HOWZAT

Anyone who saw the bovver-booted Brand in those days will recall the abuse (and beer and peanuts) hurled her way, and her calm and deadly put-downs. It wasn’t that she didn’t mind the fatso insults — she did — but rather that she needed to decontaminate them before they could do her harm. In essence, her act was a masterclass in revenge. “Before I was a stand-up, people would insult me anyway,” she says. “Men shouted at me in the street. One of the worst things for fat women is to be out on their own and see a group of young blokes coming towards them. You know they’re going to say something filthy or nasty. I’d been through that ordeal; the stand-up was my self-defence. I’d had a wealth of putdowns in my head for years that I’d never had the chance to use. It was great to use them on people who couldn’t get away because they were in the middle of a row.”

In two years, Brand moved from the dingy clubs to television, with her own show, Jo Brand Through the Cakehole, so appallingly named, she insists, because she couldn’t be bothered to think of anything better. She claims the same innate indolence also explains her “house looking like a tip” and her utter contempt for dressing up. Yet when it comes to the things that matter — the two daughters she had at 43 and 45, her marriage to their father — she drops the insouciance and smiles almost shyly. “It’s just lovely.”

I ask her if she feels sorry for Carol Thatcher, who lost her slot on BBC’s The One Show after the “golly­gate” revelations. Of the two similarly aged women, Brand has had far more luck in life, after all: money, career, family. She pauses. “I do feel sorry for her that she was brought up to be comfortable with language like that. It was probably more Denis, but it’s interesting to speculate that Margaret Thatcher didn’t gainsay any of it.”

In the past she has described herself as a “bitter, alienated old sod”, but today she tells me she has always been basically happy, which I am far more inclined to believe. Unlike other meno­pausal mothers, fretting over fading looks and missed chances, Brand looks simply the same, but richer and calmer, though never overconfident. She had been worried she’d stand out as a poor actor in Getting On, but at least she knew the hospital world it was portraying. “It was a comfort zone for me. Maybe if I take a risk and play Marie Antoinette next time, it won’t work as well. What do you think?”

Getting On will be screened next month on BBC4

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