BRAND'S NEW BAG

EARLIER THIS year, Jo Brand appeared as a guest on Jonathan Ross’ Saturday Zoo TV show, but half-way through the programme she unaccountably disappeared.

During her stint on Jonathan’s sofa, the conversation had turned to the relative sexual appeal of various Hollywood movie stars.

“Isn’t Arnold Schwarzenegger gorgeous?” Ross asked Jo, his eyes atwinkle with irony.

“Frankly, I’d rather shag Danny De Vito,” replied Ms. Brand with equal sarcasm.

As it happened, Danny De Vito was another of the guests on that evening’s show and was actually sitting right beside her at the time. Therefore when, after the next commercial break, Jo Brand had vanished and De Vito was still around, viewers naturally assumed that she had been ordered off the set for daring to insult the pint-size megastar.

“It looked that way alright,” chuckles Brand. “But, in fact, De Vito thought it was a good laugh. What happened to me was that I was desperate for a fag. I just went off in the break and didn’t bother coming back.”

Jo Brand is the queen of British comedy, the femme with the most fatale one-liners in town. Sharper than French and Saunders, more dangerous than Victoria Wood, Brand’s humour has an undeniable edge and edginess– she has her toasts (“booze, fags, shagging, cakes”) but also her prey (“men, mostly”).

“I just talk about my own life really, the things that make me happy and the things that piss me off, “ she explains. “What I do find constantly amusing is how horrible men can be, and how stupid. All the way from big things like war and rape down to the little things, like your typical yobbo bloke who believes that – the great smells of beer, Brut and kebabs notwithstanding – a date with Claudia Schiffer is a distinct possibility.”

After seven years on the British comedy scene, Brand loyalty among the public has grown to a point where she is now regarded as one of the biggest draws on the U.K. circuit. Her instantly recognisable silhouette – arms crossed, tousled hair, calf-length leggings and Doc Martens – on a poster outside any venue is enough to guarantee full houses.

She has also become one of the most popular faces on TV, appearing regularly on shows such as The Brain Drain, Have I Got News For You and Paramount City. Her own first television special, Jo Brand Through The Cakehole, goes out on Channel 4 on December 30th, and a full sketch and stand-up series will follow in the new year.

“The God of television is a funny old beast,” she says. “As soon as you get your gob on telly, more people start coming to see you even if you’re really crap. But really, I prefer playing clubs than doing telly. Doing a regular show like The Brain Drain was quite stressful really. It’s a bit too relentless, constantly having to come up with new ideas. Your failure rate gets a lot higher. The good thing about television is that they pay you absolutely bloody thousands.”

And has all this extra dosh changed Jo Brand’s life? “Not really,” she insists. “I’ve bought a few new clothes but that’s it really. I’ve got the same flat, the same car and I still do the same things.”

Now thirty-five, Brand grew up in a small village in Kent and had what she terms a “fairly normal” childhood until she was fourteen and then started to “go a bit bonkers.”

“I met this bloke,” she sighs. “And if you’d asked my mum and dad who was the most unsuitable person in Sussex for me to go out with, that was who I homed in on. He was the local ne’er-do-well and layabout, and a drug addict to boot. I got pretty seriously involved with him and generally went off the rails really for a few years. It was certainly the end of my days as a well-behaved little schoolgirl.”

Eventually, however, Jo emerged apparently unscathed from her “bonkers” period and trained as, of all things, a psychiatric nurse.

“People with psychiatric problems appeal to me,” she explains. “And also, most of the people who work in psychiatric nursing are great people. They’re a good laugh and bright and very easy to get on with. Every day was different because I worked in a walk-in emergency clinic. It covered the whole range, from people who were feeling depressed to acutely psychotic patients who were running naked up the Walworth Road.

“I have to say that it’s a very stressful job though, genuinely stressful. That’s why I always laugh when I hear myself saying that being a comic is stressful. You’re under a different kind of stress when a patient has got you in the corner of a ward with a knife to your throat than when you’re on The Brain Drain (laughs).”

Having “mucked about” for a couple of years as a part-time comic, Jo Brand eventually decided to quit nursing and turn pro in 1987. “Psychiatric nursing is not something you should do your whole life, anyway,” she asserts. “You end up either as institutionalised as the patients, or just not giving a toss about them and being fairly cruel.

“Around this time, I also got offered a spot on Friday Night Live and I felt I couldn’t go back to being a senior charge nurse in an emergency clinic after I’d been on telly talking about how I think women should be armed with shotguns so they can shoot blokes who get on their nerves (laughs). It’s not exactly a good image for the caring professions.”

Ask Jo Brand which comedian she most admires and she’ll instantly reply “Billy Connolly” but then, just as instantly, she’ll qualify that with “but only early Billy Connolly.” Jo is not impressed with the new look alcohol-free, healthfood-eating, American-friendly Billy Connolly.

“That’s all crap,” she says. “His comedy definitely suffered when he went all clean living. I don’t see how it could’ve been otherwise really. A lot of comedy is about the excesses and tragedy of human nature. And if you’re a good boy and you’re not getting out of your head on things and you’re fairly normal and straight, then you’re not going to have very many interesting things to talk about. That definitely seems to be what happened to Billy Connolly.

“Look at Brendan Behan or Dylan Thomas or all the romantic poets. Basically, they were incredibly disturbed people who were out of their heads on one substance or another most of the time, and produced fantastic stuff. I don’t think that if you’re an incredibly balanced person you’ll be able to go far enough into the depths of yourself to produce stuff that is going to appeal to people.”

Surely, however, there comes a point when even the most productive debauchee must choose between the benefits of this kind of creative process and its effects on health and sanity? “That’s right,” replies Brand, “but I think it’s better to make the decision to maintain the quality of your material. I think the benefits far outweigh the effects, myself.”

Jo Brand herself may not be quite in the Behan or Thomas league of self-destruction but she does insist that her lifestyle is “slobbish in the extreme.” Her devotion to drink, she says, is overshadowed by nothing except her devotion to food. And, as many of us know only too well, there is a price to be paid for such passionate commitment, but Jo wouldn’t have it any other way.

“If I wasn’t fat I wouldn’t feel the way I feel,” she asserts, “and I wouldn’t have the personality I have which is all tied up with what it’s like to be different from thin people and how you are treated. If I wasn’t fat and sad and bitter (laughs), I wouldn’t be a comic.”

Jo Brand is clearly happy with her shape, especially seeing as it seems to bother some men so much. “I do think there is an unconscious wish in most men to have women be where they want them to be, to have us look the way they want us to look,” she insists. “I think some men feel insulted by the idea that I don’t care that I’m not attractive to them. You can hear it in the heckles I get.

“It’s usually something about my weight, ranging from the imaginative ‘You’re fat’ to the highly imaginative ‘Fuck off, fatty’. Very funny, boys. Women have to live with this shit all the time and it’s that that makes me angry, not that some sad tosser has a problem with my waistline.”

The sad tosser who has most publicly insulted Jo Brand is the egregious Gary Bushell who in his TV column in The Sun described her first as “a hideous old boiler” and, more recently, as a lookalike for “The Beast of Bodmin Moor.” Characteristically, Brand’s retort scores a direct hit.

“He should bear in mind that he’s not exactly an oil painting himself,” she says. “Unless, of course, someone has painted a picture called ‘Constipated Warthog’! Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to respond to his criticisms on a face to face basis just yet but I’d quite like to. At the moment, I’m trying to work out a precise strategy.”

Towards the end of our interview, Jo Brand announces that one day she would like to become a Labour MP. I laugh, in expectation of a punchline, but she assures me that this is quite a serious aspiration.

“I’ve never really been an ambitious person,” she says. “When I was about thirteen and behaving myself in school, I had ambitions to be a great intellect but all that went out the window because pubs and blokes seemed a lot more exciting.

“Now, I’m certainly not especially driven by ambition in my career. I’d just like to have a reasonably interesting life and to try and do something positive that benefits other people – if that doesn’t sound too patronising. If I have a real ambition, it’s to go into politics. In a vague sort of way, I think it would be great to be an MP.”

Of course, the House of Commons is already teeming with far too many amateur comedians and clowns so what possible appeal could it hold for someone like Jo Brand?

“I dunno, most of them are so crap that it wouldn’t be hard to appear spectacularly good, I suppose,” she avers. “Obviously, I’d have to be able to devote all my time to it and, at the moment, the comedy is too important, really. When the comedy starts to lose its attraction, maybe I’ll phone up the Labour Party and see if they want me. They ask me to do benefits for them but that’s not quite the same thing, is it?

“Anyway, maybe in ten years, I’ll be lying drunk in a gutter or something and they might feel that I was a little unelectable.”

Jo Brand plays Dublin’s Olympia Theatre on Sunday, December 5th