The Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London is not the type of venue in which you would expect to find Jo Brand. Less so its tearooms. It is a rather gentle place to spend the afternoon yet not entirely inappropriate, since Brand, 46, appears to have moved on from her original, iconic image of fag-puffing, aggressive comedy diva with Doc Martens and spiky hair.
This is not to say she has turned into a sort of Nigella Lawson with laughs, let’s just say that she now appears more often with a cup of tea than she does a pint of bitter. “I keep reading pieces that say how much I have matured and mellowed, all those things that apparently come with age and marriage,” she sneers.
Just as her lip starts to curl and you start to worry that she actually has the DMs hidden in her handbag, she calms down. “I am more user-friendly than I was,” she admits. “I can tell because I am being offered the sort of things I would never have done before. No one would have said to me in 1987, ‘Do you want to write a novel?’ because I wouldn’t have been a commercial-enough prospect.”
Like a swath of her peers, from David Baddiel to Jeff Green, by way of Jenny Eclair, Brand has gone all literary. Her first novel, Sorting Out Billy, is published this month (Review, £12.99). She knows people might think this is a cliché but, being Brand, she says she doesn’t give two hoots. “There are a hell of a lot of comedians who don’t write novels. Some people say they are burning to get a novel out. Well, that wasn’t me. I’ve always liked the idea of writing one but only in a very abstract way. But it was a practical option, given the stage I am at in my life, wanting to spend time with my children. To write a novel made my life easier. Although I was shocked by how hard it was. I was expecting it to be easy and it wasn’t at all.”
Such honesty quite possibly springs more from her career as a psychiatric nurse in the Health Service in the 1980s, than from her subsequent reinvention as a celebrity stand-up. “Ninety-nine per cent of my patients were very loveable and I was very fond of them. Having worked in the field I knew it was a case of: ‘There but for the grace of God go I’. We are all potentially vulnerable to that sort of illness. It wouldn’t take much to push most of us into an anxiety state. People are so scared of psychiatric patients. Actually, your average psychiatric patient is more scared of you than you are of them.”
Sorting Out Billy, her new novel, is about three women friends, two of whom try to “sort out” the violent boyfriend of the third. Not a very promising notion for a piece of comic fiction but the book rattles along with sporadically entertaining flashes. Will it be well received? Brand, who has two toddler daughters, says she doesn’t care. “I am so au fait with being slagged off that I don’t. I’d like people to like it because, obviously, we all want people to like what we do but, if they don’t, I shan’t bother too much. Anyway, I presume that literary critics aren’t quite as misogynistic as comedy critics.” Pause. “I could be wrong, of course.” Her timing is great, her confidence less sure-footed.
“I suppose in a vaguely defensive way, I tend to interpret critics as people with an emotional problem, which is a very naughty way to treat them but I think they do have a hidden agenda. That is not to say that I think everything I do is brilliant but I do think that some slaggings are well out of proportion.” Meaning? “There is this constant whinge from critics, who say that if they said about women what I say about men, they would get roasted. What I can’t get over is that they may not say those things about women but there are plenty of blokes that do. And who get away with it. I don’t ever remember a time when everyone thought I was great. I get the kind of feeling that everyone has always thought I was rubbish.” Pause. “Apart from the audiences. Thankfully.” Phew. Just when you worry that Jo Brand is going to start thumping the table, she goes into self-mocking mode.
While motherhood may have tamed her hairstyle, it hasn’t softened her views. “As a woman I feel very pissed off, most of the time. Because you are constantly judged on how you look. And it’s not because I don’t look like a supermodel. I’d be fed up if I was a supermodel because I would be constantly being judged for looking like one.”
Of course, size is never far away in a conversation with Jo Brand. “Fat people are encouraged not to appear in society too often,” she continues. “Because they are rather unsightly. So I feel like saying, well f*** you! We have as much right to be here as anyone else. Isn’t it better, for example, to be overweight than nasty? People are so unimaginative. We all get reduced to tabloid images because that is what is simplistic and easy to take in.”
Yet she has done little to challenge this — getting so much mileage out of her shape and calling her own TV series Through the Cakehole, a tabloid phrase if ever there was one. Brand blames that particular move on a bout of non-strategic thinking.
“To be perfectly honest, I never set any store by what that series was called. We were all thinking, ‘What shall we call it?’ and someone said Through the Cakehole and I said, ‘Yeah, all right,’ and then suddenly everyone’s reading stuff into it and you think God, I wish I had thought about it a bit more.”
Her views on female grooming are equally inconsistent. “I have never been one of those women who bothered what they looked like. I can never go out looking smart without either pouring half my dinner down my front, or falling over, or the heel of my shoe breaking. I tend not to go to posh evenings precisely for this reason. I wish you were allowed to wear grotty old clothes to film premieres.”
So why submit to Trinny and Susannah? Her appearance last year on What Not To Wear on the Red Carpet was one of the show’s highlights but it was a surprise to see someone so avowedly uninterested in clothes taking part.
“I am not interested in dressing up,” she maintains, “but I am interested in what women say about each other and I was interested to see what they would do with me.” Any fashion tips? “Only one. When going somewhere posh, remember to wear a decent bra. So that they (she points to her breasts) are not at cat’s eye-level. Just slightly higher up. Apart from that, I can’t remember what their tips were. They were rude to me but not in a way that upset me because it was what I had expected.”
Bra improvement aside, the show, coming hard on the heels of a classic performance in Celebrity Fame Academy — she chased Ruby Wax around the house in a pair of hotpants — did magnificent things to Brand’s status. “It softened a lot of people’s attitudes to me. I had this cartoonish image of being a man-hating lesbian feminist and it normalised me a bit.”
The timing was crucial. “I had taken time off to have my children but after those two shows I was offered so much work that I just said yes to everything.”
Brand suggests she has no strategy whatsoever, which may be disingenuous but seems to be true. And even if it’s not, it is a welcome policy in the current comic Zeitgeist, where every novice comedian at the Edinburgh Festival has already written their Perrier Award acceptance speech, with advice from a showbiz agent. “I see what work comes along and if my diary is a bit empty, and it pays reasonable money, and I like the sound of it, then I’ll do it,” says Brand. “A lot of comics have a five-year plan. I never find the time to plan anything. I work on a lot of ideas. A lot of them never come off.”
The notion of standing on stage and making people laugh for an hour, I confide, is more terrifying. “Telling jokes. Scary? What about if you were really drunk?” says Brand. “You have to get so drunk that you don’t care. That’s how I did my first gig. I was so drunk I could hardly stand up. Consequently I didn’t care if people found me funny or not. I can’t do that every time now, because it doesn’t work as well as it used to.” Ah, the perils of hitting maternal responsibility and your mid-forties.
Sorting Out Billy by Jo Brand is published by Review on May 10 (£12.99)
