YouSaid · the spoken record

Jo Brand

lines on the record: 45
first: 2007-03-18
most recent: 2007-03-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think I would probably save Kate Bush because that's it's a lovely tune. It's got the recorder on it and it would just be nice to think thoughts of my childhood.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, as a lecturer, I'd like a church organ, if I may, and Because over the last six months I have learnt how to play the organ for a BBC series, and I had to play it at the Albert Hall just before Christmas in front of about eight thousand people, which is much harder than doing comedy. I was absolutely paralysed with fear. But I've decided to learn it now, so I'd like to take it to the desert island and get better at it.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I thought what I take is the decline and fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, and two reasons mainly. First of all, it's extremely long, so if I was there for a long time, I would at least have something to keep reading. And secondly, I think it would kind of enable me to have a decent conversation with Stephen Fry, because he knows about those things and I don't.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, my final piece of music is A piece of jazz actually, and it's by a trio called Dollar Brand headed by Abdullah Ibrahim and it's called the wedding. It's the loveliest piece of music jazz wise I think I've ever heard and when I met Bernie my husband he's a massive jazz fan and I always absolutely hated it and he's kind of shown me that actually I was listening to the wrong sort of jazz and this is really for him really to say he's a great bloke and thank you for making jazz palatable burn.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't know if it's for me to really judge I don't personally feel it. a little kind of free song of gasping runs around the audience, you know, and people are getting their mobiles out and failing the council and all that sort of thing. But other people say my act is different, but I think it's inevitable because I've got a bit older and my life is different. So I'm not sure it's softer, it's just different, really.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know really I suppose I just take every day as it comes and I feel like I think lots of women feel that I'm barely clinging on by my fingertips some days I think you know you get used to that sort of chronic tiredness sort of thing that you have from when they were babies that you your life is just going to be a slight sort of free sauna irritability in every day because you're a bit tired”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I absolutely loved it it was very easy, you know, and most people obviously didn't even know I was pregnant because I'm so big. Which is brilliant. I was a bit tired, but other than that, it was great and it was all a pleasurable experience.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think by that point, having been kind of well versed over the years in the sort of journalistic approach to celebrity, I wasn't surprised and I wasn't, I think the sun had, I think on the front of it, because it made me laugh now. Here comes the bride all fat and wide. Oh, how romantic for my wedding day, thank you so much.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My seventh piece of music is Elvis Costello. It's a song called Couldn't Call It Unexpected. I love Elvis Costello to bits. I think his lyrics are so witty and cynical and intelligent. This particular song I've got no idea why it's my favourite. It just is. It's got some interesting images in it and it just kind of takes me back to a period kind of in the eighties and 90s when I was really having a good time.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know really, I mean what was important to me at the time was Just meeting someone who had something to talk about, who kind of understood different aspects of my life. He was really, really good fun. We could talk endlessly about, you know. Logactyl injections and ECT together, which is great as well. We like the same sort of books. He was interested in politics, so was I. So yes, in lots of ways, I thought, yeah, this is it.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How did you meet? I met him through a mutual comedy friend. I mean, it just so happened that we are both psychiatric nurses.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it had absolutely no bearing whatsoever on having men as friends, because, you know, the whole comedy circuit is all men. So if you didn't want to have any friends at all, fair enough. But if you had friends on the circuit, they were inevitably men. So I'm absolutely no problem at all. I just couldn't really kind of understand the way that I was being discussed because it didn't really reflect real life in any way whatsoever. And in terms of kind of chatting blokes up and kind of meeting sort of potential husbands, well, I think in a way it kind of cleared out the dross and I only kind of got the ones that actually in any way thought I was all right, you know what I mean? Because all the ones that didn't bother to approach me were all the ones who I wouldn't have been that interested in anyway so in some ways it was it worked as a very sort of good filter.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At my next record is Billy Bragg, who I think is the kind of perfect Englishman really. There's a lot of sort of difficulty in this day and age for English people to say that they like being English because it always has kind of connotations of racism and little Englanderishness and daily maleness. And I think Billy Bragg is spot on. I've always kind of admired his politics and he manages to achieve being English without sounding like he wants to send everyone back home.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so that's quite interesting. I think being what I'm not would just be too much effort, really. And I mean, I think there's an awful lot of women around, but you very rarely hear from them who kind of aren't interested in, you know, ironing their pants or putting their makeup on for half an hour every day because they want to get on and do other things. I mean, I like to think that I speak for all women to the extent that a lot of women feel constrained from saying sort of unfeminine things about men because they think it will kind of get them into trouble. And with a certain sort of man, it would, you know, because I think a lot of men don't like to hear themselves being criticised.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But with the comedy I started work as a nurse full time in 82, 83 and from that point I kept thinking I really want to do comedy and then eventually I think one night there's a group of us out having a meal and this friend of mine Dave said oh for God's sake will you stop going on about it just do it you know so that's when it started really and I have to say I absolutely loved doing stand up at that time I loved getting in a car with kind of three blokes sitting in the motorway services moaning about the gig and all that sort of thing it was just such a joy”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's from a film called True Stories which was written and produced by David Byrne from Talking Heads. It's sung by John Goodman, who plays a character in the film Who's Fat and he's basically just looking for someone to love him. And the lyrics in it just make me think about people that I met when I was a psychiatric nurse because I think in South London particularly where I was, if you did something about the sort of loneliness of a lot of people that actually you would do away with probably half of the need for psychiatric treatment. We don't want justice.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think what that comes down to is my act on stage is a very small part of what I am. And it's quite interesting, you know, I think most celebrities have their kind of, they have their sort of three adjective tag in the tabloids, don't they? Like with me, it was kind of fat, man-hating and feminist, you know. But, you know, myself on stage is kind of a minuscule part of what I am, really.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, um, We had a guy come in one day with a huge carving fork and he came right up to the desk which was sort of chest level and in a kind of very Robin Hood sort of way just stabbed it down onto the desk. I was quite scary. I mean we had a lot of incidents where people would pick up chairs and throw them at you. We had another incident where a consultant was stabbed in the back and walked out into our department with a knife sticking out of his back, you know. I mean I'm compressing all the incidents together so obviously it wasn't like that every day and the vast majority of people I think it's really important to emphasize this aren't violent who have a mental illness but because of our department we were seeing people in a very high state of distress so those sort of incidents were more common.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, particularly, I actually wasn't attached to a ward. I was on an outpatients department and emergency clinic, so we would assess people coming in off the street who had either brought themselves in, been brought in by their families, or been brought in by the police, and by their very nature the people brought in by the police who had been picked up on the streets of South London and assumed to be mentally ill had to be behaving pretty weirdly to even be noticed. So there was quite a lot of disturbed behaviour. But you learn, I mean, if you're a kind of sympathetic person and hopefully I was, you learn that these people are just in kind of very deep distress, really.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think because my dad had quite a serious period of depression when I was a teenager and that really changed the atmosphere in our house quite a lot. And so I suppose it was something that I kind of felt I knew something about that I didn't feel frightened of or uncomfortable with and so I was pleased to do it really.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, what happened was I phoned my mum and she just came and picked me up and took me back home and I kind of started again and I think she said sensible things like, you know, you've got to have a proper career because I'd thought about comedy and I'd thought about doing drama then. And in a way she kind of taught me into doing this course at Brunel, which was a joint nurse training and social sciences degree.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, um I'm going to sound like a terrible drunk when I was a teenager, but I burnt my flat down when I was drunk after a party, not deliberately. I lived in a bedsit in Tumbridge Wells and I came home from a party and I didn't have any money for the meter so I had a candler light by my bed and I dropped off to sleep and then woke up and the bed was on fire and it was awful because I was drunk and I just thought it out in the morning like you do so I kind of patted the worst of it and went back to sleep and actually the underneath of the mattress was on fire so I woke up because I was quite hot and lifted it up to look at it and as I lifted it up the air kind of got to it and the whole thing just sort of exploded in the wall of flame at which point I thought oh dear this is quite serious and I lost everything I had”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But my next record is Turn Your Radios down, people who are the age of fifty, which is nearly me, I have to say. This is a song that I'm very fond of because I remember it from college. I was at Brunel University in dear, dear Uxbridge. This was a song we would sort of put on before we went out to get us in the mood. We used to turn it out really loud, like bounce on our beds, just go mental, and it's so joyful. It's great”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I'm not sure they knew about that bit at the time. Well, I'm sure they were, but I think they were just at the end of their tether. I think they'd tried their kind of lexicon of punishments, and none of them had worked. And I think they just were at their wit's end and they said, well, we wash our hands of you.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was probably at this point kind of 16 coming up for 17. And in the end, my parents just couldn't handle it really. And I was seeing a kind of local man, I suppose, who my mum kind of knew about because she was a social worker in Hastings. I think they had a file on him eight foot thick. He was a bit of a kind of druggy sort of, you know, bit of dealing, all that sort of thing. And basically they said to me, either you stop seeing him or you're going to have to leave home. And of course this was, you know, the joy I'd been looking for for ages. Right, I said, I'll leave home then. So what happened was I found a bedsit in the town in a fantastic place sort of looking out over the sea and school let me go back one day a week to finish my A levels.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I probably was getting back at them. I was so appallingly badly behaved. I did stuff like I would get out the window and go to the pub, you know, after my parents had gone to bed and I smoked and all that sort of thing.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I suppose I did do well. You know, there was sort of whispers of doing the old Oxbridge entrance exams and all that kind of thing, which I would have been very happy to do and go that way. But the problem then was that my dad got a job down in Hastings so we moved and I really didn't want to move schools and so I begged my parents to let me go back to school on the train every day and they put their foot down and said no. So although it wasn't a conscious thing I think I decided at that point that I was going to be quite a difficult teenager and not like my new school.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What my third record is an icon, I think, Paul Robeson. My parents actually had an album of his very scratchy and actually full of kind of rather jolly songs, you know, like lazy bones and I'm picking the corn and all this sort of thing, but I didn't really like those very much. And there was this one record, Gloomy Sunday, and it's just really reminiscence of my childhood. I didn't like Sundays very much because I had to go to church. So I was slightly gloomy on Sunday, so it kind of fitted in well.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yet that ought that part of it always sat well with me the part that didn't was, you know, when I got into my teenage years they were incredibly rigid about what I couldn't do, what time I had to be in, how I should dress, all those sorts of things. They were kind of far more controlling because you always compare yourself with your peer group, don't you? And there were people in my peer group that were allowed out to parties till midnight, you know, whereas mine would be saying, have United on by eight o'clock. Well, it's a bit of an exaggeration, but it did feel like that to me.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, definitely. My parents were actually very strict compared to other people's parents when I was a kid. I mean, for example, I wasn't allowed to have magazines like Jackie. Do you remember Jackie? Because they thought that was just too vacuous, I think. I wasn't allowed to have Barbies because my mother didn't want to encourage me as if that ever could have happened to grow up with eight foot long legs and blonde hair. And my mother was just not interested in any kind of domestic stuff at all. She was interested in politics, the kind of big stories of the day. So we would have kind of quite intense sort of political discussions, which I discovered was quite unusual.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I went to a girl's grammar school in Tumbridge Wales, which I suppose is the epitome of kind of middle classness, really, but actually I really loved it there and I made some good friends there and in my, I think my O levels I got eight O levels and did pretty well in them really.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was very sweet and I was very well behaved. I think the only time I probably wasn't well behaved was when I was with my brothers because I'm the middle child of two brothers and I remember as a kid just having laughs really, playing tricks, that sort of thing”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My second piece of music is it's a song by Kate Bush called O England My Lion Heart. I love Kate Bush. I think she's a real kind of one off. I assume that we have a similar childhood because I was brought up in Kent in the Weeld of Kent in a little village. I had a pretty idyllic upbringing and there's mentions in the song of Apple Orchards and Carol singing and all that sort of thing which really kind of resonates with me. Plus there's recorders on it and we were all tortured with recorders at school and you thought they can't ever possibly sound great and actually they do in this song.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think fearlessness becomes tastelessness a lot. It happens sometimes when you're under pressure because you are under pressure sometimes. You've maybe knocked out your best put-downs and it's still not working and you feel a bit like a cornered animal sometimes and you come out with something that you didn't really mean to say but you just sort of felt desperate. And tastelessness is not judged as a general standard, it's judged by individuals so something some individuals find funny, others will find extremely tasteless and you just have to hope the majority can kind of put up with what you said really.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It kind of felt very powerful to be able to Students who thought that they'd killed me off, you know, so in a strange sort of way I used to quite enjoy it really.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think people should bear in mind that at this point I would be completely under siege. I did a gig at Durham University once. I went on. It was very late. They were extremely drunk and they were all throwing things at me. When some guy shouted a bit of abuse at me, I said to him, if you don't shut up, I'll sit on your face. And that's bad enough. I think they couldn't believe that I'd said that. And then I would follow that up by but I'm not going to bother at the moment because I haven't got my period. And if that didn't sort of instill a sort of voiceless shock into them, then I would just go off.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I worked out when I first started the comedy Lark that there were about two hundred fifty men and probably fifteen women, so you very rarely worked on a bill with another woman that was really unusual.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I look like a scrap bag, really what I did initially in the old days, as it were, was I realised that as a woman performer, the more feminine you made yourself look, the worse it was for you, really, because people then just assess you on the basis of your appearance more. So I just tried to look as neutral as I could with kind of hideous baggy leggings and a black t-shirt, which then of course worked in the other direction for me because people started saying, oh God, you know, look at the state of her.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At my first track is Brahm's variations on a theme of Haydn, which is I think the most wonderful kind of delicate piece of classical music I've ever heard. I'm a complete Philistine as far as classical music is concerned. I remember going to see this with a friend of my Mandy who'd never been to a classical concert before and this was on at the beginning and we were both absolutely spellbound by it.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I do get a lot of hecklers, not so much these days, but I did in the old days, which was inevitable because of my weight and my appearance. So I knew it was going to happen. So I would have stuff ready for them. And what I would do with my heckle put downs is I would kind of grade them and kind of whimsical and quite sweet all the way through to nuclear. And if I was forced to do a nuclear put down at the beginning of the show, I knew I was in trouble, really.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not deliberately, but I got there at six, and as the evening went on I got more and more nervous, so I just poured a bit more down. So yeah, it was not deliberate, it was just it was five hours, six hours waiting to go on that did it.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do indeed, yeah. It was in a nightclub in the West End. I went on about midnight. I'd had probably six or seven pints of lag. I could hardly stand up. I did my appallingly constructed over academic five minutes on the works of Freud to a completely bored and drunk audience, so it was fairly hideous, really.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, a lot is going on inside really when that's appearing on the outside because that's a device that I've always used because I think it's very important in stand-up as it was when I was a psychiatric nurse to appear to be calm on the outside because that does something to the people that you're interacting with and I think it gives them confidence in you. So to me kind of 80% of it is appearing to be confident and once you've cracked that I think pretty much you can do anything even if your jokes aren't that funny.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yet that is a point of view that I hear quite a lot, but I don't agree with that. Ultimately, the worst thing that can happen is that you're sort of humiliated by an audience. And I think actually when you think about it, most of us can cope with that, and particularly women can, because women, I think, suffer humiliation like that, sometimes on a day-to-day basis when they're out and about, you know, because people feel that it's okay to kind of comment on women's appearance all the time. And so women sort of know what that feels like already.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do absolutely love it, yes. I don't find it something to be got through. I find it something to be got through before I've done it, but when I'm doing it, it's just an absolute joy eighty percent of the time.”
2007-03-18 · Desert Island Discs · Jo Brand · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source