Comedy news: Interview with Janey Godley

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Since surviving years of sexual abuse as a child, Janey Godley has channelled her experience into an award winning stand-up act and a best-selling book. Will Henley hears about her extraordinary life.

"I was at the Edinburgh festival in 1997, 1998 and 1999 and never got one review," says Janey Godley with a mocking grin. "I was famous for being the comedian that wouldn't get reviewed."

I sit, slightly terrified, staring wide-eyed at this frenetic, feisty Scot in an immaculate rented apartment in Kensington. She is looking for a teapot, and I'm worried about spilling my cuppa on the pristine carpet. All she can find in the blindingly white kitchen is an elaborate porcelain vessel that wouldn't look out of place in the tearoom of the Raj. She notes the irony; "I've gone from abject poverty to gold teapots. I've gone from living in an Oxo cube to this. There's something wrong about that."

Now a best-selling author, successful comic and regular guest on Radio 4, Godley has just been given her own column in The Scotsman, the paper that marked her out as "Scotland's sharpest comedian". Her life these days is far removed from the world she knew growing up in Shettleston in Glasgow's East End. Where it was, "grey and dirty and grimy, [where she] didn't know anybody whose dad wasn't an alcoholic."

Yet in spite of the rough neighbourhood, Godley says her early childhood was happy. Until she turned five, that is, when her uncle began to abuse her. "I'm sitting on his knee and I remember him pulling out his penis," she recalls matter-of-factly. "I was seeing this object and thinking 'what is that?' I knew I wasn't supposed to touch it, but he made me."

"I remember the night he raped me," she says, staring into her now lukewarm tea. She was seven or eight, lying in her bed with its creaky headboard and posters of David Cassidy on the wall.

"I tried to look at his face. I was determined to stare him out. But it was a mistake. He put a pillow over my face, which was fucking terrifying. After it, I knew how babies were made. I sat in bed looking at my belly thinking; 'It's gonna get really big and I'm gonna have a baby'."
She didn't fall pregnant, but the abuse carried on until Godley was 13.

"Uncle David used to play the Beatles or the Rolling Stones when it happened - bands that, to this day, Godley still can't listen to. She says that although he wasn't violent, "he was silently threatening".

While Godley is now at ease talking about Uncle David, for much of her early life she kept it secret: "As I grew older I became increasingly less ashamed of it, of the shame you're 'supposed' to have." After telling her husband, she began to talk about the subject with her friends, family and even punters at the Weavers Inn in Calton, Glasgow, where she was landlady. "It just came up in conversation," she explains. "Fuck that was weird, telling people."

A Breeding Ground for Talent

In the early nineties, Godley started a comedy night at the Weavers where she helped kick-start the career of the thorny-tongued Jerry Sadowitz and began compèring showcases. "It was a good training ground, fuck yeah, a breeding ground for talent," she says. By 1995, she was doing stand-up herself, working at Jesters club in Glasgow and touring Manchester, Liverpool, Holland and America.

Was comedy a cure for sadness, a way of overcoming past demons? Godley says not: "I never used comedy to get over the abuse. I never found it cathartic or therapeutic. I just loved doing stand-up," she says. "I love the obscurity of words and constructing a story that makes people laugh."

But despite positive reactions from audiences, it wasn't until she began to talk about her traumatic past that she really made a big impact on the stand-up scene. Good Godley, a 60-minute, largely unscripted show, premiered at the Edinburgh festival in August 2004. That's where she realised "it's okay to be a woman and talk about subjects that aren't my period and my fanny," she says.

Good Godley was a frank exploration of her gruelling life and connections to Glaswegian gangsters. "I hate that word," she says. "But there isn't another word for people who hide guns and Semtex in their houses."

She was passed up for the Perrier Award, but only after the panel learnt that her act changed every night. Perrier award winners require a set, scripted show.

"I wasn't bitter," says Godley. "I'm Scottish, a woman, and working class, and that as ethnic as you get. You've got to be Oxford-educated to get the Perrier."

When her uncle was finally arrested for the abuse - after Godley published an article about him in her local paper - she had to beg Glasgow's mobsters not to have him murdered. Three weeks before the trial, she pled for his life at a bizarre lunch with the aged hoodlums. "I needed this man alive," she says. "I wanted to expose him as a paedophile."

In the end, Uncle David went to prison for three years but was never convicted for rape. His arms and legs were broken on the first night he was in jail, and he hasn't been seen since he was released.

But Godley doesn't wonder where he is now. She says she's looking forward to the future, that audiences "want to see that person in the flesh who survived it, and that's a good thing".