Janey Godley: 'I got to do everything I wanted to do'

For some time now Godley has been raging against the dying of the light following her ovarian cancer diagnosis in 2021. (She was given the all-clear in 2022 only for it to return.)

She performed her Not Dead Yet tour around the country in 2023 and earlier this year saw the release of a documentary, Janey, which received its world premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival. Godley even went on tour with the film in March.

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Just six months later her autumn tour has been cancelled and on Wednesday she posted a video from her hospital bed explaining the reality of her situation.

In the last few years no one has been more aware of that reality than her. “People say, ‘Oh, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.’ And I go, ‘Yeah, but you don’t have a bus following you,’” she joked when I spoke to her in January for The Herald Magazine.

And perhaps no one more than Godley knows that life is what happens while you’re making other plans. Her own story has been marked again and again by horror and pain.

As a child she was sexually abused by her uncle. Her father was an alcoholic, her mother died when Godley was just 21, murdered, her daughter believes, by a violent boyfriend. Godley spent the rest of her twenties running a pub in Glasgow's Calton owned by gangsters.

All of which she would transform into material for comedy. It would be the same with cancer.

As a comedian Godley has always been an outspoken, articulate working-class woman. Some of that outspokenness was couched in what used to be called “industrial language”, most notably when she welcomed Donald Trump to Scotland in 2016 with a hand-painted banner that left no one in any doubt what she thought of him.

And sometimes that outspokenness has got her into trouble. Because at times that outspokenness tipped over into offence.

Janey Godley with former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (Image: free)Godley was dropped from a Scottish Government information campaign in 2021 after the discovery of historic racist messages on Twitter. She also acknowledged that she had been guilty of “offensive, hurtful language” against disabled people and Chernobyl victims.

“Sometimes we say things that are unacceptable,” she told me in January. “And that’s what I was guilty of.”

There were many who, understandably, reckoned those comments were unforgivable. I suspect Godley herself is one of them.

They certainly drew a storm of abuse online, as did her vocal support of independence. Godley wasn’t one to ignore any attacks, though, and continued to engage with many of those who attacked her. Why? “I like arguing.”

When we met she told me she was knitting a scarf for Liam Neeson (“all wonky shonky jazz knitting”) and was planning to have sex with Donny Osmond in the afterlife. For all the regrets and pain she carried with her there was also a pride - in her daughter Ashley, now a comedian herself, in her marriage and in the life she built from the wreckage of her own childhood.

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But then, she told me, even as a kid, despite everything, she had always felt cherished.

“When I look back on that childhood I know that a lot of people watching are going to see nothing but a lot of sadness, but there was a lot of love.”

That love was the rock she built a life on. One she was proud of.

“I’ve done so much. I became a published author. I wrote a play for the National Theatre. I acted. I became the stand-up that I wanted.

“I travelled the world. I bought a house by telling jokes. I got to do everything I wanted to do.”

How many of us get to say that?