Jo Brand is one of our favourite female comedians and TV personalities. After years of solo stand-up, she’s off to play Aladdin’s genie at Wimbledon. Emily Horton is enchanted
Jo Brand is one very busy lady. She is one of Britain’s foremost female stand-up comedians, and the last few years have seen her diversify her comedic roots and carve out a successful career as a TV personality.
Her talents as an author and actress have been put to test across a multitude of projects, including co-writing and starring in BBC’s NHS sitcom Getting On, as a host of Have I Got News For You and as a regular panellist on QI.
Taking on a wide remit of roles is clearly something Jo relishes. She is now adding pantomine to that list of accomplishments, making her debut this month as the Genie of the Ring in Aladdin with Matthew Kelly and street dance troupe Fallen at the New Wimbledon Theatre.
“I’ve never done panto before. I’ve done a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan and that was well worth a crack,” she says.
Surely it will be an easy transition given Jo’s years of experience toughening up from doing stand-up?
“I don’t look upon it as a doddle. I have no idea. I imagine it will be very different,” she adds modestly.
Doddle or no, taking on panto seems quite a change from the Jo we knew of old when she first started her TV career on Channel 4 with Jo Brand Through the Cakehole. Not only was she a woman tackling a notoriously tough, male-dominated industry, but neither did she shy away from asserting her feminist ideals.
Yet, after her joke about Prince Harry’s taking of Class-A drugs, whilst hosting an episode of HIGNFY in October, you might think that nothing much has changed; she is still is one to shock.
“Inside I feel like I am still the same horrible old hideous feminist that I always was,” she laughs.
Jo certainly used to pack a punch with her repertoire in the early days. Her angry, biting comments covered misogyny, sex and politics, which certainly seemed to rile a lot of her critics. With her pared down appearance, wild hair and Doc Marten boots, she raised more than a few heckles and derisive comments from her audiences and the tabloid press.
“An awful lot of stuff that people used to say about me wasn’t true. A lot of it was just what they’d assumed about me from watching my stand-up for ten minutes,” she explains, adding: “but all this stuff about hating men was absolutely daft. Of course I don’t.
“Unfortunately, I think you get boiled down into a very simplistic figure when your described in the press – particularly in the tabloids and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Born in Wandsworth, but raised in Kent, Jo trained and worked as a psychiatric nurse at both the Maudsley and Beckenham hospitals in south London before making the transition into comedy. Success was hard earned with gruelling stints at alternative comedy clubs around the capital before appearances on Saturday Night Live and her aforementioned C4 series.
No doubt working in mental health required a cast-iron sense of humour, but her early career clearly left its mark as Jo continues to be a staunch supporter of mental health work.
“Mental health issues are a little bit far down the hierarchy of glamour.” she tells me. “People prefer to get involved with kittens and children in charity.”
Despite increasing suicide rates (as noted by South London charity CoolTan Arts) and recent Government cuts to financial support for mental health care, Jo is almost a lone beacon in raising awareness as well as funds.
Indeed, her charitable work has seen her grace many stages all over the country, including Surrey, having appeared at the Epsom Playhouse and Kingston’s Rose Theatre for the town’s children charity Momentum last year.
She also rattles off a list of five or six other recent charitable gigs, including an appearance in November alongside Alastair Campbell at The Criterion, London.
“I keep that all ticking over with the time I can spare. I know that a lot of people pick two charities and stick with them but I try spread myself thin (if only!) to as many charities as I can.”
Talking of ‘thin’, Jo relates her love of Richmond Park and reveals the rather unlikely fact that, in addition to walks with her family, she also used to run there.
“I love Richmond Park. In fact, I know it too well. I trained there for the London marathon about eight or nine years’ ago.”
I’m rather ashamed to say that stops me dead in my tracks. Marathon, I gasp?
“Yeah, I actually got a very bad virus the week of the marathon so I had to pull out. Hooray, I wept in brackets,” she laughs. “It was a shame because I had done such a huge amount of training. I got up to running twice around the park – which let me tell you is absolutely horrible – its horrible and it used to take me days. It was a shame that I couldn’t do it in the end, but better not to do it than drop dead in front of everyone!”
It seems that Jo is not really an enormous fan of exercise (“the problem is, if you haven’t got a lot of time, it’s just a bloody palaver really”), but that didn’t stop her taking on yet another challenge when she took part in ITV’s celebrity Splash! with Olympian Tom Daley.
Presumably the constant vision of Tom Daley in trunks had something to do with it. On a serious note, it seems that the busy comedian simply does not have the luxury of spare hours to devote to the body beautiful.
“I just simply don’t have the time, what with work and a family to fit in enough swimming. The luxury of a spare two or three hours in the day to go and do exercise. It’s very hard to fit it in.”
Regular exercise may not get a look-in to the Brand diary but there’s no doubt that her schedule is filled with many diverse projects, including some that show her more sensitive side.
A role judging Countryfile’s annual photographic competition brought her to the British Wildlife Centre in Lingfield, where she laments she got to see the food chain in action a little too closely.
She recalls how she visited one day when a mother duck had inadvisedly laid her eggs in the otter compound. She watched aghast as a tiny duckling struck out across the pond as one of the otters slid noiselessly into the water “looking for a pre-lunchtime duckling hor d’oeuvre”.
Seeing this she “all but waded in to try and scoop up the poor little bugger.”
However, co-presenter Chris Packham soon put a stop to it by telling her she had to get used to the idea.
Saying goodbye to Jo, I wondered whether her husband of 16 years, Bernie Bourke, and teenage daughters Maisie and Eliza would be coming to watch her don her glitzy costume and emerge from the magic lamp.
She doesn’t sound too convinced.
“I presume the girls will come and watch. At least I don’t think they’ll say they don’t want to come!” laughing with a trace of irony.
It is clear that this funny lady has her feet very much on the ground and is as self-deprecating as ever. She has always been noted for taking the mickey out of herself before extending that laconic wit of hers onto others and, like the hundreds of residents snapping up tickets to Aladdin, I have been well and truly charmed by this particular genie.
Aladdin runs at the New Wimbledon Theatre, Dec 6–Jan 12 atgtickets.com/wimbledon
