» Aging disgracefully
Sometimes shocking, but always funny, the self confessed grumpy old woman Jenny Eclair returns to Crawley with her new tour. After all, she explains to John Clarke, she has to pay for a pension somehow.
Jenny Eclair is musing on the deep sense of hurt you feel when a favourite item of clothing lets you down. “Isn’t it awful when your best dress turns against you and you can’t zip it up? That’s a terrible betrayal. You’d forgive girlfriends more easily for sleeping with your husband.”
Forthright, feisty and - above all - killingly funny, this is typical of Jenny. And you’ll be very pleased to hear, there is much more where that came from. For the first time in six years, Jenny is setting off around the country on a solo stand-up tour.
After time spent co-writing and performing in the enormously successful Grumpy Old Women Live tour – to say nothing of writing and starring in her own plays, penning a wellregarded novel (Camberwell Beauty), and hosting a regular Saturday morning radio show on LBC – Jenny can no longer resist the call of the stand-up stage. She is embarking on a major nationwide jaunt, with her felicitously titled Because I Forgot To Get A Pension Tour.
“When it goes well, there is nothing to match the buzz of live comedy,” she beams, unable to suppress a grin at the very thought of returning to her first love. Jenny adds, with characteristic wryness, that “obviously I won’t be standing up all the time - I’ll need to sit down now and again to stop my ankles swelling.”
Jenny, who became the first solo woman ever to win the coveted Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival in 1995, is coming soon to a theatre near you. She urges you to laugh and clap very loudly, “because I’m a bit deaf and my hormones are all over the place.”
The comedian, a huge favourite with audiences who lap up such winning selfdeprecation, is offering lots of material about “being the mad side of forty, the odd joke about front bottoms and a bit of swearing.” As a bonus, Jenny also promises to wear a shiny new jacket from the sale at Selfridges, “down from £199 to £49.99 – what a bargain!”
“If Amy Winehouse had a northern mother, she wouldn’t be getting up to all these terrible things. She’d be sitting quietly at home eating meat and potato pies with her elbows off the dinner-table”
Jenny, now a vivacious 47-year-old mother of an 18-year-old daughter, goes on to be more specific about the subjects she will be covering in her hotly anticipated new show. As well as a lustful tribute to the actor James McAvoy, the stand-up is going stomp through, “a big diatribe about the rom-com. I despise the mawkishness and the emotional manipulation and the contrivance of those films,” she fumes. “All those overheard phone conversations and unlikely coincidences. And as for the infuriating taglines - ‘it’ll make you laugh, it’ll make you cry.’ No, it’ll make you puke!”
Jenny reveals that she will also be picking apart the agonies of being the mother of a teenage daughter. “The mother-daughter relationship has replaced the man-woman relationship as my major concern,” observes the stand-up, who studied drama at Manchester Polytechnic. “I’m doing quite a lot of material about the empty-nest syndrome and the natural snooping gene of the female. That is at its strongest when you’re the mother of a teenage daughter.”
“I’ll be explaining why everyone should have a northern mother. If Amy Winehouse had a northern mother, she wouldn’t be getting up to all these terrible things. She’d be sitting quietly at home eating meat and potato pies with her elbows off the dinner-table.” However, Jenny admits to one concern about her routine on motherhood. “I’m terrified that if my daughter comes to the show and hears that section, she won’t come home again afterwards.”
The comic, who has built up a devoted live following over the years, is quick to reassure us, though, that she will not be entirely neglecting her best-loved topic – the differences between men and women. “I’ll be discussing how women are ruled by their hormones and men are ruled by their bowels.
“I’ll blow the whistle on the fact that the biggest passion-killer in the world is the ensuite bathroom - for obvious reasons. I’ll also be talking about the ultimate nightmare scenario for any woman: an enthusiastic amateur man trying to give you a massage by candlelight. It’s a deep sensual massage – as practised by someone who’s read about it in a magazine and has no idea what he’s doing!”
Will men feel left out of the show, then? “Not at all,” Jenny laughs. “They’ll learn a lot. For instance, they’ll learn that they’re very lucky they don’t have to live with me! They’ll go home full of gratitude and be nice to the missus for - oooh, at least three days. I’m looking for sponsorship from Relate.”
Jenny may well return to star in Grumpy Old Women Live, which has been an immense hit in the UK and in Australia, in the future. She ponders just why that show has become such a phenomenon. “We just tapped into something,” reflects the comedian, who cowrote the show with Judith Holder. “There are huge battalions of grumpy old women out there with rolled-up umbrellas and raincoats. Their fingers are itching to get out the rollingpin and slap people around the back of the legs with it. We’ve opened the floodgates to them - it’s an extraordinary sight seeing them all pouring into our gigs.”
Jenny carries on to say, “going out on the road on my own with my stand-up show, I’ll genuinely miss the other Grumpy Old Women. I’m worried, too, that if the theatres put a bottle of wine in my dressing-room, I’ll drink it on my own and be dead by the end of the tour!
“Touring solo also means I’ve got nowhere to hide. During Grumpy Old Women Live, if I was in trouble, I could always look over to Dillie [Keane] and Linda [Robson] and plead, ‘can you do some more bosom acting?’ That invariably got me out of a hole!”
One thing Jenny’s stand-up was always renowned for was the unflinching rudeness of the material. But she reckons that is no longer required. “That approach is a bit dated now. If I just trotted out the same old stuff, audiences would notice. Of course, there will be some people who still want a joke about anal sex - who wouldn’t? But there is a sense that my show has progressed.”
Has she matured then? “No,” Jenny howls with laughter. “I can’t really say I’m older and wiser because at one point during the show I pretend to be a pony.”
Jenny Eclair – Because I Forgot To Get A Pension Tour
The Hawth Theatre, Crawley, Thursday 1 November 8pm Tickets £15, Tel: 01293 553636 www.hawth.co.uk
