by Jo Brand
Michael Foot had been my hero for a very long time and we had corresponded on a number of occasions. Our birthdays are on the same day and we exchanged cards for a bit and little presents. He was an intellectual giant with whom I could not possibly keep up. His career came to an abrupt halt when he was spotted at the Cenotaph one Remembrance Sunday wearing a donkey jacket, God forbid, and the press slaughtered him for not being smart enough in front of Her Maj. Oh, for God’s sake, even if he had been wearing a donkey jacket, so what? It is the coat of the good honest working classes. Anyway, it wasn’t a donkey jacket, it just looked like one and was remarked upon in a positive way by the Queen Mum. So there. (Obviously the fact that the Queen Mum’s taste in clothes made her look like a drag queen will go unremarked here.)
By the time I interviewed Michael Foot he was in his late eighties and it wasn’t easy. His hearing wasn’t great and he became fixated on one particular area of Labour policy. He was impossible to interrupt because he couldn’t hear me, so the whole thing was a bit of a nightmare. But I didn’t care. He was Michael Foot and he was wonderful. Everyone said he was too gentle and nice to be in politics. Well, what an indictment of politics.
Radio Cover
For a few years, I covered on Radio 2 with Mark Lamarr for Jonathan Ross’s holidays on Saturday mornings. This meant Christmas, Easter and five to six weeks in the summer. It was really great fun. Mark, as I’ve said, is a good friend so it was a real pleasure to work with him. Bands would play live in his studio and we had a stream of interesting, talented and occasionally slightly bonkers guests.
Mark has an encyclopaedic knowledge of music and would sort out the playlist, which he would bring in from his own collection, and every week I would bring along some CDs and try to sneak them in, which was not easy, particularly if they were performers he didn’t like. Morrissey wasn’t his favourite and he would make his disapproval clear by disappearing to the lay whenever I tried to force Morrissey on. Ditto Take That and Kate Bush and many others.
One of my favourite guests was Martha Reeves (her of Martha and the Vandellas) who really is a pop legend. She seemed constantly bemused by me and Mark, but joined in with enthusiasm. I am not sure how old she is, but at her age I would have been in bed with a hot-water bottle and a bowl of Complan, not slogging it round the world on planes.
It’s such a weird situation when you get to meet some of your heroes and heroines. Nick Lowe was pure joy in every way, as was Jimmy Perry who wrote Dad’s Army. I was sad when the job came to an end, but as I said earlier, when the top dogs change jobs, brooms start to sweep clean, and it’s entirely possible you might be swept out on your arse.
Writing this book has been bloody hard work. Not in the sense of working in the fields or down a mine, but just the sheer volume of words required to make up a whole book is terrifying when you stare at a blank computer screen and try to think of a witty first sentence.
I have a degree in work avoidance and will do almost anything to sidestep getting down to work. My strategies include tidying up. The only time I ever tidy up is when I’m shying away from getting down to work, and as I do this with remarkable frequency. my house is extremely tidy. Another favourite ‘displacement activity’ is Finding a Pointless Task That Doesn’t Really Need Doing. This could be something like getting out a map to look up the route to a gig I’m doing in two months’ time, even though I have a satnav, or phoning up one of my friends who I know will be on the phone for ages. Or any of the following:
Trying to find my passport for a holiday next year
Cleaning my laptop
Reorganising my drawers — the wooden things with clothes in, not my pants
Checking my emails
Checking whether the post has come Going to the shops to buy something I don’t need, like stain-remover
Playing Bubble Boom Challenge
Handwashing a pile of ‘Handwash Only’ clothes that have been in a pile under my bed for three years
Crushing up cans for recycling so they are marginally smaller
Sorting out piles of stuff in my office into other piles Doing the crossword in the paper
… and so on ad infinitum.
This is a difficult question to answer, since on the whole, most famous people I meet tend to be pretty polite —possibly because they may consider me to be a celebrity too. So you have to examine how they treat those they may consider to be ‘lesser mortals’, like runners (the lowest stratum in TV the poor sods who have to make the tea or go to the shop and try to find a chocolate éclair with fish oil in it), and it’s not very often you get to see these interactions.
In my experience, the well-known stars in our culture who are accorded the title ‘National Treasure’ do tend to be National Nightmares, with a few notable exceptions like Julie Walters. Conversely, lots of people the tabloids try to encourage us to hate are perfectly sweet and decent people.
I once took my nephews, who were thirteen and fifteen at the time and moved their lips roughly once a month, to see TIFF Friday and watch the proceedings. I loved that show, because it was at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, which is one of my favourite places. It backs onto the river, according it fantastic views of the sort of goings-on that go on near water — like boats, joggers along the towpath, swimmers occasionally, and birds.
The show was a hotchpotch of music, interviews and general silliness presented by Chris Evans, and my favourite character on it was The Lord of Love, played by the veteran actor Ronald Fraser, star of many sixties’ films who had one of those instantly recognisable faces, but not a name that went with it. As The Lord of Love he would sit in a comfy chair and recite love poems to women in the audience. When I met him he said to me, ‘If I was twenty years younger, I’d chase you all round Europe.’ As a woman who tends not to garner compliments from men, I was hugely entertained by this and retain a fondness for his daftness to this day.
After the show I introduced Chris Evans to my nephews and expected him to give them a cursory hello and then bugger off to more interesting people. However, to his credit, he sat and talked to them for a good half an hour and even though they were too dumbstruck to reply a lot of the time, he kept at it and I know it really meant a lot to them, and certainly did to me.
Apologies if I have not peppered this section with scandal-laden slag-offs of celebs. If that’s what you’re after, buy the Daily Mail.
Hello, and congratulations. Welcome to the end of this book. Please feel free to prop a door open with it (which you may already have done) or draw a moustache on the picture of me on the front. God knows, women of my age struggle with that, as Trinny and Susannah have made perfectly clear to me in the past. The only thing I hope is that you’ve got something out of it — a few laughs, an idea for a new book to read, an insight into the comedy scene in the eighties and nineties, or perhaps some new ways to avoid getting down to something you don’t want to get down to.
And rest assured, this comes up to the present day in my life, so I won’t be picking up my trusty electronic pen for a good few years to come, God willing. Now go and have a multi-ingredient sandwich.
The (real) End