9th August 2005
MURDER AND MAYHEM
THE PERFECT COMEDY COCKTAIL
She was repeatedly raped from the age of five by her uncle.
Her father was an alcoholic who left home, and her mother a Valium-addicted
depressive murdered by a lover. Hardly the stuff of comedy, but Janey Godley has used
her troubled past to carve out a niche on Britain's already crowded
comedy circuit. "Dysfunctional families do give you an edge in some
types of comedy," said the Scottish former barmaid. "If you have got a really meaty past and you have
lived a bit, then you have got a whole lot more to say," she told
Reuters at the Edinburgh Fringe, the world's largest arts festival,
where competition among 13,000 performers is fierce. Twenty-five of her friends and family have died from heroin
addiction. "It keeps on going. They keep on dying," she said. She married into organised crime with a gangster's son who beat her up. Her brother even tried to sell her as a child to a paedophile caretaker. Now the down-to-earth Glaswegian just shrugs off the memory. |
"He was just a naive wee boy who didn't understand what he was
doing. He is horrified about it now, but we laugh about it." She got married as a teenager and, now in her forties,
is still together with husband Sean. He does not hit her any more and
they have a teenage daughter who does Godley's public relations. She defends her unusual take on her tempestuous childhood. "Yeah, peddling misery and making it into literary
snuff, I know what you mean. But I don't think I do that," she
said. "If people feel I am using my life as a marketing tool, then
there is nothing I can really do about that." Godley, who has written a play about heroin addiction
and an autobiography, has also taken her show to New Zealand and New
York, Los Angeles and Amsterdam, showing that the lawless culture of
Glasgow's east end can appeal to audiences worldwide. Being a comic
is her addiction, she said. "It doesn't make any sense. It is a ridiculous job I know, but I keep on doing it as I love it. We are a complete bunch of self-obsessed, narcissistic, attention-seeking freaks. I would set fire to my leg at a bus stop to get attention." |