Date of birth: 20-01-1961 Date of death: 02-11-2024
Janey Godley was born into the poverty in the East End of Glasgow, leaving school at 16 with no qualifications. Her parents Annie and Jim Currie were alcoholics and her mother was also addicted to tranquilisers.
Godley and her sister, Ann Crawford, were sexually abused by their maternal uncle, and in 1982, when Godley was 21, her mother drowned in the Clyde. Godley believes she was murdered by her violent boyfriend, although he was never charged.
She married Sean Storrie – who has Asperger syndrome and was born into a gangster family – in 1980 when she was just 19. Together they ran a pub in Calton, Glasgow for 14 years during the 1980s and 1990s.
She took up stand-up in 1994, adopting the stage name Godley and has quickly established herself on the circuit, playing everywhere from the Glastonbury Festival to inmates at Scottish prisons. She was also a contestant on the 2004 C4 reality show, Kings Of Comedy
In 2002, she won Best Show Concept at the New Zealand Comedy Festival and, in 2006 won the Spirit of The Festival Award.
Her autobiography Handstands in the Dark, a top ten bestseller both as hardback (2005) and paperback (2006), covers her pre-showbiz life.
Godley became known on social media – especially after she was pictured standing outside Donald Trump's Turnberry Golf resort holding a sign stating ‘Trump is a Cunt’ in 2016. Also going viral were the videos she made during lockdown revoicing Sturgeon's daily Covid briefings.
It led to her becoming the voice of a public health campaign, but her involvement with the Scottish government prompted to critics delving into her Twitter past an unearthing messages Godley acknowledged used 'offensive, hurtful language', for which she apologised.
In 2023, Godley won the first Sir Billy Connolly Spirit of Glasgow Award, given out but the city's comedy festival.
In 2021, Godley shared her ovarian cancer diagnosis on social media in November 2021, and a year later announced on Twitter that she had been given the all-clear. However, a subsequent scan showed signs of cancer in her abdomen. Her experiences with cancer were covered in a documentary film and another volume of memoirs – Janey: The Woman That Won't Shut Up – both released in 2024.
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The world told Janey Godley to stay small - she did the opposite
Ashley Storrie's eulogy as her mother is laid to rest
Janey Godley, one of the greatest comedians Scotland has ever produced was laid to rest this morning at an uplifting and spiritual ceremony at St Mary's Cathedral in the West End of Glasgow.
There were tears and laughter at the hour-long service for a peerless and much-loved performer, who died of cancer earlier this month.
Those in attendance included former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and comedians Susie McCabe, Scott Agnew, Susan Riddell, Wendy Wason, Neil Bratchpiece and his brother David, as well as Still Game star Gavin Mitchell.
The back cover of the order of service was festooned with press quotes that Godley had accumulated over her 30-year career, calling her 'the Godmother of Scottish comedy', 'Scotland's renaissance woman' and 'Glasgow's gutsiest'.
Godley's daughter, the stand-up Ashley Storrie, received a standing ovation when she paid moving tribute to her mother, whom she described as a proud 'daughter of Glasgow', who refused to be inhibited.
'It felt like the world was telling her, be quiet, stay small, don't get big,' Storrie said. 'So she did the opposite - she ventured far from our shores... she travelled across the world where she found people who loved her in every corner. She grew bigger than she could have possibly imagined.'
She reflected: 'My mummy was a comedian. That was her thing. First and foremost.
'She tried acting. She hated it. She was a terrible singer. She couldnae knit. She tried it, and there are pictures of Liam Neeson wearing a hideous scarf to prove it.
Storrie elicited big laughs for chiding the provost of the cathedral, the Very Rev Kelvin Holdsworth, for trying to coach her in stagecraft, protesting: 'I know how to work a mic – priest thinking he knows better than me!'
Fulfilling her mother's wish that she 'headline' Godley's 'farewell tour', which began yesterday with her coffin being driven through Edinburgh observed by hundreds of mourners, Storrie pointed out: 'I can't do any of her jokes cause "House of God" and that.
'My mum is very grateful to all of you who came out yesterday to Edinburgh and lined the Royal Mile and lifted your voices in song and the people who have come today to remember her in the best way possible.'
Noting that Godley had been far from 'godless', the Rev Holdsworth recalled the comedian's relationship with religion as 'complicated'. Raised Protestant, she had married a Catholic and had an abiding preoccupation with the Virgin Mary.
Rejecting the bitter sectarianism that scarred Glasgow during her early life growing up in Shettleston in the East End, Godley lived close to the cathedral at the end. And the priest recalled that he once sheltered her in the building when she was verbally abused by a stranger taking issue with the comic's steadfast support for the trans community.
Like many, he credited Godley's hugely popular voiceover videos of Sturgeon, other public figures and assorted animals, with getting him through the Covid lockdown, a sentiment that he had heard echoed by many others. It was appropriate then, that this, her final public appearance was being simultaneously live-streamed on YouTube, the arena where she had greatly swelled her audience in the prolific final years of her life.
Visiting Godley in her hospice in her final days, the Rev Holdsworth had been struck by her compiling a list, of everyone she had been prepared to forgive that had wronged her, encompassing anyone and everyone.
Even those in American politics?, he delicately enquired. The priest then brought the church down by alluding to Godley infamously greeting Donald Trump at his Turnberry golf course with a blunt placard.
'Janey Godley died having forgiven everyone,' he said. 'But she still believed to her dying day that Trump is a count... ry mile away from being anyone who should ever have come near to power.'
Subsequently, the choir sang Blackadder and Red Dwarf composer Howard Goodall's anthem Lord Divine, the congregation were asked to reflect during Billie Holiday's God Bless The Child and a prayer of intercession written by a young Godley was read, praying for the wellbeing of all faiths and 'aw the wee cats'.
The service closed with Godley's voiceover from her Covid-era voicings of Sturgeon: 'Frank! Get the door!', before her coffin was carried out and the hearse drove down Great Western Road to Glasgow Crematorium, with hundreds gathered outside to pay their respects, many dressed in the colourful attire that Godley had stipulated before her passing.
Taking to Instagram afterwards, McCabe posted: 'Goodbyes are not meant to be easy, they are meant to be hard because the person meant something.'
Yesterday, hundreds of people lined the streets of Edinburgh yesterday to pay their final respects, as pictured above.
Godley's hearse drove through the centre of the city that Storrie described as her mother's ‘beloved festival home’. Written on its side was: ‘Frank, get the door’.
Several mourners had signs and T-shirts bearing the same phrase, while one woman recreated the comedian's most memorial viral moment: holding the same message that the comedian famously took to Turnberry.
Crowds applauded the coffin throughout its slow journey across the city, as the strains of Amazing Grace rang out.
Comforted by friends, a distraught Storrie walked with the cortege as it travelled along the Royal Mile and Lawnmarket with a ‘pause for reflection’ at St Giles' Cathedral where a minute’s silence was observed, before a choir sang a moving a cappella version of Elbow’s One Day Like This
Here is footage of the procession:
When her mum’s ‘last tour’ of Edinburgh and Glasgow was announced, Storrie said: ‘For the past few years of Ma's life, it was important to her that she shared her journey with everyone, to offer support for others on the same path and to highlight the symptoms of ovarian cancer - all of course in her very singular Janey style, with laughter and candour.
‘So many of you who have travelled with us on this journey wish to bid her a final farewell, so here's the details of my mum's final tour, in the two cities she loved with all her heart.’
Godley died on November 2 at the age of 63 in the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice in Glasgow, where she was receiving palliative care for terminal cancer.
■BY JAY RICHARDSON IN GLASGOW Additional reporting: Steve Bennett
We do not currently hold contact details for Janey Godley's agent. If you are a comic or agent wanting your details to appear here, for a one-off fee of £59, email steve@chortle.co.uk.
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