“HERE is your mission,” says the features editor. “A joint interview with mother and daughter comedians Janey Godley and Ashley Storrie, who both have slots at this year’s Glasgow Comedy Festival.”
Mmm. I like the idea of exploring the dynamic of two very funny comedians who live together, the mother looking over her shoulder perhaps, the daughter looking for approval, the wondering if they share the same value systems/steakbakes from Greggs. But will talking to two of the biggest gobs ever to have come out of Glasgow produce an interview, or will they overshadow each other in the competition for airspace?
What the hell. The challenge is accepted and soon the buzzer is being pushed at their modern flat in Glasgow’s west end. “Moan up,” shouts Godley from five floors north. Inside, the flat is practical (scatter cushions are prohibited) but with fashionably distressed paintwork on the doors. Or so I figure. “We stripped the paint off the doors a few months ago and just never got around to painting them,” corrects 56-year-old Godley. “We don’t need fancy.”
Indeed. Who needs painted skirting boards? We sit at a nice polished table that’s covered with a “lovely” glass top. “It was supplied by a guy we called Julio Englazier,” laughs Godley. The table, she informs, was rescued from the Calton bar in Glasgow’s east end, which Godley managed for years along with her husband, Sean Storrie. Tea is poured as Storrie joins us and chips in that she hadn't wanted the table to be sanded down at all. She'd wanted to retain the original carved graffiti.
Great. A little minor conflict. An indicator of the pair’s relationship? Opening conversation suggests not. Storrie reveals she’s just bought the controversial new Trump biography and both are in harmony, literally, when they agree that the critical content doesn’t necessarily signal the end for his presidency. “Trump was once caught on tape admitting he’d grabbed a woman’s f****,” says Storrie. “As your da’ says," her mother agrees, "Trump could f*** a dead donkey on stage and nothing would happen to him. But you hope ...”
The chat becomes a little surreal as Godley invents a Trump rap song. “Peein’ on Russian hookers ...” she sings, cheerily, to which her daughter adds the hook: “Pishin’, pishin’, pishin’.”
You quickly get the sense this is not the Hallmark version of what mothers and daughters are all about. Yet, while they’ll sing together, are they of the same comedy mind? “No!” says Storrie, in loud, dramatic voice. “I call her Kim Jong-Janey, because she can stand in front of this huge contingent of followers who love her, even when she gets on stage and just says ‘Mind when you had a dug?’, and they fall about laughing. I almost want to walk in front of them with a placard saying, ‘The word “dug” is not the joke!’ But the bitch can pull it off.”
Storrie adds: “She is all creative brain, and I’m logical brain. For example, she can fling paint onto paper and see what happens. Since the age of three I’ve been terrified of the idea of a blank sheet. I’d cry in art class because I’d sit for a solid hour and do nothing. I need to know what I’m going to write on it.”
Godley’s summation of her work-life outlook seems to be the Scottish version of the Nike slogan. “Jist dae it.” Her progeny, on the other hand epitomises Scottish Presbyterian caution. “Gonnae no’ dae that 'til you’re sure.”
Two different women indeed, but connected by the need to connect with an audience. Godley broke into comedy after years of telling funny stories to her Calton bar regulars. Storrie watched her mother gig and took to the stage aged 11, when she told her first joke, about Barbie having bulimia. “I upset a lot of people with that gag,” she says with a pleased smile. But Storrie, now 30, didn’t immediately plan a career in the laughs business. She went through a range of jobs before going to college to study film, then moving back to stand-up.
However, Godley didn’t encourage her daughter into comedy. “We let her make her own choices,” she insists. “Me and Him decided she could weigh up her own options. No pressure.” (Never named in interviews, Godley’s husband is clearly the silent partner in their relationship.)
But let’s go backaways, Janey. What of this little creature Ashley who became a comic? Godley pauses and her voice becomes serious. “I didn’t want to have a baby,” she admits. “I was six years married and I kept putting it off.”
“I was a marriage Elastoplast,” offers Storrie, and they both laugh in agreement.
Godley continues. “I didn’t want a baby but He convinced me we should try. I came off the pill for one week and I fell pregnant in Newquay – appropriately enough. But we had no idea what we were doing with a child. He had a dysfunctional family [criminality, she says, was woven through both families] and we didn’t write a life plan. People didn’t.”
Her issue takes issue with the comment: “Some people did!”
“Who the f*** do you know that did?” counters Godley, laughing.
We’re off. This pair clearly have separate versions of the bringing up baby story so let’s turn up the heat even more. Why did Godley and Him choose to send their offspring to a west end private school, given their working-class credentials? And what of their daughter’s reaction to being supplanted into a whole new universe? (They were still living in the east end at the time.) "Well, to put it in context," says Godley, "I left school before I was 16 because I had no shoes to wear. It was that simple. I felt education was super-important. As for Him, his faither had seven sons and he ran pubs. School didn’t even figure. Plus, we’d brought the wean up to speak nice and this could have meant her head being kicked in at school in the east end. So we sent her to Laurel Bank. But it wasn’t about elitism.”
At this point, The Wean kicks in: “Bullshit! I was an experiment, not a child. And what about the crazy stuff you did? No sweets. No birthday cake. And where did the child vegetarianism come in?”
We’re heading into Mommie Dearest territory now, I suggest, and they both laugh, taking the heat down a notch. “That was down to Him,” says Godley, grinning while blame-shifting the missing partner. “But I admit we did hunners of things wrong.”
Godley was clearly asking a lot of her daughter, the east/west dual existence, having her picked up from her nice school by her east end uncles and their "Rottweiler dugs" before the family decided to move west to an upmarket area, a little like the Beverly Hillbillies.
Did the schoolgirl have to protect her mother from criticism? “Endlessly,” she maintains. “Because she can be very extreme. Take her politics [SNP-supporting] for example. People are too quick to jump behind a cause. And a party. I think politicians, on the whole, are lying corrupt bastards.”
Godley isn’t so much into examining why, for example, Shettleston voted Conservative in last year's General Election. She simply hates Tories. The polarisation, she reckons, emerged from dealing with a darker life. “I expect my thinking is formed to a degree because my ma laid in the Clyde for four days before they found her,” she offers by way of example. Her mother was drowned in the Clyde in 1982 and Godley has previously said she believes she was murdered.
Godley admits her daughter contains her excesses. “I’ll be in the room, on Twitter, and I’ll hear the heavy stomp of feet coming near and she’ll yell, ‘Why the f*** did you just say that? Take that off immediately!’ And I will. Because she’s the mother sometimes.” She shrugs. “I’d never to go into her room and say that.”
The pair are really opening up now. Storrie, for example, admits she’s not out of the box marked Regular Child. “All I wear is dungarees,” she offers. “And I was once a Catholic, until I was nine, and saw a documentary on Channel Four about how children in the 1950s had been sent from Catholic orphanages to Australia and were treated as slaves. I refused to go back to the church until they apologised.”
Godley smiles as she acknowledges her daughter is a little unusual. “She doesn’t want to marry and have babies. Maybe that’s down to us. We sent her to a school that encouraged feminism. And when she was five me and Him decided we wouldn’t get her a toy ironing board for Christmas. As a result, she never irons.” She laughs. “But I wish we’d got her a wee Hoover because the floor needs a good clean.”
They both laugh hard. What they agree on, they say, is domestics. Godley offers: “As long as the cups, and the towels and the sheets are clean and the place doesn’t look like a drug den, we’re happy. You see, I was brought up in the dirtiest, clattiest house I’ve ever seen. I had nits and scabies. So what matters to me is not untidiness, but cleanliness. We don’t do Lladró or Capodimonte [upmarket porcelain brands]. And we don’t give a f*** what neighbours may think.”
What Godley does worry about is people assuming she and her daughter aren’t nice to others. “We brought her up not to be a d*** to others – and to try and give money away to the needy if you’ve got some.” Storrie crashes in, laughing: “That last edict has given me guilt problems. I hate it that I always want to hand money to people in the streets.” Godley halts her. “I don’t hate that, Ashley. It’s good you do it.” “Yes, but Dad hates it,” says Storrie. “Homeless people don’t give you a receipt for tax purposes.”
It’s obvious this pair can laugh at their differences. But it's clear that they are also each other’s support system. “Last night she was feeling blue so I asked what it was,” says Storrie. “She said her soul had filled up like a big sink in her stomach and then the plug was pulled out, and I said, ‘Great. But gonnae no' use that image again?” The pair burst into wild laughter at the recall.
“We recognise we need to speak about things,” says Godley. “My ma and all the women I knew were full of terrible depression and took lots of tablets – Mandrax and Phenobarbitone, the lot, and I vowed not to get like that. So we talk things out when we’re anxious or blue.”
She adds: “But we don’t only get each other. Ashley’s been great in being able to explore His condition, having been diagnosed with autism during his depression time. And we’ve since learned Ashley is mildly on the spectrum.” She adds, softly: “I said to her we can’t have silences. She needs to tell me when she’s feeling shitey.”
Storrie agrees: “Because I have the autism thing I tend not to be able to tell when someone is annoyed at me – or just having a bad day. I used to sit there and wonder what was going on around me. But now I ask. And if I get a text from her I insist on getting an emoji of a clown face to indicate she’s not annoyed.” Godley adds: “That’s true. I can’t text her saying, ‘Aye, OK.’ This may be seen as passive aggressive. It has to be a f***ing clown.”
The pair are on the same page when it comes to realising they’re not always on the same page. But you can’t have two great gobs in the one family without bouts of spontaneous combustion. What’s the biggest fight they’ve had? Storrie tells the tale. “We were on the way to New Zealand and about to land in Los Angeles for a stop-over. She was sitting in front of me and asked me to hand her something. And straight away she yelled, ‘Don’t pull that face!’ The thing is, she was in front of me and couldn’t even see my face.”
Godley, in semi-apologetic voice, chips in: “I was jet-lagged.” But Storrie is having none of it. “She was totally irrational and I became so incensed that when I walked off the plane at LAX Airport I disappeared on my own. Since I was the only one with American money she had to come and find me. But I just said, ‘You can go **** yourself, Janey.”
The stand-off continued until it was time to re-board. “And then we had this huge fight in front of the check-in woman.”
Storrie breaks into a wide grin as she adds: “Now, over the years, we had tried everything to get an upgrade. My mother would tell the check-in people my boyfriend has just died, she’d asked me to pretend I had a limp, everything. But nothing ever worked. But as we were having this massive row, the check-in woman suddenly announced we were being bumped up to first class.” Godley laughs at the outrageousness of it. “Clearly they wanted to separate us away from the normal people.”
They laugh at the madness of it all. But then Godley becomes (unusually) silent. Thoughts are loosening. She looks at her daughter and asks, apropos of nothing: “But would you never want a boyfriend?” “No. Why?” “Well, I worry about you, that you’ll be lonely and ..."
We're off and running again. “But I’m not lonely!” yells Storrie. “And why would I suddenly become lonely?” Silence.
It's not about guys, she later adds. "It’s relationships. I could be a lesbian and still think, ‘No. I like being on my own’.” She looks to her mother. “I don’t want to compromise. Why should I? You’ve had to compromise to Him so much. Aren’t relationships so much about lying?”
Godley stays silent. So you ice-break. You suggest people in relationships simply become a slightly different version of themselves. “That’s like buying a telly and realising it’s become a microwave,” grins Storrie. Her mother laughs out loud. And all is right in their world.
Last question. Would the pair appear together on stage? “I wouldn’t want to do it,” says Godley. “I think it negates who she is. People might be saying, ‘Oh there’s that wee lassie up there wi' her ma.” Storrie laughs. “Oh aye," she says, "nothing to do with my amazing wit.”
They both burst into fits of giggles before Godley adds: “She has out-funnied me a few times on stage – and part of me is proud as hell. But another part of me is thinking, ‘Shut the f*** up, Ashley. Do you realise how long it took me to get here?’”
If the new BBC Scotland Channel is looking for a Scottish reality show, the Kardashians have nothing on this pair.
• The Whyte & Mackay Glasgow International Comedy Festival runs from March 8-25 www.glasgowcomedyfestival.com
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