I meet Jo Brand in picturesque Dulwich, a place she once travelled through on
the bus to her job as a nurse at the Maudsley psychiatric hospital, nose
pressed against the window, pondering on how the other half lived. The buses
and nursing have long gone, but as she trundles into the cafe near her home,
she looks reassuringly familiar. She had seemed of late to have adopted a
more elegant style of dress, leading some to say that her happy marriage,
motherhood and new-found fitness (the self-confessed lazybones now runs
marathons instead of stockpiling them) were easing her into fragrant middle
age, almost WI material. But no, we can relax: within half an hour, the
52-year-old in a ripped black tracksuit, scarecrow hair restrained with an
(almost) comedy pink bow — she looks like Ermintrude in mourning — has
relocated to the garden for a fag, which she is requested to extinguish.
“Oh, well,” she chuckles, “I got two in before they asked.”
Outside, with her cigarette and her sunglasses for protection, Brand is
cheerful company as we discuss dementia, incontinence and criminal insanity,
while local yummy mummies sipping skinny lattes shoot her glances, impressed
by her fame and appalled by her outfit.
Mental health is a big issue in Brand’s life. It’s not that she lacks it, more
that she is fascinated by it.
Her mother was a psychiatric social worker for a time; her husband, Bernie, is
a psychiatric nurse; and for 10 years she worked as one herself, dealing
with the tough nuts (and nutcases) of south London. “We treated a lot of
criminals who’d killed people,” she says. “I was scared from time to time.
I’m not particularly calm, but I’m good at acting calm. It proved to be the
same in stand-up — if you look like you’re not fazed by the hecklers, it
helps.”
The job was valuable background for her new series, Getting On, a pitch-black
comedy set in some forgotten NHS ward, peopled by elderly ladies with
wandering minds and nowhere better to go; a place beset by C. diff, lunatic
form-filling and self-obsessed consultants. Brand plays a common-sense nurse
called Kim Wilde (the real one approved the choice, and even offered to
appear as a patient), maintaining humour, incredulity and plain kindness
amid the absurdities of a hospital where a patient’s “accident” must be
reported as a “critical incident” rather than cleaned up. Written by Brand
and her two female co-stars, it was directed by Peter Capaldi, who pruned
the jokes and concentrated on the vérité of the handheld camera, one of the
patients spewing out improvised language that would make Malcolm Tucker
blush.
Brand herself is resolutely sane: seemingly one of the few comedians of her
generation not afflicted with depression. Fry, Laurie, Wax, Merton: the list
of personality disorders winds around the light-entertainment brigade like a
straitjacket. “For a lot of comics,” she says, “there’s definitely an
element of catharsis. They are outsiders in one way or another. A lot of
them have personality disorders and a tangential view of the world. When a
manic depressive is flying high, they can be very funny. It’s what Eddie
Izzard does. But he does it without being ill.”
Brand still sometimes misses nursing. For all her reputation as a toughie, she
has a soft centre when it comes to the vulnerable; as a teenager, she took
disabled children on holiday; she worked in a Barnardo’s home; she
considered training as a psychiatrist, but the “blood and gore” of the
medical life put her off. “And I’d probably just get a bit too involved.”
She offsets the comparative shallowness of show business — she feels it
keenly — with her charity work, and she’s a pushover for worthy fundraisers.
In fact, her last public appearance when we met had been not a show, but
chairing the annual conference of Unionlearn, the TUC’s learning and skills
organisation.
These days, the “sea monster”, as she once billed herself, is cosy as
crumpets: a Countdown guest, a reliable, multipurpose celeb, almost a
national treasure, which has rescued her from the tired gags about useless
blokes. Apparently, she was more employable after her bumpy makeover with
Trinny and Susannah. “After that, a lot of TV execs went, ‘Ooh, she’s
normal. She’s not the man-hating, hideous old lesbian we thought she was.
Now we can employ her, and she’s not going to saw someone’s bollocks off.’”
For the BBC’s Play It Again, she performed Bach’s Toccata in D minor on the
organ at the Albert Hall; she appears on Question Time as a “representative
of the great unwashed”. When she revealed she was a fan of Jarvis Cocker,
she was asked to interview Pulp for an NME cover story: “It was amazing.”
Last year, she played the Sergeant of Police in The Pirates of Penzance,
despite “the small matter of not being able to sing”.
Have the prizes and privileges softened her? She has grown up, certainly. In
1986, she did her first stand-up fuelled by seven pints of lager, drawn to
the drink, drugs and dangerous behaviour of the circuit, just as she had
been to the “bad gang” at school. Where did the sexual politics come from?
“That was just part of me. My mum is a strong feminist. She wouldn’t let me
have Jackie magazine or watch girlie things on telly. And I had two
brothers, so we used to play in the woods all day, throwing mud at each
other. There was nothing very feminine about it, which was great.”
Her parents, who met at Young Socialists (“He went for the beer, she went for
the blokes”), were the source of social conscience, the kind of family it
was hard to rebel against — until she fell in love with an upper-class
wastrel and heroin addict, forcing them to make her choose between love and
home. She left, got a part-time job in the civil service and did her A
levels with one day a week at school. “It was great. I had my own flat. I
was very popular.”
She is nostalgic for the crummy clubs and sustaining mateyness of her early
career. “You couldn’t see the stage for cigarette smoke a lot of the time. I
loved all those grotty places. I loved being in some crappy old kitchen
because there was no dressing room, sitting on the bin, having a laugh.
There was a sense of camaraderie.” At the Edinburgh Fringe’s Late’n’Live
show, she got drunk as a strategy. “They got all the English comics on late
so a load of pissed Scottish people could tell us how much they hated us. It
started at one in the morning. I’d get as pissed as the audience, so I could
be equally abusive back.”
