Comic Jenny Eclair talks to Emma Johnson about life after 40 and turning into her mother
ASK Jenny Eclair why women don’t go into the comedy business, and you get a very straight answer.
“Because they are not stupid,” laughs the bespectacled blonde. “I feel it is a form of autism.”
It is the sort of bluntness we have come to expect from the only female comedian to have bagged the prestigious Perrier Award for comedy, but probe further and it transpires that, for all her confidence, Jenny does not count herself as one of this country’s top comedians.
“If you think about gigging women who can pull in 500 people, I am at the bottom . . . there’s the first division – who are French and Saunders and Victoria Wood and Jo Brand, and then I am top of the second division,” she cackles before correcting herself, “no, no they are premier . . . they are in the Premiership and I am the First Division.”
Football analogies aside, Jenny has proven her wit again and again. As well as notching up many years on the stand-up circuit, she has written books, enjoyed West End success with plays like The Vagina Monologues and now, at 47, finds herself the voice of Britain’s ladies “on the mad side of 40” thanks to the soaraway success of the stage show Grumpy Old Women.
Co-written with Judith Holder, it held a mirror up to all those things that drive middle-aged women to madness, and was an instant hit both here and abroad.
Much to Jenny’s surprise, it would seem.
“It was just one of those things that gathered its own momentum and you just stand back and think ‘Oh, this is rather marvellous – I wish I was on a better cut of the royalties’. I had no idea when Jude and I wrote it that it was going to take off like that,” reflects Jenny.
“It gave so much pleasure and it was great fun to do and it was just a laugh – great friendships and a laugh with Chardonnay drinking women.”
Now, however, Jenny has ditched the women – if not necessarily the Chardonnay – and finds herself solo on stage for the first time in six years with her “Because I Forgot to Get a Pension Tour”, which calls in at Liverpool’s Royal Court on Sunday.
And, despite decades in the business, the woman who claims to suffer from “acute show-off-itis” admits to some pre-tour nerves.
“It is not that I had lost my bottle but I had realised that it is tough,” says Jenny, who confesses she is conducting our interview from beneath a fluffy hotel duvet, despite the fact it is nearing midday.
“I don’t know whether I was being lazy or it was just that I knew that there were much easier things to do. But then you can’t really describe yourself as a stand- up comic if you haven’t got a set and I started to feel I really wanted to have an hour under my belt again.
“Now I feel like I have got my equipment back. I know what I am doing with the material and it has found its own momentum.”
“It is really good fun now,” she continues. “I sometimes catch myself, though, and think, ‘Oh, what a mad thing to be doing’. It has been a very long time since I have sat in and had a meal at home with a knife and fork at 8.30 and watched some telly.”
A spin-off from the BBC TV series of the same name, Grumpy Old Women hit a nerve with women of a certain age tackling such subjects as body image, the youth of today, hot flushes and even grumpy old men.
The Because I Forgot to Get a Pension Tour is, says Jenny, in a similar vein but “slightly fruitier”.
“It’s a little bit more sort of mad, because I am a bit more of a potty mouth,” she whispers throatily. “It’s probably a bit riper and it’s not as big a show because I am on my own. There aren’t as many theatrical tricks.
“There is a slide show . . . with three slides.
“It is really about holding a mirror up at my life and the lives of middle-aged women across the country because there are a lot of us in exactly the same boat,” Jenny continues. “We were these groovy ’70s teenagers and now we are coping with middle age, maybe not with horror – but it is a shock to find yourself turning into your mother.
“We are a very me, me, me generation – we think we are the first women ever to get old. We thought we were the first women to ever have babies.”
Does it take in that great middle-age milestone, the menopause? I venture.
“Peri-menopausal, I am not there yet,” Jenny interjects. “There is a lot of stuff about the physical decrepitude of knocking on, and a lot of mother daughter stuff about being on the brink of empty nest.
“There is stuff about wanting to get pregnant again – which is a physical impossibility – and a lot of stuff about worrying about my mother moving in once my daughter has moved out.
“I also talk about how I can’t drink any more. My drinking life used to be about going out getting drunk with drummers on the Old Kent Road, and now it’s about falling asleep in front of Midsomer Murders on a Sunday night. There’s also a warning about the dangers of drinking and watching television.”
Given that their relationship features in the show, has Jenny’s own teenage daughter, Phoebe, been to see her mother on tour yet?
“She is at drama school in London at the moment and fortunately the only dates I have had near London she has been otherwise occupied. She did see Grumpy and she said if it gets in the West End she’ll come and see it,” laughs Jenny.
“No, she is actually very, very supportive. If I am having a down day, she’ll text and tell me she is proud of me.
“My mother is coming tonight,” Jenny adds. “I’m not sure how good an idea this is. I’ll see if I live to tell the tale – if I am actually in Liverpool or whether she shoots me in the dressing room.”
JENNY ECLAIR is at the Royal Court Theatre, on Sunday, November 4, at 7pm.
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