4 weeks ago
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With her peroxide-blonde hair, chilli-red lipstick and instinctive aversion to obedience, Jenny Eclair has never been one to conform. And this morning is no different. She sighs loudly from the unruly-looking study of her south-east London home as she deftly steers her PR minder away from our Zoom conversation.
“I’m 64 f***ing years old, you know. You don’t need to keep an eye on me,” she suggests. “You’ve probably got much better things to do with your time.”
The middle daughter of a British Army Major, born during a posting in Kuala Lumpur in 1960, Jenny Hargraves has never been one to mince her words.
“It feels like somebody’s eavesdropping and I find that really distracting,” the former Loose Women panellist continues. “I can’t be doing with it. It’s like nobody trusts me.”
Presumably, they have her best interests at heart, as evidenced shortly afterwards when Eclair, as she has been known since her teens, goes off on a highly unflattering rant about Ricky Gervais – containing several four-letter words.
But then, one suspects, it wouldn’t make much difference anyway, given the Grumpy Old Women star’s militant (and brilliantly entertaining) outspokenness. It’s hard to miss both in person and in the pages of her new memoir, Jokes, Jokes, Jokes, published earlier this month ahead of a major UK tour in the New Year.
Growing up in Lancashire’s Lytham St Annes, her “predatory”, teenage years were punctuated with an almost feral promiscuity – graphically chronicled in her acerbic memoir – which only snowballed when she scraped onto a drama degree at what was then Manchester Polytechnic.
“I had an incredibly reckless streak,” she admits of her hedonistic undergraduate years in the early 1980s, where she admits her bed post’s capacity for further notches was pushed to breaking point. Conquests – including a dalliance with future Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction star Tim Roth – were as common as the city’s rain, but not always for romantic reasons.
“I just slept with people because, genuinely, I didn’t know how to get home,” she admits today. “We didn’t have mobile phones then and you couldn’t get an Uber. There might be a pay phone in a shared house but often you didn’t know the address of where you were.
“Were you in Didsbury? Were you in Fallowfield? It was just easier to spend the night in a guy’s bed. And I know this was insane, but I used to hitchhike around Manchester when the Yorkshire Ripper was on the prowl. I was incredibly lucky.”
Thankfully relatively unbruised by her sexual misadventures, an early 20-something Eclair next recounts her attempts to control her diet. Terrified of failing to realise her lifelong acting ambitions and upset by insensitive comments about her weight, she admits today: “I had a lack of control over my future, and I think I actually wanted to be too ill to grow up, so consequently I developed anorexia.
“I wanted to be poorly on the sofa and to be looked after as I just wasn’t ready for the responsibilities of having to leave home, although obviously there was a part of me that just wanted to be thinner as well.”
Uncertain of her dramatic prowess and with a singing voice that could shatter trophies rather than win them, Eclair moved from Manchester to south London after graduating. With her anorexia now under control and following a stint as a life model at Camberwell Art College, she graduated from under-the-radar “punk poet” to one of Time Out Magazine’s most promising young stand-up comics.
She also progressed from one-night stands with virtual strangers to a responsible relationship with designer Geof Powell, who has been by her side ever since – even though it took 27 years before they finally walked down the aisle together in 2017.
Just as Eclair’s stand-up career was gaining momentum, their daughter Phoebe, now 30 and a successful playwright and screenwriter in her own right, was born.
“By the time I became the first female to win the Perrier Award in 1995, Phoebe was five and I just wasn’t ready to deal with the success,” Eclair admits. “I had terrible imposter syndrome.”
The award has helped launch the TV and film careers of dozens of A-list stars, including Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Steve Coogan, Lee Evans, and Baby Reindeer creator Richard Gadd.
But the weight of expectation was just too much for Eclair, who recalls: “I just thought, ‘I can’t cope with this. I’d like to give this back’. I wanted to win, but once I did, I just thought, ‘Now I’ve got this, I hate it’.”
Her anxiety was almost certainly exacerbated by a period of personal regression, when the lines between her crude onstage persona and her post-show behaviour became boozily blurred and she found herself in multiple late-night liaisons with a string of similarly thrill-seeking hedonists – none of whom were Geof.
So why wash your dirty linen in public by talking about it in your memoir and, presumably, forthcoming stage show?
“Well, there is that slight feeling that you may have opened your dirty knicker drawer. Not that I have a dirty knicker drawer. The prospect of that is offensive,” she says. “And you do feel like a part of your skin has been removed, but Geof knew what was happening and, as I say in the book, he played the long game – although he loved our daughter more than me for quite a long time.”
She pauses: “But we have very much always been each other’s support system. We would crumble without each other.
“What a terrible thing it would have been to throw it all away for a stupid couple of snogs. And I know it’s hopeless to give myself an excuse to say I was acting out my on-stage alter ego, but I genuinely think that was part of the problem.”
The slightly toxic 1990s ladette culture certainly didn’t help, either.
“I got a little bit carried away with it all,” she concedes. “But maybe I should have lied and not put that in the book.”
Lying – or even just moderating her potent opinions – is clearly not something that comes naturally to Eclair and a discussion of the male-female comedic divide awakens a torrent of bile towards against one of Britain’s most successful – and divisive – comedians, Ricky Gervais.
“I don’t think he knows who I am,” she says. “I don’t think he’s interested in women comics. I don’t think he rates us. I don’t think he thinks anything of us.”
At this point the conversation lapses into what could, most kindly, be described as a rant. It’s fair to say, she isn’t a fan and the air turns blue.
What Ricky Gervais thinks of Eclair is anyone’s guess, but their opinions on cancel culture are world’s apart.
Gervais refuses to tame his material, often regurgitating the defence, “it’s only a joke, it’s not real”, while Eclair, for all her outspokenness, likes to learn from experience.
“I look back at some of my old material and there’s loads of stuff I couldn’t do now,” she says.
“The odd dementia joke, the odd trans joke. Things that were just not considered remotely out of order, I wouldn’t do now. But I don’t feel any anger at that fact, I just feel like I got away with it, but I still make mistakes.
“I was doing a romantic fiction awards ceremony not too long ago, and I said something about Geof and I being together for 40 years. I said, ‘We’re now so old, we can’t hold hands in public, because it looks like one of us has got dementia’.
“That got an absolute groan of a ‘Nooooooo’ and fell very, very flat on the ground, so I just thought, ‘OK, that’s a joke I can no longer use’.”
Today she is “making up” for her “neglect” of Phoebe, by being a very good grandmother to her two-year-old grandson, Arlo.
“I am a very, very good grandmother to Arlo,” she states. “I really am. And Tuesdays, when I look after him, are pretty sacred.
“You’d have to pay me a lot of money to give up my Tuesdays with him. Well, when I say a lot of money, I mean over 500 quid. Actually, I’d probably give him up for £250. Or £50 if it was the end of the month.”
The one thing Jenny’s not prepared to negotiate on is dignity.
“Phoebe has always been so much more dignified than me, but I’ve never had any dignity. I think dignity is overrated and that’s not what I run on. I run on spite,” she chortles.
“It’s very easy to get written off as a woman, as a writer, as a female comic and a lot of my career has been about me proving myself and what I really want is people to just say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you could do that. It’s really good.’”
● For tickets to see Jenny Eclair’s brand-new memoir show Jokes, Jokes, Jokes Live!, visit jennyeclair.com Jokes, Jokes, Jokes: My Very Funny Memoir, by Jenny Eclair (Sphere, £25) is out now. For free UK P&P, visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832
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