged, exhausted nurse in the NHS so I could hardly justify having a make-up person attempt to help me look my best. (Although this doesn’t seem to stop them in Holby City.)
On the set we also had lots of what I used to call extras, but are now called supporting artistes — which sounds a bit posher. They were the most delightful group of women in their sixties and seventies, of whom I became incredibly fond over the three weeks we filmed. Their job would normally be to wander past in the background on EastEnders or Harry Potter, but we asked a little bit more of them — and that was to improvise with us in scenes. They didn’t actually have to learn lines but just throw out the odd sentence which matched their character and illness — and they were brilliant at it. It looked very natural and non-forced, and the lucky buggers got to lie in bed all day.
We would film the same scene three or four times based round the script and plot, and as we refilmed we would add ideas as they came to us and so build on what we had already filmed. This meant that when it came to the editing process there was bloody loads of stuff for Peter and the others to wade through. I was just glad it wasn’t down to me to decide.
I got so used to the ward and became very happy with parking my arse at the nurses’ station and ‘looking at the computer’. What was actually happening was that I had found a game of Solitaire on the computer and became slightly obsessed with it, to the detriment of my concentration.
We did have a huge laugh. Ricky particularly has a talent for making you helpless with laughter during a scene, and being the most unprofessional of the three of us, I’m sure there were a few scenes where I look like I’m going to explode, given that I’m trying so hard not to laugh.
The three weeks passed very quickly and then the three episodes were edited. We used a lovely song by the Sheffield singer Richard Hawley as the theme tune. It is called ‘Roll River Roll’, and it created the perfect atmosphere for the show.
When Getting On was broadcast we all held our breath. I never have any confidence in my own performance and wondered whether critics would say Jo and Vicki were great but I was complete shite.
To our delight, the critics were universally positive and well over the
top in some cases. The viewing figures were fantastic and I remember getting a text from Ricky Grover (expletives deleted) remarking on how weird it felt to be in something successful.
I felt this strongly too. Over the years, I have clung on by my fingertips, presuming that at some point I would go right off the radar, return to touring and then disappear from view. So to be involved in a series like this which has sent my career in another direction is very gratifying.
Jo and I were nominated for a BAFTA for our performances in Getting On, and were miffed that Vicki didn’t get a nod too. As it panned out, the BAFTA was won by Rebecca Front from The Thick of It. I was just pleased to even be nominated in the area of acting. It still makes me laugh when I think of it. What a hoot!
Trinny and Susannah’s show What Not To Wear was a popular programme on the BBC in which they grabbed members of the public, had a right go at them about the way they were dressed, pummelled them emotionally and physically, humiliated them by making them take off most of their clothes and then stand in front of a 365-degree mirror, and then set about turning them into a new person.
There were a couple of specials made and I was invited to do a show called Trinny and Susannah on the Red Carpet. The purpose of this was to do what they did, except with celebrities, and the finite point of the show was then to push us up the red carpet in front of the paparazzi to present an award at the BAFTAs, done up in our finery.
I and Sophie Raworth, a BBC news presenter, were called upon to do the honours.
Our initial contact involved a meeting at some rich bloke’s penthouse in Battersea that he let out for filming purposes. I was sat down between Trinny and Susannah on a luxurious sofa, at which point they turned on the telly and showed me a DVD of my fashion faux pas. To be honest, I wasn’t that bothered by what they said. I thought I looked OK in all my so-called hideous incarnations, which is obviously my problem! OK, my hair looked bloody ridiculous in the eighties, but whose didn’t? They also commented that I looked and dressed like a man. So what? Couldn’t give a toss, quite honestly. Yes, I wore black baggy clothes, but that was down to laziness and shunning white for fear of looking like a marquee. I am and always have been a closet Goth, and also black has the advantage of shaving off a couple of pounds —and I’m not going to pass up that opportunity.
They stuck me in front of the infamous mirror, luckily not just in my bra and pants but with some tight black things on. But I wasn’t even bothered about that really. It wasn’t a surprise for me nor, I would imagine, for the viewers either.
We then set about finding something for me to wear and so I was taken shopping to fat lady departments in posh stores round London. Trinny had a good old go (when I came out of a changing room), at pulling my knickers down, I can’t really remember why now, but a small battle developed, which I easily won because even though she’s tough as old boots, it appears I’m tougher.
I was also dragged to the office of a designer — a woman called Anna Scholz. She has tried to make clothes for big women which are a little more imaginative and glamorous. That’s fine for the big women who want to be glamorous, but I don’t. However, I went along with it because I was interested in which role model they would cast me as. Would it be Widdecombe? I feared the worst.
On the whole I quite enjoyed myself, had a pop at them when I could, and steeled myself for what I assumed would be some sort of unexpected, further attempt at humiliation. It eventually arrived one morning in the Battersea penthouse when the production team informed me they just wanted to ‘do something’ and sat me in a sort of dentist’s chair under a very bright light, with a camera running, but refused to say why.
At this point, Susannah, who seemed to have been cast as the good copper (i.e. to persuade the criminal — me — to do or say something I didn’t want to), appeared with a pair of tweezers and announced to the camera that she was going to deal with the hair-growth on my chin. The moment had come, then. I felt this was a deliberate attempt to humiliate me over something which isn’t a big deal (I hardly had a Brian Blessed beard at the time), but which women are made to feel embarrassed about — excess hair-growth. I was particularly pissed off, because they hadn’t checked it out with me first —presumably because they thought, quite correctly, that I wouldn’t agree to it.
I began to get angry, at which point Susannah panicked a bit and said, ‘It’s a problem we’ve all got, you know, Jo,’ and attempted to turn the tweezers on herself. I bundled her out of the way and launched into a speech right down the barrel of the camera, about how the subtext of their show was about making women feel bad — and embarrassing and humiliating them. I stated that I didn’t care, because I could stand up for myself and I knew all about attempts of producers to make ‘good telly’ and I wasn’t having it — but, I went on to say, most women on that show weren’t as experienced as I was and under the glare of the camera, nervous and malleable, they agreed to things that I thought were exploitative and unkind.
I continued with my rhetoric, at which point they wheeled out the producer, who asked the most brilliant question a producer has ever asked me. She said, ‘Would you like to have a lie-down?’
My answer was something along the lines of, ‘Are you having a laugh? No, I don’t want a lie-down. I am not tired, elderly, disabled or ill. And of course you’re implying that I am somehow being histrionic, because I’m what you sneeringly call “The Talent”. I DO NOT WANT A LIE-DOWN!’
I peppered all this with a few more expletives and there was a bit of a stand-off. It took a while for the atmosphere to cool back down to normal and then we carried on. However, this is a very good example of how some television-makers handle people really badly.
We then continued as if nothing had happened, although they seemed a bit wary from that point on. Fine by me. As for the director who’d said earlier on, ‘We need a bit more conflict,’ he certainly got what he wanted.
Eventually, T and S got an outfit together for me which included their requirements of a bit of cleavage (yuk) and emphasising a waist, which in all honesty I didn’t really possess, particularly as I’d had a baby relatively recently. On the night of the BAFTAs, I was put into the outfit, a brown Anna Scholz two-piece consisting of a long skirt, top and velvet coat with leopard-skin lining, which was perfectly all right but not really me. I was made up to within an inch of my life and then driven to the bottom of the red carpet to face the phalanx of paps waiting for blood.
God, it was hideous, the worst bit of the whole show, and I was so relieved when I got inside. I then had to present an award, can’t even remember what for now, with the athlete Denise Lewis. (Yes, a comedy Laurel and Hardy thing going on there, I’m sure.)
I was so happy to get home that night, peel off my grown-up lady outfit and put on the familiar, black baggy, food-stained clothes in which I felt like myself. That outfit was given to me as a present at the end of filming and I haven’t worn it since.
I have seen Trinny and Susannah a few times over the years and they are actually all right, although you may not be surprised to learn that we’re not new best friends. They, like everyone else, just got sucked into the maelstrom of the ever voracious God of Good Telly.
Countdown has been one of my favourite things to do ever over the years. Firstly, because I was so familiar with it and watched it from the kick-off. It started in November 11982 on Channel Four. I had just left university and begun work as a nurse in the Emergency Clinic in South London, and whenever I was on early shift I would arrive home knackered and put it on. I was always tired after early shifts which started at seven, because however hard I tried I could not go to bed at a sensible time so I would rise at 6.115 having had about five hours and sometimes even less than that.
At that time I was living in a tiny little bedsit-type flat on Denmark Hill. There wasn’t even enough room for a bed so I had a bed-settee thing which I would laboriously have to turn from one to another twice a day. Sometimes in the mornings I didn’t even bother. I would get
home from work and just go back to bed like an exhausted slug, barely managing to raise myself, apart from toilet and tea. It was ground floor and I suppose I should have felt slightly security-conscious, but I never did.
More fool me, because once when I was in hospital I got burgled and, paranoid that I am, I always imagined that somehow the burglars had a hotline to the hospital computer and burgled homes of patients because they knew they weren’t at home.
The reason why I was in hospital was an allergic reaction to some hair colour. I used to dye my hair different shades when I got bored with it, and this time round it was a reddish dye rather ironically named ‘Nice ‘n Easy’. The reaction was my fault because I didn’t do what is called a ‘patch test’. This involves putting a tiny bit of the dye on your skin and then waiting a while to see if there is some reaction. Well, I have no patience whatsoever so I couldn’t be bothered. Patch tests are for wimps! I had used hair colour before and assumed it would be OK. What I didn’t know was that an allergic reaction can come out of nowhere even if you haven’t had one before. So I put the dye on, left it for forty minutes as instructed and then went to bed. Almost immediately my head started to hurt and after an hour it was (pardon me for this description) leaking copious amounts of pus and really hurt. I rinsed my head under the cold tap, took some painkillers and went to sleep.
When I woke up in the morning, my face felt a bit weird and on looking in the mirror, I didn’t recognise the Far Eastern woman of about seventy who was looking back at me. My eyes were so puffy I could barely see through them, and so I wondered whether I should take myself off to A&E. But being also slightly allergic to hospitals, I just put on a pair of sunglasses and headed out to meet some friends.
When I arrived, their reaction was enough to tell me that things were bad and they persuaded me to go to hospital. There I was given some drugs to sort it and left quite happily. The next day I still looked like Madam Bloaty Face and I felt worse. So back I went to the hospital with two friends, Jim and Andy. The nurses looked at them as though they’d given me a beating, and I was immediately admitted and put on intravenous steroids. By this time I couldn’t see a bloody thing and soon found myself in a ward of elderly ladies. The poor old woman opposite me just kept shouting, ‘Please, someone kill me!’ Apparently, she couldn’t see either and was in the last stages of cancer. It was very depressing and sad, and added another positive in my head towards the case of euthanasia.