Jo Brand

[faceless]

LOOK BACK IN HUNGER - THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY: JO BRAND
October 30,2009
By Roger Lewis
express.co.uk

IF JO BRAND has ever met a sane, civilised man, none merits a mention in Look Back in Hunger, her bumptious autobiography. Everywhere she goes she is assailed by “downright pervy” men, from slavering old gym teachers to the landlord of her rented villa in Crete. He kept trying to burst into her room so she pushed all the furniture against the door – night after night. As a teenager Jo joined in a game of hide and seek. A “pervy man” grabbed her from behind the curtains, “tearing at my clothes and slobbering on my neck”. Later he returned for more.

From such a litany we can deduce that Jo is no romantic and the men who heckle her stand-up act only intensify her belief that blokes are basically beasts, who get “stranger and scarier” all the time. Her short hair and stocky frame seem to be an issue.

She piled on the stones as a side-effect of taking the Pill, “so that proved to be a very effective contraceptive,” she remarks drily. Even the security men at her gigs hurl unprintable insults at her about her appearance – Jo seems to attract people with the mentality of the Yorkshire Ripper. The paradox is that Brand has always wanted to ape masculine characteristics. As she puts it, she has wanted “a bit more of a grasp on the testicles of life”. Born in 1957 Jo hated what her mother’s generation were expected to tolerate. She saw how these post-war women were “longing for just a little break from the daily grind of housework, swings and shops”.

Not that she went about doing a lot to avert such a fate. Raised in Kent and Hastings, Jo was a mediocre scholar who later drifted between dead-end jobs. We are thrown a few details of her early years – fond memories of jam roly-poly are interspersed with comments about dire school food. But Jo’s life really got interesting when her manic - depressive dad made a bonfire of her clothes, kicked her record player to pieces and punched her boyfriend Dave in the jaw. Jo moved herself to a bedsit in Tunbridge Wells, which went up in flames when a candle rolled under the mattress.

As odd things always happened around Jo – ghosts materialise, coat hangers fly out of the wardrobe, pet tortoises attempt suicide – it was a short step for her to decide to train as a psychiatric nurse. She became a sister at the Maudsley in 1982, helping to administer the ECT pincers. Jo found she had a gift for keeping her cool around the most violent of patients.

We also discover that Jo had phenomenal levels of courage. Though she never quite tells us why she had a hankering for doing stand-up comedy, we can see how she thrived in its aggressive atmosphere. Heckling mobs are unlikely to disconcert a woman capable of pacifying seven-foot tall psychopaths by sitting on their heads.

Her recollections of the comedy circuit in the Eighties are to be cherished. Eddie Izzard was “absolutely terrible when he started” and “I had Frank Skinner down as a no-hoper”. Jo always pulled a good crowd because her patients would turn up, often stark naked.

Life on the road is hellishly depicted. There is a lot of driving at night and unhealthy snacking on Ginsters pies and fizzy drinks. She’ll arrive at a provincial hotel and be told, “You’ve got to be back at 11 or we’ll lock you out”. But her world-weary, soothing baritone was to be her fortune; she’s rightful heir to the comic mantle of Beryl Reid, Joan Sims and Hattie Jacques.

Though chunky, what’s largest about Jo is her heart, her humanity. I love her.

Headline, £20

[faceless]

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
heraldscotland.com

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.

[faceless]

Lunch with Mariella: Jo Brand
A mischievous conversation with the comedian covers everything from accepting lifts from strangers to the joys of peanut butter sandwiches
Mariella Frostrup
17 October 2010

The pope has come between Jo Brand and I. To facilitate the pontiff's visit to Lambeth Palace they've closed Lambeth Bridge and as a result I'm running horribly late. When I finally arrive at Chez Bruce, 45 minutes after our designated meeting time, the comedian who taught audiences that feminists could be funny appears unperturbed. "It's nice to have a bit of time to myself," she reassures me, folding her copy of the Guardian.

She's tucked in a corner table by a large window framed by a view of Wandsworth Common in glorious autumn sunlight. "I've brought a present," she says, thrusting a copy of Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin into my hand. "But read it on a good day. It's about a middle-aged couple whose son dies and then they mount their own mini-rebellion against the Nazis." Dark, literary novels about the second world war aren't an obvious choice for a comedian who made her name with tampons and fat jokes. "I like reading, I like boring things, and yet I think people for ages had this image of me that I was on the tube with a chainsaw looking for any likely candidate."

It's still a leap for me to think of Jo Brand as the happily married mother of two girls, having grown up on her hilariously and viciously honed jokes about men. I wasn't the only audience member who presumed her synonymous with an alternative, possibly man-eschewing lifestyle.

"Once you get labelled, people expect you to behave within the very narrow confines of that label," she says. "I was a man-hating lesbian for so long that people that didn't know me thought: 'Christ, has she converted to heterosexuality? Does she suddenly like them after all?' You can be really pissed off about the way that men behave and a very strong feminist but why shouldn't you want to have children and live within a kind of family life?"

Having been written off myself in my single days as "intimidating", surely the lads can't have been knocking down Brand's bedroom door with her image as a mincing machine for male egos?

"I never had any trouble!" she twinkles. "I don't think anyone ever came back and thought, 'God is she going to saw my bollocks off in the minute of the night, or make me read The Female Eunuch while we're watching telly. There's a false belief that fat women will take anything because by being fat they've ruled out a huge percentage of the male population that don't like fat women. But it's not like that at all!"

I ask about the restaurant, a 15-minute drive from her south London home, and she surprises me by saying she's only been once before. "We came here for my dad's birthday about five years ago, and I really liked it because it's discreet and the tables are quite a long way apart. I'm a terrible sort of non-fussy eater really. I don't like posh food very much and the more ingredients something's got in it the less I tend to like it. So it was either this or taking you for a kebab really."

I argue in defence of the sophisticated menu. Chez Bruce, one of the best loved restaurants in London, a bit more bistro than the building's previous incumbent, Marco Pierre White's unforgettable Harvey's, and certainly as gourmet as Brand would venture. "When my mum went out to work when I was 11, I was given the job of doing tea for my brothers and at that point peanut butter sandwiches entered our lives with a vengeance. So that's my favourite food." Another is the spud. "My mum and my husband are from Irish backgrounds so we have a lot of potatoes. Chips, mashed, boiled, new potatoes, I love them all. Even the slightly wanky ones like Duchess potatoes that go up in a little spiral."

We order and she turns down wine but urges me mischievously to "get pissed" in advance of my parent/teacher meeting that afternoon. I remark that for a woman whose routines are littered with jokes about being staggeringly drunk, it's ironic that earlier this year she took part in an advertising campaign to discourage young people from doing likewise.

"There are a lot of surrounding issues with alcohol, particularly with young women," she says. "Pissed young women are so much more vulnerable than sober young women."

I presume she's talking from experience and ask what the dumbest thing she's ever done whilst under the influence. "At 16 I accepted a lift from a squaddie in a pub at one o'clock in the morning in the middle of Cheshire. He drove past where I was staying and carried on down this dark lane and stopped the car – I was miles from anywhere and thought at the very least he's going to rape me and at worst he's going to kill me. The two options were, say I've got herpes and my mum's just died and try and talk him out of it, or go on the offensive. So I just went right up close to his face and started shouting: "What the fuck do you think you're doing, let me out of your fucking car, who the fuck do you think you are?" And he started crying. He went on to say he was engaged and missing his girlfriend and he didn't really know what he was doing. I ended up kind of like a therapist going: 'Oh, you poor thing, never mind.'"

That weekend in Cheshire, working as a voluntary carer for Mencap, marked the beginning of a 10-year career as a psychiatric nurse. Her experiences with the mentally ill later became a staple of her comedy routines and also inspired her critically acclaimed BBC series Getting On, set in a psychiatric ward and shortly to start its second series. I ask why she's always been interested in people at the fringes, disturbed adults, disturbed children?

"I think it's a combination of my mum who worked as a social worker in child protection for years and that I just feel incredibly sorry for people whose lives are a mess, whether it's through mental illness or alcohol problems or disability. Just because you're different, people are scared of you and think you're a bit weird. I suppose I feel a bit protective and that's what my mum's like, so unwittingly I've picked that up from her."

Close up Brand has kindly green eyes, almost khaki, mirrored by the low-cut T-shirt she's wearing in a matching shade. It's curious that someone as genial in person would have cultivated such a scary image on stage. "Not towards women though, and certainly not towards vulnerable people. The whole point of my act was to have a go at people who are the top echelon of society. White men really. Not all, because there's a layer at the bottom who are suffering as much as anybody else. I just wanted to have a bit of a kickback and see what happened."

In her stage act no subject is off-limits, from vaginal reconstruction to vivisection, but she's not averse to censorship at home. "A lot of children in my daughter's class watch EastEnders and ours don't. Even though it's on at 7.30pm it's depressingly adult. There's people shouting at each other, hitting each other, killing each other, people's lives being a nightmare. I believe children should be children for as long as they possibly can."

Time is fast running out, but in the relaxed ambience of Chez Bruce bathed in a haze of sunlight I'd quite like to lay my head on her ample bosom and have a nap. Sadly it's not to be. As she prepares to depart I ask if, having created a comedy career out of drawing attention to her weight, she's always been sanguine about it. "As a teenager I wasn't. I just wanted people to leave me alone and stop shouting 'fuck off fatty' at me really. That would have suited me." Like the rest of her fans I'm grateful that instead she started shouting back at them.

Jo Brand's Can't Stand Up For Sitting Down is out now

-------------------

Here's an extra audio bit:

download 15mb mp3 of Jo Brand talking to Richard Bacon.

[faceless]

'Everything changed when the NHS started calling people ‘customers’ instead of patients'
Director Peter Capaldi and star Jo Brand tell Adam Sweeting how their superb hospital sitcom Getting On sees the funny side of death.
Adam Sweeting
22 Oct 2010

"She got into a mess on the NHS,” sang the late rock ’n’ roller Ian Dury in Plaistow Patricia. The line runs through my head as I trek out to Plaistow hospital in east London, where series two of Getting On is being shot. It’s apt that this dark and deadpan comedy about a geriatric ward in a backwater of the health service is made in a mouldering shell of a building, given emergency resuscitation for the occasion.

“This is a derelict hospital,” says director Peter Capaldi. The star of The Thick of It (in which he plays ranting spin doctor Malcolm Tucker) is taking a quick lunch break in the Sister’s office on the fictional Ward B4. “No running water, no heating, no nothing. They found a ward, chopped out a bit of wall, repainted it and brought that bit back to life.”

Series one of Getting On won plaudits for its pitiless eye for detail and willingness to laugh sardonically in the face of death, bureaucracy and unsavoury bodily functions. Jointly written by its leading women, Jo Brand, Vicki Pepperdine and Joanna Scanlan, Getting On prescribes no panaceas, but eye-wateringly evokes the squalor and mundanity of much health work.

Sister Den Flixter (Scanlan) and Nurse Kim Wilde (Brand) care about their patients, but that doesn’t stop them scoffing the cake intended for the woman who just died on her 87th birthday. In the first episode of the new series, which begins on BBC Four on Tuesday, the ward’s young housemen are transfixed with horror at having to examine a foul-smelling bag-lady whose “clothing has fused to the skin” and suffers from a perianal abscess (“Go on, have a root around,” urges Pepperdine’s Dr Moore briskly).

A running joke in the show is the contrast between the plush new wing planned for the hospital, advertised with glorious technicolour illustrations, and the glum surroundings in which the nursing staff have to tend their elderly and demented patients. It’s a neat metaphor for the way the NHS has had private finance initiatives lavished upon it yet remains an unreformable leviathan. “My character doesn’t change massively in the second series,” says Brand, 53. “I think she just gets more pissed off with being the ward drudge, really. We wanted to capture the sheer quiet desperation of it all.”

The trio may be friends who live near each other in south London, but they come to the project from different angles. “Jo Scanlan is purely an actor, Vicki’s an actor but has done quite a lot of comedy too, whereas I’m purely a stand-up, I don’t act at all,” says Brand. “I wanted to stick closest to what I was when I was a psychiatric nurse, so it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch.”

Brand suspects that the real-life NHS is “different but probably not better” than when she spent 10 years as a psychiatric nurse up to the mid-Eighties. “I would have stopped all this tendering out to private companies. Everything changed when the NHS started calling people ‘customers’ instead of patients.”

Scanlan, 47, says their objective wasn’t to deliver a critique of the health service, but to use the hospital setting as a crucible for widely shared experiences. “We can see what it’s like to be a human being living and dying, and the care or lack of care that we receive. We’re trying to find the point where poignancy and tenderness and absurdity collide.”

She adds that “with the first series we had huge amounts of feedback from people in the NHS saying, ‘That’s my ward!’ But I think the NHS is representative of experiences throughout the public sector. It might be ‘health and safety gone mad’ or misuse of language and management-speak – like people who think using the word ‘empathy’ means you actually have empathy.”

Director Capaldi, 52, stoutly defends the NHS (“It’s a wonderful idea, and I don’t think people in Britain always realise what they’ve got”). He got the job because Scanlan knew him from their work in The Thick of It (in which she plays Terri Coverley, a long-suffering press secretary). Primarily known as an actor, he says his previous directing experience consisted of “a short film and some commercials”, though the former happened to be Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life, which in 1995 won an Oscar for Live Action Short Film.

It all began when Scanlan asked Capaldi to direct a 20-minute pilot of Getting On. “I think Jo’s wonderful so I said yes,” he explains. “Then the BBC commissioned three episodes, and now we’re making six more. I’ve just got dragged along for the ride.”

Too modest, one suspects. Capaldi has applied the reality-drama technique developed by The Thick of It’s creator Armando Iannucci, in which the action is captured by a couple of freely roving lightweight cameras as if they’re simply eavesdropping on real life. There’s no background music, and natural light is used wherever possible. Capaldi has also facilitated the trio’s use of improvisational techniques. They start with a written script, then ad-lib some of the dialogue to make the show feel more naturalistic.

“The Thick of It is very densely constructed and thoroughly written, and the improv element is used to make everything appear very instantaneous,” says Capaldi. “Getting On is slightly less dense, and the cast use their own words much more on the set.”

Scanlan and Pepperdine have been improv addicts since their drama school days, but Brand, despite her stand-up experience, seems less keen. “I was never very good at it,” Brand says, “but we’ll all have a good old bash at it.”

That makes it sound like traditional British muddling-through, but don’t let them fool you. Behind its seemingly artless facade, Getting On is a lean and cunningly designed machine.

- Getting On returns on Tuesday on BBC Four at 10.00pm

[faceless]

the interview JO BRAND
To some she's a cake-eating Antichrist, but lads don't mind her. She used to be a 'miserable, alienated old sod' but she's cheered up now
BEN THOMPSON
7 January 1996

There is a scene in Friday night's first episode of the new series of Jo Brand Through the Cakehole which will probably cause a bit of a stir. An amateur dramatics society performs a version of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. The script is unaltered but there is something strangely liberating about the sight of a group of apparently straitlaced elderly women - a real live amateur dramatics group, not professional actresses - enunciating the word "motherf---er" repeatedly and with obvious enjoyment.

Like much of the best of Jo Brand's material, this is a simple joke and an audacious piece of cultural criticism at the same time. Quentin Tarantino seemed to have reached the saturation point beyond which no reference to him or his work could possibly be of any interest. "It was a bit of a risk," Brand admits, dividing her attention good-humouredly between coffee and cigarettes in an airy Channel 4 conference room, "but it's got to the stage now where it was a few years ago, and that is the time where amateur dramatics societies would start to pick things up. The women really loved doing it too; they were all, 'Ho ho ho, what's my son going to say?' "

Some people, as is their right, will not find this funny. Some people will never find anything Jo Brand does funny. Talking to this extremely amiable woman, it is hard to keep a grip on the fact that there are people who regard her as some kind of cake-eating Antichrist. Brand seems to derive great enjoyment from provoking those who are pre-disposed not to like her, but when, say, she is being slagged off by the Sun (as she constantly is), does she on any level wish things didn't have to be like this? "I wish things didn't have to be like this on every level really."

The strange thing is that the people most likely to be upset by Jo's jovial brand of boisterous anti-machismo seem to be liberals, not lads. "A lot of the time," she says, "lads will just think it's a bit of a laugh. They know it's not going to change things politically - they're safe in their own kind of laddish kingdom, so it doesn't worry them. In some ways it's good that they've actually sat down and watched it; I don't have a grand plan - I'm not that organised a person - but if I did, that would be stage one. Stage two would be to try to take them a bit further than they expected to go."

Whereas other comedians plot their career strategies with military precision, Brand's more happy-go-lucky approach - "I never think, 'Where am I going to be in a year's time?' That seems to be a sure way of missing the fact that you might be quite happy now" - has paid huge dividends. Of all the generation of comedians to come through the Friday night Channel 4 slot, the very British broadness of Brand's humour seems to have won her the widest following. Ratings of the first series spiralled far beyond expectations, and pensioners as well as students flock to her marathon live tours.

Pre-comedy life experience probably helps in this regard - "you are a bit more normal if you've done a proper job for a bit." Brand also cunningly eschews the generationally specific routines which straight-from-college comedians tend to fall back on. You won't hear her wittering on about Star Trek. "A lot of people do that kind of nostalgia stuff believing that they were very happy in their teenage years," Brand observes sagely, "but that's probably just an illusion." She seems very happy in the here and now. "I'm miserable as sin a lot of the time," she says, "but I've been much happier in my thirties [she is now 38] than I was in my twenties. I like to read my diary occasionally to remind myself what a miserable alienated old sod I used to be."

Now very much a Londoner, Jo Brand grew up in Kent, in an idyllic country village "not unlike the one in The Darling Buds of May". Having moved to rough-and- tumble Hastings for what she smilingly refers to as "the nightmare adolescent business", Brand was "invited to leave home" at 16. She went into the lower echelons of the civil service, doing A-levels on day release. She also worked in a pub for a year, as a Barnardo's house mother, and at a flower nursery pulling the heads off chrysanthemums ("Particularly good preparation for the comedy circuit") before doing a degree course and becoming - the one thing everybody knows about her - a psychiatric nurse.

She had always nursed comedic ambitions, but her comedy debut - at an ill-tempered London benefit - was not overly auspicious. "I had the seven pints of lager temerity," she remembers wistfully, "to think I could go on after everyone else had died and storm it with my sad five minutes about Freud ..." The sad five minutes about Freud were soon dropped, but it took Brand some time to develop the barnstorming deadpan of today. Hamstrung by nerves, her delivery used to be such a grim monotone that other comedians could get easy laughs by doing impressions of her. In a successful bid to loosen herself up, she deliberately took on as much arduous compering work as she could get her hands on.

To find out just how far she has progressed, you have only to see her in her much less confident old incarnation as the Sea Monster on ITV's recent repeats of Friday Night Live. Jo herself "managed to avoid" this experience, though the man who does her hair phoned her up to tell her off for going to someone else. "I told him, 'That was 1988, you big div.' " The accolade of Best Live Act at the 1995 British Comedy Awards was a well-deserved reflection of the authority of her now imperious live persona. It's in building a functional television vehicle for this persona that Brand has really moved ahead of the pack.

"I always thought, 'I'm not going to do any crap sketches'," she says, "but then, funnily enough, I did." Brand continues in characteristically self-deprecating vein, "By the time you actually get to filming you tend to be so knackered that you don't actually give a toss anyway."

The new series has an imposing - and very funny - opening shot of Brand filmed from beneath a glass floor. Does she ever think of not doing jokes about her size? "You can't build your career on one set of values and then shift to doing jokes about embroidery," Brand argues. Now that she is firmly established though, isn't it tempting to leave behind the more self-hating material? "I know exactly what you mean," her voice crackles with the appealing grain of fine parchment, "and I don't think I can, because that's the kind of person I am really. I was like that before I got into comedy and I don't think I'm ever going to change."

Sometimes Jo Brand thinks that what she describes, not quite dismissively, as "the fat bird stuff" might be history. "Then something will just pop out and I'll think 'Oh well ... still doing it'." Sometimes, too, she'll set up a joke and you will wonder which way it's going to go, and then she'll almost wilfully bring it back to the obvious - as if that gives her as much pleasure as trying to do something different. "Absolutely," she says firmly. "I think there's always been a tradition in England of people being a bit useless, and that being something which this society thinks is quite loveable. I'd like to think I'm a part of that.

"I think there's a danger that we're moving towards a state where the people we are expected to admire are almost not human any more, and I don't like that. I prefer it when someone looks like a nice person and you think, 'I could have a laugh with them in the pub.' "

This, by happy chance, is exactly the kind of person Jo Brand is. Embarrassed by having - in her own words - "loads of money" she has invested in a small house in a Shropshire field near where her Mum lives, and discreetly gives the rest away. When mention is made of her long-term beau, comedy writer Jim Miller, Brand almost blushes. Do they live together? "No, but," - a winsome smile - "we do see each other occasionally."

'Jo Brand Through the Cakehole': Channel 4, Fri 10.30pm.

------------------------

The article's from 1996, but it's good to have a flashback