Janey Godley is sometimes called the “female equivalent to Billy Connolly.” The much-loved Glaswegian comedian and author has fans all over the world. John Archer’s new feature documentary Janey (produced by Hopscotch and receiving its world premiere as the closing film at the Glasgow Film Festival) shows Janey coping after being hit with two hammer blows. First, she is “cancelled” when tweets emerge from more than a decade before in which she used offensive language. Then she gets terminal cancer.
Hoe does Janey react? The indomitable comedian goes on tour. “I might die before this tour ends but I’m no dead yet,” she says with typical gallows humour as she hits the road with her 2023 ‘I am still NOT DEAD YET’ show.
Janey’s daughter Ashley, who is a broadcaster and stand-up herself, came up with the idea of a film to record the tour. Through her agent, Janey was put in touch with filmmaker Archer, one of Scotland’s leading producers of feature docs. “I looked into John’s amazing catalogue and I thought, ‘yeah, he is the perfect person to do this.’ And that’s how it all got together.”
The comedian “forgot the camera was there from the start.” She describes Archer as “a very loose director.” He’d come up with suggestions. “He would say ‘tomorrow we are going to be filming in your old street,’ but he never told her what to do. Instead, he pointed the camera at her and let her “rabbit” away with her daughter or her best friend Shirley.
In the documentary, we see grainy old footage of a young girl in a red coat and a little boy walking across Glasgow wasteland near Govan, kicking a football.
“John didn’t know it was me. When he showed me the rushes and I started to watch it, I said to him ‘you do know that is actually me?’ He almost fell of his seat. He said ‘No!’ I said ‘Yes!’”
The comedian adds that she recognised her red coat, the way she walked and her skill with the football. The boy is her “wee cousin Sammy.”
Janey has had a tough life. As a kid, she was abused and beaten up by a rogue uncle. Her mother was murdered. All of this is covered in the film but its tone remains defiantly upbeat. She never gives in to self-pity.
“I don’t let anybody get me down,” the comedian proclaims to Business Doc Europe. “My life isn’t defined by child abuse or murder or violence. My life isn’t defined by that just as my life isn’t defined by cancer or comedy. My life is what I make it…I think I just decided I am not going to let anybody beat me.”
Even when she was a kid and her uncle was molesting her, she was determined that he was not going to win.
“I realised that the minute you stand up and threaten them back, these men tend to fade into the background very quickly because they’re shit-bag cowards. It’s the same on social media. The minute you stand up to them, they just run and hide. I tend to live on the positive side of that and go ‘fuck the lot of you. I am going to keep living as much as I can and as loud as I want.”
Whenever she faces anything daunting today, Janey can always remind herself that it won’t be as challenging as what she encountered on a daily basis when she was working in her pub, The Weavers Inn, in the East End of Glasgow.
“That was a really hard shift. You’re not just dealing with pumps and pipes and glasses and measures. You’re dealing with violence – domestic violence; you’re dealing with sectarianism being near a football ground; you’re dealing with people’s mental health issues. It is a really hard job. People underestimate how hard that job was.”
Her time at The Weavers Inn taught her how to deal with even the most obnoxious loudmouths who might try to sabotage her stand-up routines.
“I was a beautiful young woman back in the day and I was made to believe I was a fat, horrible monster by wee old men who had 39-inch waists. They’d say to me ‘oh, you’re putting the beef on. You’re no the prettiest girl in the parade.’ What the fuck was I thinking? Why did I ever listen to them?”
These days, it’s very rare for Janey to be heckled at her shows but she still receives plenty of abuse on social media.
As for her ‘cancellation’ based on those tweets from years ago, she acknowledges “I said things I shouldn’t have said.” Nonetheless, she feels the way she was targeted was unfair. “People will go 25 years [back] to find something you said. It’s like finding an old dog shite and saying have a smell of that.”
The fans knew that Janey wasn’t a racist and that she has spent her life standing up to fascism. In spite of the cancellation, they stayed loyal to her.
Former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon features in the documentary. Janey says they have a “good rapport” but aren’t especially close – and she doesn’t expect Sturgeon to turn up at the Glasgow Film Festival premiere.
“A lot of people hate her and a lot of people love her. That’s life. I think she is good and I like her,” she concludes of Sturgeon.
The terminal cancer hasn’t held her back. The illness, she suggests, isn’t like it’s portrayed “on telly.” You can live and work even when you’re having chemotherapy.
Those coming to watch the film as it tours around Scotland after the Glasgow premiere will get double helpings of Janey. They’ll see her on screen – and then they’ll get a Q&A and a stand-up routine. She has just finished a tour of England and will be going back out on the road with the new film. Janey also has a parallel career as an author. She has written two volumes of autobiography, fiction, comedy books and BBC comedy shows.
When she was growing up, Janey was a huge fan of Billy Connolly, the legendary Scottish comedian who features in Big Banana Feet https://businessdoceurope.com/glasgow-ff-billy-connolly-big-banana-feet-by-murray-grigor-and-paddy-higson/ (1976), another film screening at the GFF. (Just restored, this documentary follows the ‘Big Yin’ on his 1975 tour of Ireland.) Janey met Connolly when she was performing at a comedy festival in New Zealand and he was working on a Hobbit film. They were in the same hotel, hit it off immediately and began to hang out together. He even came to watch her on stage.
“I just love him!” she enthuses. He told her that watching her perform made him think about how audiences react to him when he goes off on one of his wild comic rants.
One person Janey certainly doesn’t love is Donald Trump. She is shown in the documentary carrying a placard that says ‘Trump is a cunt’ when the US politician visited Scotland in 2016.
It seems Trump wasn’t happy about being described in this way. “I couldn’t get an ESTA,” Janey says of what happened when she next tried to visit the US and was denied the visa waiver she needed.
If she can’t get to America, America is coming to her. One of her most devoted fans, Brian from Newark, is travelling all the way from the US for the GFF premiere. “I can’t wait to see him!” she signs off.
Janey, directed and produced by Archer, receives its world premiere as the closing film of the Glasgow Film Festival. It was co-produced by BBC Scotland and Screen Scotland. It will be in cinemas from 15th March. Cosmic Cat is handling the release.
