‘It’s far too late for me to go to the gym every 10 minutes’: Jo Brand on ageing, raging, fitness and grief

The comedian turns 70 soon, and in her new book, she contemplates the years ahead. She explains why she loves a work in progress, the importance of anger in mourning, and how she gave up smoking – only to become a champion vaper

Had Jo Brand, who turns 70 next year, been spending a long time thinking about getting older? Had it become the subject that consumed her, and the reason why, now, she felt impelled to write a book about the vagaries of ageing? No, she says, laughing. She was simply asked if she’d like to do it.

Still, it encouraged introspection about what she wanted her future to look like. “Now’s the time, if you want things, to get them in place. I think a lot of people say, ‘I really want to do that, but I’ll forget it for now.’ And then they get to a stage where they can’t.” Does she mean bucket-list things? “No, I mean … what do I mean?” Brand pauses. “I mean the ability to perhaps end your own …” She doesn’t go there, but the end to that sentence is obviously: life.

“I know it’s not legal yet, but I think it will be, sooner rather than later.” Her mother had procured drugs to end her own life when she was ill, though she didn’t use them. Two minutes in, and we’re already talking about assisted dying. Off-duty comedians – such a laugh.

I’m being unfair. Of course Brand is fun, but ageing isn’t, sometimes. In her book, Decline and Falling Over, she calls the point past middle age “your shitter second half”. The book is funny, as you’d expect, but also surprisingly sober, covering such cheering topics as the decision to go into a care home and, yes, assisted dying.

Despite thinking about what she wants her future to look like, Brand has not yet come to any solid conclusions. As a teenager, she worked in a residential home (for adults with learning disabilities, rather than older people), and complained after she witnessed some “appalling behaviour” by male staff. It was not investigated; instead, she was sacked. She was left with a fear of care homes. “That was in the 70s. Are they that different now? Who knows?” But, she adds, “I can’t imagine I can persuade any of my family to get interested in looking after me.” (She has two grown-up daughters.)

Are there any benefits of getting older? “Being rude to people.” She laughs. “No, not really. But saying what you think, I suppose. I like the whole ‘grumpy old woman’ sort of thing. I do quite like being grumpy. I’ve never really been a grumpy person. I’ve been a bit friendly, and tried to be pleasant to everyone – not on stage, I accept that, because a lot of people think I’m probably horrible, but in my personal life.” It is, she says, “that whole thing that a lot of women suffer from, which is putting everybody first and themselves last”.

Brand writes several times that she’s a “people pleaser” – which, given her bolshie stage persona and unflinching attitude, surprises me (although she has always seemed thoughtful, and very kind). “It surprises me as well,” she says. We’re in a meeting room at the Guardian offices, Brand glorious in layers of black with dark pink hair, looking queenly but punk. “I have always been one because … well, why? I’ve no idea. My dad was quite hard to please, so maybe I spent quite a lot of time doing that.”

Did the on-stage version of her character not influence the way she was in real life? “I don’t think it really did,” she says. “I think that was because there weren’t many women comics around when I started – you needed a sort of shield.” If she could be more vulgar, more aggressive than the drunk men who heckled her, they’d back off – or at least, she hoped, word would get around that she wasn’t to be messed with. “If you’re heckled, you have to deal with it because audiences lose faith in you if you don’t, so I had a sliding scale of pleasant through to soul-destroying. I never wanted to use soul-destroying, but I occasionally would.”

Growing up in Hastings, where the family ended up after moving from London and Kent, the teenage Brand was rebellious rather than people-pleasing. She had unsuitable boyfriends, stayed out, discovered drugs. “But that was more to do with the circumstances we were in,” she says. “At the time my dad was in a very bad place, and so he was really difficult to live with.” He could be violent. “I mean, not as bad as some poor women have it on a regular basis, but quite a few times. Mainly when I answered back to him, or my little brother did.” Brand, I notice, tends to downplay a lot, but it must have been scary. “It makes you a bit jumpy, hypervigilant. So I was only too delighted to get out of home.”

She moved into a bedsit at 17. It was quite exciting, looking back. “We had the freedom to behave appallingly, if we wanted to.” Was she in danger of going out of control? “I always had a sense of when the brakes should be applied. So I was never in danger of, let’s say, becoming a heroin addict, even though I was around a lot of people that used drugs. I think I would have quite happily drunk a lot more if I could drink.” But she couldn’t hold it. “When I was at university, I was very cheap to get pissed.”

Becoming a comic had been Brand’s ambition since she was a teenager. “I liked making people laugh, but not in any well-formed sense of doing an act.” She became a psychiatric nurse instead, trying standup at 29. “I imposed a pointless line on my life: that you can’t get to 30 and not have tried comedy.” It helped that she was older, she thinks, and that no heckler could ever be as shocking or as aggressive as some of the patients she had dealt with, who suffered with psychosis. “I was a bit hardened.”

Still, how did she not let it get to her, listening to drunk men making personal attacks? “My self-esteem had gone as low as it probably could. It’s hard, because it’s embarrassing if someone says something really gross and awful to you in front of a big group of other people. And the way to deal with it, to me, is to come back with something better. It’s like a battle. If we’d had to fight each other, obviously I wouldn’t have done terribly well.” She smiles. “But I might have done.”

What was it like to be a young woman on the circuit? Was sexual harassment part of her experience? “Not the way I looked,” Brand laughs. Then she reconsiders: “Actually, there were a few comics occasionally trying to get in my room at two o’clock in the morning. I just shouted through the door, told them to fuck off, and they did. So it was nothing that I couldn’t deal with.”

Still, the 80s comedy circuit sounds as if it must have been thrilling. It was, she says. “There was such a variety of people doing such weird things, like melting a block of ice or whatever it was they did,” she says, referring to the performance artist Anthony Irvine, known as the Iceman. “These days, it’s much more uniform. I think there are some really brilliant comics around, but it’s become very stand-uppy.” It’s expected to be more polished now, I venture, less anarchic. “Yes, maybe anarchy needs to come back.”

The birth of alternative comedy in the 80s must also have felt exciting, politically, after decades of old-style comedians with their racist and sexist jokes. For a while it must have felt as if a generation of progressive comics could change, or at least help change, society. But it doesn’t feel like that now. “Yeah, the world is in a mess,” says Brand. “But there are an awful lot of good people, and I just hope the good people win out. I’m not an optimist, but then again, I’m not a terrible pessimist, either.”

By 1993 Brand had her own show, Jo Brand Through the Cakehole. It was a mix of standup and sketches. In one segment – Drudge Squad, her spoof cop show – two female detectives worn down by domesticity try to fight crime amid laundry baskets and useless husbands.

There were men in the tabloids who were unforgivably awful about Brand, especially about the way she looked. But as for the teenage girls (myself among them) who watched her Friday night Channel 4 show, it’s hard to overstate the thrill of seeing Brand, a woman who looked and spoke differently from everyone else: hilariously rude and unapologetic.

Is she envious of female comedians starting now? Does she think they get an easier time? “I’m not, actually. There’s a lot more really good competition these days, and because we were quite unusual – I think there were 15 of us out of, like, 200 male comics – we were a bit of a novelty act, so that was a help. And people didn’t quite know what to make of us, and that was a help, too.”

Until last year, Brand presented the Great British Bake Off after-show, An Extra Slice, and this year she is doing a book tour. She has already won a Bafta for her role as a kind but harassed nurse in Getting On, the BBC comedy she co-wrote with Vicki Pepperdine and Joanna Scanlan, set in an NHS geriatric ward. Over the years, she has – for television – learned to play the organ at the Royal Albert Hall, performed as Britney Spears and, for Comic Relief in 2016, walked 140 miles from Hull to Liverpool.

One aspect of getting older, she says, is that she is less adventurous than she used to be. “I used to do quite a lot of stupid things, like jump off things or learn how to rally drive. I couldn’t imagine being a rally driver now. I love a bit of madness like that, but I’m much less mad than I used to be, physically.”

Brand also doesn’t do as many live shows. She thinks her memory took a hit during the pandemic, which makes remembering long sets a bit harder. But she has been doing some “work-in-progress shows”, which takes the pressure off a polished performance. “I was so delighted that I could use that tag, which basically means: most of this might be rubbish.”

One of the worst things about ageing, she says, particularly as a woman, is that “you get ignored. Putting my job for a moment out of the equation, older men still get much more respect than older women, because we all think older women are just one big blob that looks the same. I think it’s going to take a while longer to cherish older women for the fantastic variety that they are.”

Brand has experienced tragedy in the last 10 years – she lost her parents, both brothers, and two of her three best friends. How has she dealt with it? “I’ve been very good at suppressing my emotions,” she says. “I was always taught not to show any weakness in public, which used to be just a bloke’s thing, didn’t it? So I probably haven’t handled it all very well – I just pretended it wasn’t happening for a long time because I couldn’t believe how awful it was.”

In her book, she writes about being stuck at the “angry stage” of grief for a while. “I like the angry stage,” she says. “I think anger is just as valid as crying – you can be angry about people leaving you. I think being angry is very good for me.” As for denial, another part of the so-called five stages of grief, Brand says she could probably do it for the rest of her life. “So yes, I’m not terribly good at grief, because I’m not terribly good at acceptance, either – I don’t think I’ve done that yet at all.” Sometimes she’ll think she hasn’t heard from one of those best friends for a while. “And then I remember. That weird stuff happens with grief all the time, doesn’t it?”

Has it made her agonise about her own mortality more? “Less! I refuse to think about it. I’m a massive avoider of those sorts of things. I know it’s a bad thing to be, but what’s the point of thinking about it? It’s far too late for me to go down the gym every 10 minutes. At least, I did give up smoking, but now I’m a champion vaper.”

Best just to get on with things. Or at least take a tip on ageing from her great-grandmother, “who just went to bed and ate chocolate all day”. Not that retirement holds any appeal. Brand is lucky, she says, in that her job is not one she has to retire from. “There are still enough people to come and see me at shows, so I can do that if I want to.” Long may she reign.

Decline and Falling Over is published by Penguin (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.