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An interview with Jo Brand, By Teddy Jamieson
She’s the left-wing feminist comic who thinks Jimmy Carr is a nice bloke … would the real Jo Brand come forward.
4 Oct 2010
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These days, Jo Brand has a notion that she’s seen as more approachable than she once was. “I’m aware of this general feeling, just from bits and pieces that people tell me they’ve read in the press, that I’m a bit nicer than I used to be. I’m a bit more manageable and I’ve calmed down a bit and all that sort of thing.” Personally, she’s not sure that this is the case. “I don’t feel like I have inside.” She’s 53, still a feminist and proud of the fact, still something of a class warrior, still definitely a Labour supporter (when we meet she hasn’t yet voted in the leadership election because she hasn’t decided which Miliband to back. “I would love a black woman to be the next Labour leader, but I don’t want it to be Diane Abbott. Sorry Diane”), and still someone who sees the target of her comedy as power and, in particular, male institutional power.
But the cartoonish image of Brand back at the start of her comedy career – the bovver-booted man-hater – has been redrawn with a softer pencil. That’s partly to do with the fact that we get to see her doing different things these days – televised book clubs and acting as a nurse in her sitcom Getting On (back later this month). And partly, perhaps, that these days we know she’s married with children. All those man-hating lesbian quips she was subject to from some of the more Neanderthal members of the male species don’t really add up nowadays. She looks a bit softer, too. She doesn’t dress in black any more for a start. Today she has turned up at a white-walled hotel near Dulwich Picture Gallery in London dressed in purple and with her hair tied up in a ribbon.
We sit outside to allow her to smoke, and ostensibly to talk about her new book, Can’t Stand Up For Sitting Down, the second volume of her life story, but I don’t really want to because I don’t think it’s very good. But she’s such an entertaining, likeable interviewee I don’t want to tell her that. It certainly doesn’t sound like it was fun to write. “It was worse than homework,” she says. “It was like every single essay you ever had to write at university all together in one go.” Why did she write it then? “Because I’m rubbish at saying no.”
It’s an throwaway answer and yet it’s interesting. This, after all, is a woman who can stand up to baying audiences, who once told posh girls/fashion-bullies Trinny and Susannah where to go, and who tells me that when she first got up on stage she saw comedy as an act of revenge (“Yes, definitely”). And yet she’s also someone who says she can’t stand confrontation and is a natural “smoother-over”. The fact is, she says, “getting on stage is a very small part of my life. In the rest of my life I do tend to be like ACAS. But there’s something about confronting an audience of people which is very different.”
Of course she wasn’t born with her emotional armour. It was something that had to develop, to harden over the years. That’s what the desire for revenge arose out of – all those years in which she was abused by passing men in the street, for her weight, for her looks, for being a woman. Times when she didn’t feel able to speak up for herself. Times when she felt vulnerable.
There’s a story she tells in her first memoir, Look Back In Hunger, and now repeats to me. “I remember once being on the tube when I was a student, in a carriage with a bloke on his own. I was reading a book and he started wanking. And the thing is, what most women do is they freeze. They don’t know what to do because it’s not something that you think, ‘I must prepare myself for that happening when I go out and then I’ll know what to do’. What women should do is get up and embarrass them, go ‘what do you think you are doing?’ But you don’t. You freeze.”
When she finally got on stage at the age of 29 she called herself the Sea Monster, dressed as a lesbian cliche and sought confrontation. “A bit of me really loved that. A bit of me wanted to say to the men in the audience, ‘look, I can do this just as well as anyone else can and I’m a woman and you’ve got to stop underestimating women because we’ve got a big strength about us’. And it just seemed to me a good arena in which to do it really.”
She must have known, though, that she was going to get a certain response from the beered-up male section of the audience. “But I quite like that. I suppose I was setting myself up to do battle. I think as a woman over the years there was a bit of me that just wanted to answer back all those random blokes in the street who’d had a go at me and use the men in the audience as a symbol for those blokes.
“It was very difficult to do this and not tar all men with the same brush – because I certainly wouldn’t want to do that – but in some ways making it any more complex than that was a bit pointless. So I did go for them as a group, which I know is unfair, but I kind of thought to myself, ‘you blokes you’ve had the advantage of hundreds of thousands of years. Why don’t we have a bit of a go now’.”
Part of that desire to attack male domination, she thinks, might come from the fact that she was always in competition with her brothers. “I saw them as rivals in almost everything I did,” she has written. Brand grew up in Kent. Her mother was a proto-feminist and her dad was very traditional, “kind of quite rigid ... well, very rigid, I would say. And he had a particular idea of how he wanted me to be and I wasn’t like that and he didn’t like that at all.”
She says she might have been a “very nicely behaved hard-working academic kid” but her parents moved her from a school she loved to another she decided she would hate. It seems to have ignited an oily pool of teenage rebellion. “It was that, plus, plus, plus,” she says now. And so she decided to become the very opposite of what her parents wanted. She dabbled in drugs and chased inappropriate men. “I had offers from men to go out with them and I think I deliberately sloughed off the nice ones and went for the hideous ones.” She laughs at the memory now.
Her first real boyfriend was a druggie. Her father punched him, threw out all her belongings and burnt them. The boyfriend snogged other women. It was something of an amour fou. Eventually she walked away from him.
But not from her parents. “We never pulled the shutters right down. It was more difficult with my dad because things had gone much further with my dad, whereas I felt my mum was always thinking ‘oh God, how has it gone this far?’ But even so, I get on really well with my dad now. Now that they’ve got rid of me and don’t have to feel responsible.”
Has she cast her mind forward to the day when she will be the parent of teenage daughters? “Oh God, everyone does and I just feel I’ve got to be prepared for anything.”
It would be another decade before Brand finally ventured onto a stage in anger. She spent most of her 20s as a nurse. She made lots of friends, and loved the work. “I didn’t love all the people I met because some of them were absolutely vile, let’s not beat about the bush. I had some hideous run-ins with people with alcohol problems. But I would say that, on the whole, 90 to 95% of the people that I met, who were what we now rather weirdly call service users – which I don’t like because I think it’s a terribly cold phrase – were just people struggling like most people do to deal with what ever their particular problem was.”
Some of her experience has filtered into Getting On, the NHS sitcom she’s co-written and appears in. “I just wanted to get across the message that despite Holby City and Casualty it’s not like that. It’s not glamorous. People don’t wear make-up to work. Not all the nurses are attractive and having affairs with consultants. It’s a grind and it’s depressing and people’s lives are sad. But a lot of the time it’s funny and you meet lovely people and you get fond of them. But dying is something that happens all the time. It’s something that nurses aren’t blase about, but it’s almost a daily part of their lives and they deal with it in a sort of rudimentary and fairly bland way, if you like.” It becomes normal? “Exactly. And of course with my job in the emergency clinic anything was normal – from someone waving a knife at you to someone running through the place naked.”
It’s a job, she says, she could only do for a certain amount of time. “Doing it for your whole life inevitably tarnishes you in some way. You either emotionally remove yourself from the situation so you’re not as effective, or you become cynical about it or you become very slightly sadistic and obviously some psychiatric nurses become very sadistic, and that’s an issue in a lot of closed institutions where people don’t really see what’s going on.”
So instead she decided to get up on stage. She was 29. It was easier to do it at that later age, she reckons. “Because when you get towards 30 you don’t give quite as much of a toss what people think of you and so it was easier for me to take the kind of knocks. And there were plenty of them. I think if I’d been 20 I would have crumbled under the weight of them, under the weight of all the abuse, the heckling and booing and all that sort of thing. I was fairly well defended by the time I got to 30.”
Comedy has changed since she started stand-up. In the days before we meet I come up with a hypothesis that Brand is the last alternative comedian standing (well there’s her and the two Marks, Steel and Thomas). These days – if you’re Jimmy Carr – you can make jokes about rape.
“There does seem to have been a shift,” agrees Brand, “but I think it’s kind of a generational thing. Each generation has a backlash against the generation before. It was inevitable that the children of alternative comedy would go ‘ooh no, we’re not having that, that’s bollocks’ and bring traditional comedy racism, sexism, what have you, back again. Because alternative comedians were reacting against that. I’m not surprised by it at all and it may well be that another backlash comes along against this particular current.”
She sounds surprisingly sanguine. Doesn’t she think the likes of Carr and Frankie Boyle offer a different order of aggressiveness? “I think in some ways it’s a gender thing. There were plenty of male stand-ups around during the alternative comedy years who could have potentially been Jimmy Carrs. The interesting thing about Carr and Boyle is they’re really nice blokes and so their step away from alternative comedy is almost a kind of separate thing from their personalities.”
Which, if true, is worse in a way. “I think some people ramp a side of themselves up for performance purposes. I’ve always thought that Jeremy Clarkson was like that as well. If you meet him he’s a perfectly kind of reasonable, polite, friendly person ...”
I’m not sure I want to know that, Jo. “I know you don’t. Nor do I. I’ve done kind of charity things for him and it really annoys me because when I met him I just wanted to hate him. And I kept thinking ‘why is he asking me to do these things? He must know I can’t bear what he does’. And so that’s all very weird. Jeremy Clarkson’s performance on television is a hugely exaggerated version of something about him. But I don’t really know what it is – that kind of casual European racism and all that drives me bloody nuts.”
Maybe she is nicer these days. Maybe this ability to hate the sin and not really mind the sinner is a symptom of that niceness. Or maybe she was always nice. She doesn’t want to kill men, she says. Truth is, she never did.
