Nobody did comedy quite like Janey Godley. This wasn’t just a matter of her background, which in turn became the currency of her live act – her childhood poverty (“a world of near Dickensian squalor”, as one Scottish newspaper described it), her marriage into a notorious Glasgow gangster family. Her career curve stands out too. Other comics build a reputation online, move into standup – then do something else. Godley did it all the other way round, taking up live comedy in her 30s, as a departure from (or, she would argue, extension of) her bar work. But she reserved her biggest splash for her fifties, with a series of viral videos that established her – and her broad Glaswegian comedy – at the very heart of Scottish public life.
My earliest experiences of Godley’s work were at the Edinburgh fringe, at which – as a middle-aged, working-class Glaswegian woman – she legitimately claimed to be an endangered minority. Godley’s work always put that life experience front and centre – not surprising, given that it offered her material (on child abuse, arms caches and organised crime, say) to which few other comedians had access. There was a self-conscious fearlessness to her comedy, and with good reason: “If I stand in a room with 600 people, talk for 15 minutes and nobody laughs, it’s no worse than having a gun held at your head. And I’ve already had that, so it doesn’t really scare me.”
While a comic to be reckoned with – Godley knew her own voice, revelled in it, and could turn a mean joke – she was never a critic’s darling. Her standup was more notable for the subjects it addressed than how it addressed them. Which was fine by her: she wanted to please audiences, not comedy snobs, and performed on the Free Fringe in Edinburgh to keep her gigs accessible to as wide an audience as possible. And yet, in due course, cultural cachet came her way too. Images of her solitary protest against the US president’s 2017 visit to Turnberry golf course, armed with a “Donald Trump is a cunt” placard, won progressive hearts. Then came her breakout voiceover videos online, which found her dubbing footage of Nicola Sturgeon and others in her own no-holds-barred Glasgow patois.
The resulting sketches, sometimes made with her comedian daughter Ashley Storrie and purporting to reveal what buttoned-down politicos were really thinking, made for a striking incursion by a female working-class voice into the traditionally urbane territory of UK satire. (Watch the one that re-voices Theresa May’s resignation speech to the House of Commons, where the gulf between dialect and environment is so precipitous, it could make your nose bleed.) They were also credited with helping Scotland through lockdown, and elevated Godley to national treasure status. She was commissioned by the country’s National Theatre, and to front Scottish government public information campaigns. She lost the latter role, though, and was sacked from a panto in Aberdeen in 2021, when a series of racist tweets came to light. A month after that, still in the eye of a media-political storm, Godley was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
No doubt those ugly social media posts, for which she apologised, sullied Godley’s egalitarian image. They taint but do not eclipse a remarkable career in comedy, not to mention her work as a playwright, memoirist and novelist. Firmly situated in the great tradition (Billy Connolly, Frankie Boyle, Kevin Bridges and beyond) of brusque and uncompromising Glasgow standups, she took the gallows humour required to survive the first half of her life, and used it to thrive – to elbow her way into an industry not usually open to women of her background, and to entertain thousands. Godley’s was a comedy career constructed, like she lived her life, on her own terms, and it will be fondly remembered.