Jenny Eclair on touring her memoir
Jenny Eclair on touring her memoir
As she takes her memoir out on tour, we talk to the comedian about bringing her life story to a live audience…
Photo credit: Nicky Johnston
LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST WITH JENNY HERE
‘Professional show-off’ Jenny Eclair has put pen to paper for her memoir. It’s an honest and funny insight into the popular comedian, novelist and podcast presenter, in which she reveals everything from ‘sleeping with men who looked like they lived under a carpet’ to being the first woman to win the Perrier Award. And Jenny has now made the autobiography the topic of her new tour.
She decided to write the book after realising she wasn’t in the right state of mind to go ahead with her plan to write another novel. “My mother had just died and I was weak physically and mentally. The publishers were very, very kind and they let me write the memoir instead. It was very good for me. It was cathartic in some respects.”
The tour material reveals her story but she says it is one that is universal. “It is about how my family operated, but also I’m pushing it back out to the audience. I go decade by decade, and there’s usually somebody who’s in their 20s or their 30s or their 40s or their 50s, 60s… and I just throw it out so that the audience don’t feel excluded from my story, because it’s a shared story.”
Jenny says she is comfortable to reveal so much about her life. “I’ve always been an over-sharer and there’s never been very many secrets in my stand-up – I have this massive back catalogue and I have jokes to suit many, many occasions.”
What will audiences take away from it? “I think what will surprise them is that some people have really happy childhoods and really happy relationships with their parents and siblings…and it is possible to still be quite screwed up, even if you’ve had a very good start in life.
“It was only when I was left to my own devices that I really started to screw things up. I made some very unwise decisions as a teenager and then at drama school, developing an eating disorder and sleeping with terrible people. Then coming to London and embarking on a slightly ridiculous career, which I have no regrets over. I was never destined for a proper job.”
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While it may not be what she calls a ‘proper job’, it has been an impressive career, which has included a Perrier Award in 1995, becoming an acclaimed writer, presenting BBC1’s Grumpy Old Women and writing the much-loved BBC Radio Four Little Lifetimes monologues.
Now a grandma, she divides her time between working, being with her two-year-old grandchild, and exploring wherever her bus pass will take her from her home in Camberwell. “I live on a main bus route and I’ve got an over 60s Oyster pass. I can go anywhere I like for nothing – after rush hour. And I give that Oyster card a right good spanking most weeks. We’ve got a lot of parks on the doorstep, and I can get to the West End or go off to the Hayward Art Gallery. I can get anywhere on a bus.”
Jenny hosts two popular podcasts – one is a Taskmaster spin-off; the other, Older and Wider, she co-hosts with Judith Holder, producer of Grumpy Old Women.
“We are chalk and cheese. I think that a lot of women who listen sort of align themselves with either a me or a her. Although we’ve started to morph slightly into each other. She never used to swear as much as she does now. I also started planting bulbs in October to come out in the spring, and I never used to do stuff like that. We got a lot of emails, particularly in lockdown, saying that the podcast provided a much needed sort of blathering really. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea but for the people it works for, it works for them.”
