Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down

by Jo Brand

  Edana is the third one of the triumvirate who worked for many years in the Health Service, although she has always harboured a yen to write for TV. This opportunity came up recently for her and she is trying to convert her working life to fulltime writing but it’s a very competitive field and it’s taking a while.

  We try to all get together once a year for a couple of days if we can, and our last trip was to a health spa … not my natural habitat, it has to be said. But it was pretty quiet and there was a lack of hassle from other punters. I did even, at one point, don my cozzie and get in the pool for some aquaerobics which I’d assumed would be a piece of piss. Blimey it’s actually quite hard work and I felt half dead afterwards. We also signed up for a ‘brisk’ walk (I realise the word ‘brisk’ should have been a clue) which was more like a bleeding route march in the Army The main group pulled ahead of me many times, to my shame, and at one point I had to pretend I was off to find cover to have a piss while I cowered in a bush and had a sneaky fag.

  And then, of course, there is my lovely friend Waggly who was diagnosed with MS while we were nurses together. She lives fairly close and is an inspiration to all of us as she has fought her illness tooth and nail, whilst devoting a lot of her time to her fellow sufferers. She’s always available to help and has a gorgeous sunny optimistic outlook, given what a rough time she’s had over the last few years.

  Showbiz Mates

  Although it’s difficult to meet and keep friends in this business because everyone is so bloody busy and on my nights off I just want to flop over and spend time with the family I do make an effort to spend time with the following mates from the comedy world.

  Kathy Burke

  I think Kathy is a bloody genius and more than that, a fantastic person to spend time with. She is down to earth, funny and cynical, and a prime example of someone who has really struggled against the odds to become a leader in her field. We only meet a handful of times a year, but I always look forward to it enormously as I know I’m going to have a good time and spend a lot of it pissing myself laughing.

  Liza Tarbuck

  Liza comes from comedy royalty and I first met her when we did a show up in Scotland together called Win, Lose or Draw. It was a joy to meet such a funny woman who could hold her own against all-comers. She is a right laugh too, has a very quick mind and doesn’t take any shit from anyone.

  Dawn French

  Dawn is absolutely lovely and totally comfortable in her skin. Sometimes I wonder how she has managed to remain so nice in the shark-infested waters of telly and showbusiness. She radiates a kind of positive light around herself and I defy anyone not to like her.

  Meera Syal

  I first met Meera when she was in a sketch on the Channel Four show that I did, Through the Cakehole. I immediately liked her. She is bright, has a sardonic wit, and although we’ve managed to have quite a few elongated gaps in our friendship we are still clinging on and manage to see each other at least twice a year. It’s difficult as we both have children and lives that are not conducive to meeting up, especially as we live at opposite ends of London.

  Jenny Eclair

  Jenny Eclair is one of the biggest balls of energy I have ever met. She bursts into your personal space and will not be ignored. Her mind jumps all over the place and it’s as if there is a pressure in her head to get more words out per minute than anyone else. She’s very funny very sarcastic and very lovable. We live quite close to each other, and almost every time I go to the local supermarket, I bump into her lurking somewhere in the aisles. Again, we struggle to maintain proper, regular contact but always have a really good gossip when we catch up.

  Ruby Wax

  I am sure that the first time I met Ruby, she blanked me although she insists this isn’t true, but we got over that and discovered we liked each other, although we are totally different. Ruby has a sharpness of mind that I simply don’t possess and, like Jenny she could talk the hind legs off any creature you care to mention. But there is a fondness between us and we like having big long laughing sessions together.

  Hailing from Notting Hill, Ruby is not best keen on setting foot in Sarf London and treats it as if she were in the Bronx. She distracted me so much once when we were driving through South London that I hit the car in front. The driver got out, ready to remonstrate in a South London fashion i.e. quite cross, but on spotting both of us thought it was a hidden camera show and beat a hasty retreat.

  Yes, I know you were expecting me to be holidaying with Elton and David or playing badminton with Posh and Becks, but I suspect I’m not quite glamorous enough. Bollocks — I don’t suspect — I know.

  The cliché that everybody has a novel in them is probably not true. I certainly don’t think it was in my case.

  However, once you achieve a certain level in the business of show, you do tend to get asked whether you’d like to write a book.

  ‘Yes, one with lots of pictures and not much writing in it,’ was always the response in my head.

  Well, the offer did come my way in the early nineties, and based on a book that had been published a year or so before, about the hundred greatest men in history, I decided I would have a bash at my own list.

  The first book was called A Load of Old Balls, and although I had some characters in there that you might expect, like Jesus, I also added a few like Ronald McDonald. I enjoyed writing it, the structure was simple and it was like fifty short pieces of stand-up.

  This then led to the second book — A Load of Old Ball Crunchers — a list of fifty great women in history.

  I am not in the slightest bit organised, so my approach to writing these two books was pretty chaotic and depended on things like how hung-over I was, what was on telly and whether I felt like it. Some days if I was in the mood I could write for twelve hours; other days, after an hour and a half I’d have gone stir crazy and had to go out.

  It was the three novels that I found most difficult. Having had a break from writing for a few years and got married and had children, when I was approached by Headline to write a novel I thought it would be a good idea to accept, because my eldest daughter was still pretty much a baby and it meant I could stay in wearing my nightie and sit at the laptop composing great prose while rocking the cradle with one of my feet.

  Of course it’s never how you expect it to be and after a couple of months I found myself rather resenting the huge amount of work it entailed. A novel is such a massive undertaking. It’s like doing thirty really long essays, all run together. And you wonder where you are going to find enough words to put in it.

  I decided to write about areas that I knew.

  So my first book, Sorting Out Billy, was set in South-East London where I was from and involved three friends, one of whom was a budding stand-up comic (unsurprisingly). One of the three friends had a boyfriend who was violent towards her and it fell to the other two to try and sort him out. It is a comedy book and you may question why I thought domestic violence was a suitable topic for comedy In itself of course it’s not funny, but every base aspect of human nature has a darkly comic side to it and this was what I was trying to achieve.

  The next novel was called It’s Different for Girls and was set in Hastings, again an area that I am very familiar with because I spent my teenage years there. Rather conveniently I set it in the seventies when I was a teenager — hence demolishing with one swipe of my pen as it were, the need for ploughing through archives of teenage lives in that decade.

  And finally my third book — which is my favourite —was called The More You Ignore Me. It was set in Herefordshire, where I spend a lot of time, and involved the two ends of the fan spectrum within one rural family To write it, I drew on my knowledge and experience of mental illness. It seems that now I may have exhausted my personal repertoire, so if I ever write another novel I may well have to spend the first few months doing research.

  The first novel took six months, the second six weeks and the third two years — and all of them had thei
r attendant problems. It’s unlikely that I will ever give up my career as a comic to become a fulltime writer. It’s too lonely and there’s too much opportunity to skive off.

  I have also contributed to other books, including many charity ones. A very popular way of raising money is to produce a celebrity cookbook, and in many ways I am the worst person to come to, because I hate cooking and I like eating very boring food. So I have to rack my brains every time, as I’m sure no one would be too impressed by a recipe for cheese on toast or spag bol, both of which I’m very good at. Well, they’re the only things I’m good at, to be truthful.

  My favourite contribution of all time was to the QI Annual 2008. I was asked to do a page called ‘Fags of the World’ and was sent a sheet of paper with about a hundred packets of cigarettes on it and told to provide a by-line for each one.

  This was tremendous fun to do and enabled me to write captions, say for a packet of Russian cigarettes, with the words: ‘Perfect after you’ve shagged your best friend’s husband’

  Ending the last chapter with a cigarette — a Russian one, to boot — leads me neatly into this chapter on the pleasures and perils of tobacco.

  We are all absolutely certain by now that SMOKING IS A BAD THING. And that’s not just for you as an individual, but also for the people around you into whose faces and lungs you may be blowing your smoke. There was a golden era in the forties and fifties when people were blissfully ignorant of the dangers of smoking and assumed it to be the most sophisticated and attractive habit in the world. Then gradually through research, it began to dawn on us that perhaps it wasn’t the health-giving habit everyone assumed it to be. Smokers metamorphosed from urbane creatures into scuzzy lepers, who were not only damaging themselves but their loved ones too.

  Of course, as a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl I didn’t know anything about this when I started smoking. It was a simple act of teenage rebellion, combined with the boredom of a very long bus journey to school on which several of us would produce our tiny little packets of ten Number Six out of our satchels and try to look like we knew what we were doing as we attempted to direct the stream of smoke out through the tiny slot of window on the bus that we could actually get open.

  After Number Six I moved onto Rothmans, whose ad showed the arm of a pilot at the controls of a plane, thereby implying that you could be something as dashing as a pilot if you sucked on these babies too.

  According to Mr Sigmund Freud, smoking is an oral pursuit and I won’t bore you with the theories, but it seems to me that smoking is used by a lot of people to calm their nerves, firstly by giving them something to do with their hands and secondly by supplying them with some nicotine to soothe their anxiety.

  I have worked in two professions that worship smoking: nursing and comedy It’s amazing how many nurses and doctors smoke, given that they more than anyone, should be well-versed in the potential dangers. But many dedicated smokers play the lottery game of assuming it will not be them who suffer the long-term effects, and cling rather pathetically to stories of stalwart elderly people in their nineties who have smoked eighty a day throughout their lives and can still run a marathon.

  As a nurse I can’t believe now, when I look back to my days in the Emergency Clinic, that we were actually allowed to smoke in the nurses’ office, where you could sit down and have a break or a cry after someone had hit or abused you. The place was thick with the fug of smoke and must have been really unpleasant for the non-smokers, but your smokers tend to be a selfish lot so we just carried on puffing away.

  Similarly in comedy in the good old bad old days, dressing rooms would be stuffed full of nervous comics waiting to go on, dragging on their fags as if they were full of oxygen. Audiences smoked too, so everywhere had a blue-tinged mist hanging over it — and that kind of felt right and matched the atmosphere of tension and expectation.

  As the smoking ban started to bite, I found myself having an increasingly adolescent attitude towards the rules and trying to get away with smoking in as many non-smoking areas as I could. When I toured Australia, we deliberately booked on an airline that still let you smoke, as the thought of a fourteen-hour and then a seven-hour flight did my head in anyway let alone being forbidden to have a fag.

  For me, smoking is a way of tackling social anxiety. These days, I don’t drink so much or so regularly as I don’t think I could function as a parent if I got pissed too often — sorry to deliver such a bombshell. Therefore my life has followed a pattern of drinking absolutely bloody loads in short bursts and behaving quite badly on a number of occasions, but always having a fairly consistent intake on the fag front. When my anxiety rises, so does my smoking, and at social events like parties —or gigs, of course — I do actually find it helps me feel slightly less wobbly.

  During my twenties and thirties, it didn’t really occur to me to give up, but when I decided I wanted to have children I got the most almighty lecture from my GP and decided to stop. I did this by making a cutting-down plan over three weeks, cutting down from forty a day to three on the final day The last days were almost worse than having given up, because the gap between cigarettes seemed to stretch like an eternity of doom ahead of me and I found myself counting down the hours, minutes and seconds to when I could have another one. I didn’t use any chemical aids like that chewing gum.

  On the final day I had a last cigarette, attempting desperately to smoke the filter, and then stopped. It was bloody awful. I tried to cut out things that I associated with smoking, like talking on the phone to friends for hours on end, going to pubs, and Mark Lamarr, who had been a good old smoking buddy for years.

  However, I couldn’t actually cut out Mark Lamarr as I had a gig in Birmingham at the Glee Club two days into the new fag-free regime. I had decided to aid my giving up with some special medication known as Murray Mints (‘too good to hurry mints’) and seemed to be getting through about three bags a day When I arrived at the Glee and walked into the dressing room it smelled like a war zone to me. I had been free of smoke for two days and it was a bit of a shock. Also, I was worried that without the crutch of a cigarette, my act would fall to pieces. However, I didn’t give in and did my first ever smoke-free gig.

  Up until this point, I also used to smoke on stage —which seems like some weird surreal dream now. If I’m honest, my set was a bit shit, but better than I’d expected. I’d thought I might just break down on stage and sink to my knees crying, but I got through it — and as soon as I walked off stage made a run for the door, back to my smoke-free world. There is no doubt I was irritable over a number of weeks and possibly months, but eventually I realised I could live with it and settled into a fag-free existence.

  That fag-free existence lasted for five years, although occasionally I would catch a whiff of someone’s cigarette and be carried back nostalgically to those days when my powers of self-denial were rubbish. I suppose I just tried to be pleased that my powers of self-denial had been strengthened.

  My willpower did crack, though, five years on. This was down to a stressful period in my life consisting of too much work, some family problems and being pissed. I was at a launch party for Paul O’Grady’s latest book and for once I’d left the car at home. Normally I use the car to stop myself binge drinking, as having got away with drinking and driving once I knew I would never do it again. I don’t normally go to things like this, but I’m very fond of Paul and I needed a night out.

  Having imbibed enough alcohol to lower the resistance of the Pope, I looked at a friend’s cigarette and found myself saying, ‘Can I have a puff?’ My mate Alan Davies gave me the beady eye (he has always tried to stop my smoking excesses) but, fuelled by enough vodka and tonics to render an entire office Christmas party unconscious, I turned away and took a drag on my friend Andy’s cigarette. Blimey, was it lovely And that was the beginning of the end. At the next party I had a whole one and over the next six months, passed the point of no return by eventually buying my own packet — a sure sign I was on the road t
o rack and ruin.

  So, sadly I am a smoker again, but this time round I seem to have a little more control than I did and am planning to try and tackle it again. Don’t know where, don’t know when, but I’m sure I’ll meet the non-smoking me again some sunny day.

  What I like best in life is reading books, preferably accompanied by a little light scoffing. It is something that has not been easy to do since I’ve had kids, as finding time to read when there are eight thousand other things to do is like putting time aside for darning. That is the main reason why I agree to judge book awards, as I know it will force me to read and that I will love it. And I do. Books have been really important to me throughout my life, and the books I love best which have really stayed with me are the following:

  The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

  by Robert Tressell

  This is one of the first books written at the turn of the last century which is actually about the working classes.

  It is quite a dense, difficult read and I rejected it as a teenager, because there just seemed too many long words on the page. It is about a group of builders doing up a house for a rich bloke in ‘Mugsborough’, a fictional town which is actually based on Hastings, where I spent a lot of time as a teenager.

  The group of builders all have very different personalities and political views, and to some extent are caricatures, but the story gives a real insight into the lives of the poor, as men are laid off, families struggle with feeding their children and preventable tragedies occur. The idea of socialism rears its head through one of the characters who is a committed leftie. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists also has a very poignant connection for me in that my lovely brother-in-law Paul, who died at a relatively young age just after our daughter Maisie was born, and who taught English Literature at Oxford Brookes University was an expert on this book. It is one of the must-reads for anyone who has vaguely left-wing views, and must have been a breath of fresh air for readers, who at that time had only been treated to the lives of the middle and upper classes with whom they would have found it very hard to identify.