Book review by Steve Bennett

Miranda Hart garnered plenty of headlines last week for her revelatory new memoir, disclosing her chronic illness and the news that she’s finally found love and married at 51. 

All that press overshadowed another female comedian’s autobiography – which is sharply ironic given that a recurring theme of Jenny Eclair’s Jokes, Jokes, Jokes is how she has often felt overlooked in her 40-year comedy career.

But while there’s often a tinge of bitterness that her professional life still isn’t cushy after all these decades, and the strong suggestion that innate industry sexism is the reason for that,  the book is more nuanced - more honest - than that. She dislikes any sourness in herself and realises she’s been given more breaks than plenty and that sometimes she hasn’t done a good job with the shows and opportunities she’s been given. It is a candid assessment of what’s gone right and wrong.

What comes across loudly in these 385 pages is how much of a grafter Eclair is. She’s always saying yes to projects, whether out of an inherited work ethic or the freelancer’s perennial fear of a jobs drought. Her long career is not to be sniffed at, evolving from gobby rebel to mischievous arty aunt, all built from her own toil.

Maybe some of this comes from her stoic mother, June, who never let her polio slow her down. Meanwhile, the comic ascribes her urge to perform to being an army child, forever having to make an impression at a new school. She was born in Kuala Lumpur, where her military dad Derek, a possible spy, was posted, and had an interesting spell in Berlin before growing up in the north of England, predominantly  Lytham St Annes.

‘This is northern seaside territory, the seaside postcard is less of a gag and more of a way of life, she writes. ‘There is a saltiness in the air and underage girls are being felt up and fingered all over the place.’

At Manchester Polytechnic School Of Theatre, while still using her real surname Hargreaves, she has a brief fling with Graham Fellows – who would go on to become John Shuttleworth – but mainly develops her stage skills… and an eating disorder which colours her formative decades.

Eclair lives the sort of bohemian, if slightly directionless, student and post-graduate life that may have been shambolic but feels almost romanticised in retrospect, full of offbeat experiences. She even got to dance on Culture Club’s Karma Chameleon video she reveals (though she can’t spot herself now).  

Young artistic types may not follow that beatnik path any more in a time where fame is created online and every night out is committed to digital film, but it’s a world Eclair brings vividly portrays – as indeed she does every chapter in her unconventional life story.

She came into comedy via performance poetry and rode the wave of alternative comedy in the 1980s that washed away the old guard.  But in comments that today’s new generation might come to reflect on, she admits:  ‘Weirdly I feel strangely guilt now about the sneery dismissal of the old-school club comic by my generation. Many were highly skilled working-class blokes just trying to make a living… I have no doubt that many of those blokes were complete arseholes, but things had to change. I just wish we hadn't been quite so smug about it.’

Eclair had a short-lived double-act with Helen Lederer – who also recently published her memoirs – and while she felt she lagged behind near-contemporaries like Jo Brand and Victoria Wood, in 1995, she famously became the first solo woman to win the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe. It would take 19 years for Laura Solon to become the second.  In a telling story, the day after her festival victory she was interviewed by a Daily Mail reporter in the Balmoral Hotel – but was too hungover to be coherent. 

Reflecting on that career pinnacle – the award, not the hangover – Eclair writes shrewdly: ‘I don’t know why so many women find success, so tricky, why we are almost happier, playing the underdog, constantly on the defensive, ready for the next knock-back. This time, when they're not back doesn't happen, I can't really deal with it; I feel an overwhelming responsibility to myself and to women in comedy generally. I feel like a fraud. In some respects, I don't know how not to feel better; bitterness has kept me going for so long, and suddenly my modus operandi has been taken away from me, and I feel panicked.’

That’s typical of the insightful self-analysis contained in the book – though she’s also occasionally indiscrete about others where needed, hooray! She condemns Clement Freud for being a ‘complete shit’ on Just A Minute, for example.

Invitations start to come in following her Edinburgh victory, but she never quite makes the best of them, especially as she feels an increasing discontent between the sweary rock-n-roll swagger of her onstage peroxide blonde character – which hit the late-1990s ladette zeitgeist at just the right time – and her real personality. ‘I am restless,’ she writes. ‘I don’t know at this point if I can be funny and completely authentic – I just know that stage Jenny is not something I want to be full-time; she isn’t good for me.’

She ascribes not being certain of which version of herself she wants to be to the difficulty in getting a TV career off the ground, but not for want of trying. She was to be a face of the newly launched Channel 5 and even has two series of her own chat show, now long forgotten. 

Still she continues to tour, although she’s rarely the darling of the press. (Full disclosure: she quotes one review from me from 2007 that she understandably still takes umbrage with, for while the criticism might be valid, I almost certainly prioritised good copy over good manners.)

She moves into novel writing and – in the second biggest break of her career – gets invited to become one of the talking heads on Grumpy Old Women, which becomes her brand for a while, very successfully exploited. Countless reality shows including  I’m A Celebrity follow – and finally Taskmaster, something else she feels was a long tine coming given it was made by the production arm of her agents, Avalon.

Her enduring career is certainly a testament to perseverance, and the warts-and-all account of its up and downs is a cracking read, and often as funny as the title promises. 

Personal stories weave in and out of the professional, which help give the book a more substantial form as Eclair goes full circle from child to grandparent, via her daughter Phoebe, an acclaimed playwright, and then to seeing her mother die. True to form, this is an affecting, occasionally amusing, account of grief.

But whether you are a fan of her stand-up or not, this detailed insight into what it’s like to be an edge-of-fame comic – successful, but never enough to ever rest on any laurels – is a compelling read for anyone interested in the  life of a comedian, and the recent history and politics of the industry.

• Jenny Eclair’s Jokes, Jokes, Jokes: My Very Funny Memoir is published by Sphere, priced £25. It is available from Amazon for £19.97  – or from uk.bookshop.org, below, which supports independent bookstores. 

Published: 16 Oct 2024