Janey Godley documentary: Cancer, being cancelled and why we need pals

This may come as news to Mr Osmond, who at 66 is hale and hearty and currently doing a headline residency in Las Vegas, but I guess we all have our own ideas of what heaven might be like.

Donny Osmond, though, I say when she tells me this. Really?

“I’m going to stick with somebody who looks quite passive and is frightened of me. I don’t want a challenge in my afterlife sex. I want it to be easy, with a bit of music.

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“I don’t want to meet Elvis. He was quite creepy.”

Monday morning in the Glasgow Film Theatre. Godley is here today because she has a new film to promote.

Janey is a documentary which follows the comedian and her daughter and fellow comedian Ashley Storrie around Britain during Godley’s Not Dead Yet tour. It will be the closing gala at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival in March. A world premiere, no less.

John Archer’s film covers all the bases in Godley’s storied life; the comedy obviously, but also the reality of living with advanced cancer (she was diagnosed with stage three ovarian cancer in 2021 for which she continues to receive treatment).

It also sees guest appearances by Jimmy Carr and Nicola Sturgeon, reiterates the comedian’s four-lettered opinion of Donald Trump (she doesn’t think he’ll get to be President again, she tells me) and addresses cancel culture and the furore in 2021 around the discovery of historic racist tweets written by Godley.

Janey with Nicola Sturgeon (Image: Robert Perry)

It also covers the fact that as a child she was abused by her uncle, that she believes her mother Annie, who was found dead in the River Clyde in 1982, was murdered by her mother’s partner at the time, and that in her 20s Godley ended up running a pub with her husband Sean that was owned by gangsters.

In short, it’s fair to say that Archer has plenty of material to work with.

This morning we will talk about all of this. But right now it’s 10am and Godley is all glitter and bonhomie. She is in good form. She looks it, too.

Even so, to ask her “how are you?” is not, given her condition, an idle query.

“I’m feeling fitter than I’ve ever felt,” Godley says when I do.

“I’m strong and healthy. But cancer still hides inside me. People always want to know that you’re cured and I will never be cured. So, you end up babysitting everybody else’s reaction and grief to that. People go, ‘Oh, you’re looking well.’ I go, ‘I’m still dying.’ “It’s hard to explain that to people, but I don’t want people getting the false impression that I’ve got the all clear because I don’t and I will never get the all clear. I will live with this until I die.

“But physically I’m feeling well. The hernia’s more a problem. I got a big hernia after the operation. [Godley had a hysterectomy in 2022.] “No woman wants a big bulky ’hing at the front of her stomach. Especially when I got my womb out. I should have more space, no less.”

Godley is back on the road this coming Monday for more live dates around the north of England.

The question is, why? Why go on tour? Why make a movie? Why put yourself through it all in the circumstances?

Janey with her daughter Ashley (Image: unknown)

“I think it would be a nice legacy,” Godley suggests. “I think it would be nice for something to be left behind; that people could see the good, the bad, the indifferent, the boring, the mundane, the funny, the human that is me.

“Ashley decided we should make a documentary. It was nice for both of us to have a project that wasn’t based round f****** chemotherapy.”

The vehemence with which she utters that curse tells me all I need to know about the “joy” of chemo.

Actually, Godley says, when it came to filming, she loved the experience.

“It’s weird with me and Ashley. You just point a camera at us and we’re good to go. I don’t have that thing: ‘Could you leave us for a minute? This is a special moment’. Ashley has been videoing me since 2003. We were used to it.”

Does it suggest, Janey, that the need to perform is paramount?

“I always need to be performing. It’s the only way I can get through chemotherapy and the only way I can get through cancer. I don’t know anything else. Even when I was a barmaid I was performing. The audience were my customers and the stage was behind the bar.”

Godley pauses, rubs her arm. “God, I’m all bruises from these canulas.”

She admits she finds the cancer treatment difficult. “Having to go into that ward and seeing all the poor young women. And then you do that thing where you see people lying in bed bald and you go, ‘That’s a shame. At least that’s not me.’ But that is me.”

She looks at her arm again. “I’m holding off getting a [Hickman] line,” she says. “I never took drugs as a child, so I’ve saved my veins for this day. I knew taking heroin would be a bad mistake.”

With Godley, a punchline is never far away.

Watching the film, I tell her, I did wonder if the fierce urgency of her current situation has maybe allowed her to come to terms with the past. To find some peace in relation to the wrongs done to her; the abuse she suffered and the loss of her mother.

“Naw, I’ll never get over it. What I’m going through now hasn’t lessened … My ma would have been 90 on Saturday past. She never even got to see 50.

“The thing is when you’ve been through murder like that and when you’ve been through abuse, people say things like, ‘you move on,’ and ‘you make peace with it.’ Naw. I was vengeful against they b******* to this very day. Both of them are deid,” she says of her uncle and the man she believes killed her mother, “and I wished them deid.

“I don’t believe in ‘you have to forgive’ and ‘you have to let go’. Nah, nah. A man that rapes weans and a man that attacked women. Nah. I hope both of them are lying on burny stones somewhere.

Janey with Shirley (Image: Supplied)

“It never made me bitter or angry. It made me very realistic about grief and revenge. And I think sometimes when you are told to let things go I think it undermines your ability to go. ‘No, f*** that.’”

What does become apparent from watching the film is that Godley is having to deal with everybody else’s reaction to her diagnosis as well as her own.

“I have to babysit everybody else’s grief,” she agrees.

“My husband is not going to watch it and Ashley is not going to watch it. They have never read the books. They don’t want to. They’ve been in the middle of it, so they don’t want to stand back and look at it.

“But having to deal with everybody’s reaction is hard because a lot of people automatically feel sorry for me. And yet I think I’ve had a good, happy, fulfilled life. I had a great childhood. When I speak to my friends about their childhoods, a lot of them had mammies that cooked and cleaned and gave them clean socks and clean pants and took them on picnics and they had an immaculate house and they went on holidays. But they were psychologically damaged.

“Whereas I had a clatty house, I always had nits, my ma was f****** mad, my da was an alcoholic who was functioning. There was an uncle who was sexually abusive.

“But I was loved. My da told me right up to the day he died that he loved me. It’s a real juxtaposition of this horrible f****** violent thing happening and yet love and attention.

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“My ma and da never hit me. I’ve got pals who were brought up in beautiful, lovely houses with roses around the door whose ma used to batter them with a Scholl sandal.”

Well yes, but Godley also thinks her mum knew she was being abused.

“And I won’t forgive her for it. But I think she was abused by her dad. She ended up in a mental hospital about four times and she ended up addicted to valium and she ended up drunk and she ended up deid in the Clyde. So it’s not like she got an easy ride out of this.

“But she was funny. And so was my da. I don’t know how I would have coped if it was my da that was abusing me. I don’t think I’d be here because my da’s love was everything. When I look back on that childhood I know that a lot of people are going to see nothing but a lot of sadness, but there was a lot of love.”

There is love in her life now too. The love of her family and her friends. Godley’s friend Shirley is one of the stars of the documentary.

“Did I tell you how I met Shirley?” Godley asks.

“I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell you this story. Simon Pegg the actor was a comedian before he was an actor. And I met Simon at the Groucho years ago, maybe 12, 13 years ago. And his wife is Scottish. Maureen.

“So we got chatting and we were talking about comedy and Glasgow and then he said, ‘Maureen’s auntie Shirley lives in Glasgow. You would be great pals with her.’ And then he says to Shirley, ‘I’ve got Janey’s number, you two should meet.’ “We met up and we’ve been pals ever since.

“I love her. She’s great and when I had the hysterectomy she looked after me. When I came out of the hospital, this day two years ago, I didn’t go home to my house. I went home to hers and she looked after me. She took the bandage off me. She jagged me every day with blood thinners.

“She’s coming on tour with me.”

Godley then talks about another of her friends, Monica.

“Monica’s great fun,” she adds. “I was with her last night. We have really good frank discussions about how things are going to be when I’m not here. How she’s going to behave. What I want her to do.”

That latter point clearly matters. You get the sense that Godley is one of life’s fixers. “I tend to be a leader,” she agrees. The night she learned that it seemed likely that the cancer had returned she was due to perform.

“I don’t even know how I did the show because my brain was like, ‘What’s going on?’”

Even then, however, the leader in her kicked in. “In the break I phoned my lawyer. My brain went into ‘I’ve got to sort everything’ mode.”

And now you’re planning for … “Planning for not being here,” she says, finishing my sentence for me. “Making sure that everybody’s money is in place, making sure everybody’s property is in place, that everybody has got their share. I’m doing all that.”

It should be said that the cancer when it returned did not come alone. Just before she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2021, she was dropped from a Scottish Government information campaign after the emergence of historic racist tweets she had posted years before.

As she says in the documentary: “First I get cancelled and then I get cancer.”

Godley is still horrified by those tweets. That she ever thought it was OK to write them. She had always seen herself as anti-racist.

“I think one of the things about white privileged women like me is we say things and think that because people know we’re not racist we can say things. Naw. We have to check our language all the time. Just because you’re a lefty, liberal, watch your language because sometimes we say things that are unacceptable. And that’s what I was guilty of.

“I’ve always marched against fascism and yet I came out with a lot of s***** tweets.”

The result was not just seeing her government information campaign dropped. She was also targeted on social media. It goes on to this day.

“Do you know what? People don’t want to forgive anybody. They want to kill them. There isn’t forgiveness. You have to die, that’s the end of it. You’ve said something bad, you have to die.”

And yet she keeps engaging with those who attack her on social media. Why? “I like arguing.”

It was Jimmy Carr who encouraged Godley to do the Not Dead Yet tour.

“I went to see him in Edinburgh. I was really despondent. And he went, ‘No, go and do the tour. What are you going to do? Sit in the house and be dead sad about cancer?’ “So, I had to do chemo and the tour on the same day a lot of times. There was one day I was getting two sets of chemo and I was on tour that night in Dundee.”

Again, the question occurs. Why put yourself through that?

What else was I going to do, she asks?

“I annoy everybody if I’m not working. I think my husband and my daughter will be looking forward to the day I die just to get a wee break.”

And in the end, Godley says, the tour turned out to be energising. “It was cathartic. It was brilliant to get back on stage when I was told so much was wrong. The end is near? F*** you.”

Godley clearly has a need to keep busy. Right now, she tells me, “I’m knitting a scarf for Liam Neeson. It sounds like the beginning of a Fringe show. ‘I’m knitting a scarf for Liam Neeson.’ “My pal knows him and he likes my videos and she says Janey’s knitting and he went, ‘Tell her to knit me a scarf.’ And it’s the worst scarf you’ve ever seen because I cannae knit. It’s all wonky shonky jazz knitting. There’s holes and everything in it. I don’t know how he’s going to wear it.”

She’s also learning the violin and going on trips around Scotland with her husband. They’ve bought a new car, “which upset my husband no end because my old car Bessie, she’s dying. It’s an allegory for me. He’s like, ‘I don’t want to let go of my old car because my old car is really my wife and when she dies I’m going to feel dead sad.’ “And he’s got autism so he doesnae like new things. I keep trying to cheer him up with this new car and he’s like, ‘I don’t want the new car.’ “We talk about death a lot in the house and we laugh about it. ‘I cannae wash the dishes because I’ve got the bad, bad cancer.’ ‘Will you change the bed?’ ‘I’ve got the bad, bad cancer.’ “People say, ‘Oh, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.’ And I go, ‘Yeah, but you don’t have a bus following you.’ That said, Godley says she doesn’t want to “get dead old either”.

“My wee dad slowly defrosted with dementia. I don’t want that. I want to go when I can pull up my own knickers and drink tea.”

And when it comes time to get cosy with Donny Osmond in some celestial bed she can at least look back on a life well lived.

“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 to be.

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“I travelled the world. I bought a house by telling jokes in the west end of Glasgow. I’ve nailed it. I got to do everything I wanted to do.”

Janey will receive its World Premiere as the closing gala for Glasgow Film Festival 2024 on March 10. Visit glasgowfilmfest.org. The film will be released in cinemas across the UK from March 15, with a special live stand-up set from Godley at select screenings in Scotland