People I like | Jo Brand

Brand's new life

by Lee Randall

WHEN Jo Brand suggested meeting at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, we thought, for one fleeting moment, about posing her in front of its Rubens, before rejecting the notion as utterly banal. Besides, when Trinny and Susannah pronounced Brand Rubenesque, she barked down the camera, "That’s code for fat," to remind us that she hadn’t lost any of her edge during a two-year hiatus in which she gave birth to a brace of daughters, Maisie and Eliza.

As luck would have it, Brand has just revealed that this Rembrandt portrait is her favourite painting here. "I’d love to have it in my house. It’s fantastic. Look at the girl’s face; she’s gorgeous, isn’t she? The thing is, girls aren’t meant to look like that any more. She’d be considered fat today. But she’s just slightly chubby and has nice rosy cheeks and is very sort of ordinary-looking. Rembrandt is a fantastic painter of ordinary faces, but he makes them look extraordinary."

What she doesn’t say, and may be too modest to notice, is that this lovely, open face, with its great big eyes, strong nose and wide mouth, could pass as a portrait of the comic as a young girl. Our photographer has another notion: "She actually looks like Rembrandt. Just imagine her wearing that little hat and you could be staring at one of his self-portraits."

Brand is about to return to the Edinburgh Fringe after a six- or seven-year absence ("My brain’s so spongy I can’t remember, exactly"). She’s bringing not one show, but two: the play Mental, with co-writer and co-star Helen Griffin, and her stand-up act. I suggest she’s a glutton for punishment, but Brand dismisses my concerns as nonsense.

"I’ve been shattered since I was about 12, so I’m used to it. I was a nurse for 10 years - that’s the sort of shattered that I base my table of shatteredness on - and compared to that, two hour-long shows seem a breeze."

Considering she’s also got two under-threes at home, I find this kind of stamina awe-inspiring. But while she admits that motherhood has put a dent in her serious reading, Brand is otherwise thoroughly enchanted. "I just got in under the wire, age-wise," she says. "I like motherhood. It was something that I always wanted to do. So I have two little girls. Dressed in dungarees and DMs and being told to hate men." All except their father Bernie, I presume. "No, and him," she deadpans flashing a mischievous grin. "At least I’m sure that’s what people think I’m doing."

And if you’d had a boy? "I’d have loved it. After all, I have two brothers [one older, one younger]. People say weird things to me, like ‘What would you have done if you’d had a boy?’, as if I would have sacrificed it on a spit in the garden while chanting, ‘I hate you because you’re a boy!’ There’s this whole ridiculous thing that’s built up around my man-hating."

Don’t you think it’ll have something to do with your act, I venture, receiving an affronted look for my temerity. "Yeah, but [onstage] you don’t have to be a carbon copy of your life. If I was, I woud be too boring to be a comedian. You exaggerate certain aspects of yourself because that’s what comedy is. Unfortunately, I ended up taking the piss out of men, and that was translated into me being some lesbian separatist feminist, which is bizarre. Maybe people do take everything incredibly literally, and I should have been a bit more careful... Anyway, who cares?" she concludes, laughing.

In person, Brand is smaller than I expected. She speaks softly, as if the mute button’s on, but with the warmth factor turned up to 10. She’s also a bit shy and self-effacing, though not lacking in self-esteem or gimlet-eyed perspective. Having read that she despises interviews, I’m not surprised when she delays ours as long as possible by asking me loads of questions. She keeps peeking at my notepad and I accuse her of reading upside down, a charge she denies before commenting that my handwriting reminds her of her mum’s.

If she’s uncomfortable being queried, you should see her in front of the camera. Ultimately professionalism triumphs; after a bit of eye-rolling and grimacing, she tucks in like a trouper. In fact, she’s a natural, for in common with that other glorious Londoner, Kathy Burke, Brand has the wonderfully mobile, riveting countenance of a character actress. Her smile beams mega-watt twinkle, and she is, according to the photographer, a joy to behold through the lens, very much the embodiment of Norma Desmond’s proclamation, "We had faces then."

As far as the notion that Brand is a rabid man-hater, the problem is twofold. First, people do take comics literally, particularly if their speciality is observational humour. The second factor is something Sir Ian McKellen noticed after seeing her perform for an audience of 2,000: "It’s like she’s just leaning over the wall in the back garden." She makes comedy look so easy that we forget it’s an act.

Indeed, she makes the ordinary extraordinary. Any honest woman will tell you that Brand’s alleged misandry is actually a stiletto-sharp version of the conversations we have among ourselves when the boys are out of earshot. And it’s hilarious. "I hope it is," she says quietly, "because that was the main thrust behind it. I never wanted to bang any kind of political drum. I just wanted to make people laugh. I wanted to talk more about women’s things because I thought women don’t get to hear much of that, because there aren’t many female comics."

Despite her enduring success, when you mention Brand’s name lots of people - predominantly men - dismiss her, not merely as a mouthy broad, but because she doesn’t fit their stereotype of female pulchritude. To me that’s like saying, "Toulouse-Lautrec - what a short-arse," and walking straight past the canvases.

Or, as her friend Phill Jupitus puts it, rather more strongly, "She’s this whipping girl for small-penised, ludicrously unimaginative journalists. The size thing," he continues, "is really weird. Jo and myself, we’re big and that’s a great in for anybody. ‘Larger than life’ is as nice as it gets. It becomes wearing. Because if we were black and critics drew attention to it, people would say it was appalling."

Does Brand give a toss? For a minute there, watching What Not to Wear on the Red Carpet, I entertained thoughts that she might be planning the kind of transformation we’ve seen among a clutch of American comics, specifically Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers and Roseanne Barr. Each started her career riffing on the fact that her brand of unattractiveness made people uncomfortable. Yet with success, each woman went in for a complete surgical overhaul.

Brand is thoughtful. "I think why they did it - and I could quite easily fall into that trap myself - is because they just got bloody sick to death of people saying they looked shit. Which you do. It’s not exclusively a female thing. There’s a comic called Ricky Grover - a sweet guy, very big, fantastic actor and so funny - but every time he goes on stage he gets this ‘f**k off you fat c**t’ thing from the audience. People think blokes can take it on the chin, but he’s as sensitive as anybody else. He told me, ‘I can’t take it any more.’ So I think that’s why people do it. Roseanne, for example, probably had all this stuff written about her being a fat cow and thought, ‘I have a bit of money now, I can pay to make myself look better.’"

Brand has no plans for body modification. "I don’t really agree with it. I don’t know if I’m ever going to lose any weight. I’m certainly not prepared to make much of an effort to do it. But you get put into this position where you’re expected to be a flag-waver for fat women, and I resent that."

It’s taking one tiny thing and making it all of you. "Exactly - making it the whole context on which your life is predicated. And people’s lives are more complicated than that. Unfortunately, the tabloids reduce you to a caricature of what you are as a person. You can’t avoid that - they do it to everybody. Once you’ve got your tabloid tag, it’s very hard to throw it off."

When I talk to Jupitus he admits a degree of culpability in his own case, and reminds me that Brand used to refer to herself as the Sea Monster. "I always get myself first, before others can. It’s a defence mechanism, saying, ‘I know I’m fat and I can be funnier than you are about it.’ The thing about Jo, and she’s so graceful with it, is that she gets more bile and invective than any other comic because she’s a woman. Guys pretend they’re not threatened by her, but people who attack her, it says more about them." There’s rage in his voice, and the strength of his regard shines through.

"The brilliant thing about Jo," adds Jupitus, "is that comedy is such a shitty male-dominated environment, and a lot of women angst about that. Whereas Jo beat us at our own game. For Jo, being female is three or four down the list. She’s a comedian first. I like that. I feel sorry for her, always being dragged out as a standard-bearer for women."

Brandy, as he calls her, is his Jiminy Cricket. "She’s your conscience. There’s a domino effect of maleness. It only takes one to say something blokey and everyone starts in. We’ll be doing a show and she’ll whisper, ‘Sexist, sexist,’ under her breath in my ear.

"Brandy is a national treasure and it’s a privilege to know her," he concludes. "She’s so good at her job. She has the loveliest, sexiest laugh - it gets you in your trousers. She is gorgeous. There’s not a bitchy bone in her body. She’s glorious to be around, really giving."

An aspect of that is the way she observes a line of demarcation between her private life and her public life. Bernie, for instance, remains a mystery. She kept her first pregnancy a secret, despite working until the seventh month. And you rarely see pictures of her children. I sense that when she’s off duty, Brand is fully present as a wife and mother.

Nevertheless, it’s my job to ask questions, so I wonder why, at her age, she bothered getting married. "Why did I get married?" she echoes. "Because I wanted to. It’s difficult to elucidate any more without talking about bits of my life that are off limits."

Has she any advice about making a success of it? "First of all, it’s good to get married later, because I think between 18 and 30 you change so much. Whereas if you get married when you’re 40, you’re not going to change much, so whomever you choose will be pretty much what you want. When I think of the people I was going out with when I was 18 - if I’d married them, I would have had to assassinate them now.

"The other thing I’d say is don’t get married if you can’t face a bit of boredom and a bit of irritation and a few rows and to actually go through some very annoying patches and work at it a bit. It’s an awful thing to say, but a lot of people like the idea of a day out with a nice party, get in a few nice clothes to wear. Then six months later, it’s ‘oh dear’."

What about child-rearing? She chortles. "Don’t read any books! I did. And they drive me f***ing mad because they never answer the question you want to know. They should have a disclaimer on the cover telling you the politics of the writer - they run the gamut from extreme liberal to neo-fascist. You’ve got one saying put them to bed at six every night and beat them with a slipper if they so much as look at you funny. And another says let them go on a demo when they’re two years old and go out with someone when they’re three and smoke at five. It drives you slightly mad, really."

I throw her the question I ask every comic: who among your peers would you pay to go and see? At first she sneers. "None of them! How could they not let me in for free?" But when I persist, she says, "John Hegley; Bill Bailey; Alan Davies; Billy Connolly; loads of them."

No women, I notice, though there aren’t as many to choose from. She agrees. "There are hardly any. Cathy Heywood I’ve always loved; Linda Smith I love as well. I have to say Ruby Wax or she will somehow get to read this and will phone me up and threaten to kill me because I haven’t mentioned her. She’s great. I’m a big fan of hers now. She’s really quick.

"There’s still such a small woman-to-man ratio that it’s noticeable. We’re still at the stage where you’re categorised. If you’re a man, no one says, ‘Oh, he’s that sort of comedian.’ With us, it’s like, ‘Oh, she’s a man-hating comedian, and she’s a political one, and she’s a lesbian one.’ There’s a little lesbian group with Rhona Cameron and Donna McPhail, and Jackie Clunes was in that, but she’s not any more. She’s crossed the divide and we’ve [arms open wide] welcomed her back."

Audiences seem delighted to welcome Brand back, as well. She was hilarious on Celebrity Fame Academy, and her hour with Trinny and Susannah was a hoot. "I hope it was," she says. "I thought they were fine and anyone who comes away hating them is a fool, because you should know what to expect. A part of me wanted the opportunity to say a few things to them, but also to turn it into a laugh. On a perfectly cynical level, I had been off work a couple of years and it was prime-time BBC1. I thought it would be one way, if I came across as a funny person, of letting people know I’m working again."

You looked fabulous. "Did I?" she asks. "I thought I looked like a ‘before’." Did you get to keep the clothes? She smiles and drawls, "Yeah. So that was another attraction of the show. But I have to say I don’t like posh people very much, though I got on fairly well with Susannah and Trinny. They’re not horrible. I don’t have that thing some left-wing people have that they can experience pure hatred for people who are upper-class. I don’t agree with the class system, but that doesn’t mean everyone posh is awful, either."

When not having her boobs pummelled by the toffs, Brand’s been busy making television pilots, including a quiz show with Stephen Fry. "And I just finished my novel last night," she says triumphantly. "It’s called Sorting Out Billy, but I won’t tell you any more. You’ll have to read it," she teases. I promise to hunt her down for a rematch next spring, when it is published.

Despite what I deem to be a frenzy of activity, Brand insists, "Now that I have children I find it much easier to say no. When I was on my own, if someone said, ‘Do you want to do a benefit in Aberdeen? And we’ll bring you up in a cattle truck and give you half a piece of bread when you get there,’ I’d go, ‘Yes, no probs.’ But I’m not like that any more. I can’t afford to be."

So she’s unlikely to reprise her appearances at Late and Live, when she reasoned the only way to proceed was by getting drunker than the audience - a feat that resulted in her having to perform from her chair because she was too pissed to stand. But we will be able to enjoy a completely revised version of Mental, about the experiences she and Griffin had as psychiatric nurses.

And then there’s her stand-up act. While mostly scripted, she says it will start with her take on snippets from the local papers. I suggest planting some corkers for her amusement. "Will you? You must! Some days you just want to do your job and go home. Other days you’re in a really good mood and want to muck about. And, of course, controlled as we are by our hormones - perhaps you’d like a chart with my menstrual cycle, telling audiences when I’m most likely to be amusing or bad-tempered?"

Her hormones must be in perfect alignment today, for at the risk of destroying her street cred, I’ve got to tell you that Jo Brand is a delight. In fact, I’m perilously close to becoming her worst nightmare. She once said, "At parties I always get cornered by the gobby, pissed-up bloke who wants to move into your house and know everything about you." Well, can you blame them?

Source: Scotland on Sunday

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