Glasgow games prompts stand-up tour

Janey Godley is to perform stand-up in obscure corners of Scotland after securing funding to tie in with the Glasgow Commonwealth Games.

The comic will visit he most 'far-flung parts' of the country with her daughter Ashley Storrie, also a stand-up, under the Journeys To Glasgow banner.

En route they will record audio and video interviews with Scottish people, gathering such stories as ‘how people met on the bus to Glasgow and got married'. The footage will go on YouTube and into the national archive in the British Film Institute Mediatheque in Glasgow’s Bridgeton Library.

They will also be encouraging the public to try stand-up.

The plans were revealed at the launch of Festival 2014 in Glasgow's Botanic Gardens yesterday, part of a cultural programme coinciding with the Games next July.

Godley and Storrie will also host bus tours of Glasgow and perform a ten nights of gigs during the Games, featuring acts drawn from Commonwealth nations.

Arts development body Creative Scotland has been widely criticised in recent years for failing to engage with the nation's artistic talent.

But Godley declared: 'I was desperate to get comedy represented as an art and I'm over the moon that we are part of this cultural programme. It proves that comedy is an art and can be part of an arts budget.'

Locations for the tour are still to be co-ordinated with other Festival 2014 events. These include News Just In, a 'continually evolving, satirical comedy' by theatre company Random Accomplice set in a fictional media office for the Games, described as 'part Twenty Twelve, part Drop The Dead Donkey', mixing live performance, filmed content and online interaction.

Janet Archer, chief executive of Creative Scotland, said the programme would ‘shine a light on our artists, our culture, our creativity, our communities and our places’.

Last year, the Olympics Games was tied to a Cultural Olympiad that included Stephen Fry curating a two-week comic commentary on the Games at London's Criterion Theatre, Tim Minchin performing a gig at Cornwall's Eden Project, Terry Jones co-creating a new children's opera, The Owl and the Pussycat, that travelled through London's canals, and comedians including Reginald D Hunter, Jenny Eclair and sketch group Idiots Of Ants performing ten pop-up gigs along riverbanks between London and Edinburgh.

- by Jay Richardson

Published: 17 Jul 2013