Fearless Scots comedian Janey Godley lived and died on her own terms

Died: November 2, 2024

IT was the morning after the Brexit vote in June 2016. Just as Britain was absorbing the news that David Cameron had resigned, Turnberry Hotel & Resort, in Ayrshire, was putting out the red carpet for Donald Trump, the hotel’s owner who was also the Republican presidential nominee in the US.

The world’s media was on hand to watch Trump and his entourage arrive by helicopter. It was a momentous day, yet one of the lingering images was that of a small, lone Scotswoman, defiantly holding a sign that described Trump in terms as crisp as they were scathing.

The protestor was the comedian Janey Godley. A mounted policewoman asked her to move, but Godley declined politely. “She was really sweet actually and when I refused to give my ‘details’ she just went off on her lovely horse”, Godley later tweeted.

Godley, a stand-up comedian, author and broadcaster, has died at the age of 63 after a long fight with cancer. Brave and open to the last, she posted a video on the X platform on September 25. She wrote: “I’m now at end-of-life care - palliative care - and will be going into a hospice for the foreseeable - thanks to everyone who sends me love and support- you’ve been amazing”.

The previous week, she had cancelled all future dates of her autumn tour, which had gone under the title of “Why Is She Still Here?”, after her doctors had advised that she should stop working “for the foreseeable future”.

Speaking to the Herald’s Teddy Jamieson last January, Godley said she had a clear idea of how she wanted to spend eternity in the afterlife: “I think I get to have quite a lot of weird sex with Donny Osmond. He doesn’t have a choice. It’s just how it is.” (Mr Osmond is, needless to say, very much alive).

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

Godley was speaking a few weeks before a documentary, called Janey, was due to be screened at the Glasgow Film Theatre as the closing gala of the Glasgow Film Festival. John Archer’s film followed Godley, and her daughter and fellow comedian Ashley Storrie, around Britain during Godley’s Not Dead Yet tour.

The documentary ranged across Godley’s often turbulent personal life and career. This, after all, was a woman who as a child was abused by her uncle, and who believed that her mother Annie, who was found dead in the River Clyde in 1982, had been murdered by her mother’s partner at the time. The Calton pub that she and her husband, Sean, ran while she was in her twenties was owned by her father-in-law, a well-known criminal figure who was no stranger to violence.

In August 2006, by then well-established, she had no fewer than three productions on at the Edinburgh Fringe. One of them, The Point of Yes, was about the heroin epidemic that had struck her native Glasgow in the 1980s.

“I never took heroin but lots and lots of my friends did and died”, she said in an interview. “It's about how people reach that point of saying yes. 1979 was the year I met my husband, Sean, and we took over a pub in the Calton and I saw the very first wrap of heroin arrive in the Calton. I was there”.

Fellow comedian Ashley Storrie with Janey (Image: free) Godley was 45 at the time she gave that interview. “My own mammy was murdered at 47 and I realised that I've only got two years left, not to live, but to fill in all the things she never got to do”, she said. “It's a shame. She should have got to get old and cranky and swear at kids and keep cats. I don't think I grieved properly. I just created a life for her somewhere else in my imagination. She was never a boring mum. There was always a story. So I suppose I'm a bit like her”.

Janey Godley was born on January 20, 1961, in the east end of Glasgow. She was the youngest of four: her siblings were Ann, Mij (her father Jim’s name spelt backwards) and Vid (short for David). Her father was a hard-working man but was also an alcoholic, and her mother was a chaotic dreamer.

The dysfunctional family lived in a small two-bedroom flat in Kenmore Street, Shettleston, which at the time was the least healthy place to live in Scotland. From an early age Godley was frequently raped by an uncle, to the extent, as she wrote in her bestselling memoir, Handstands in the Dark, that when she was just six years old she contemplated suicide. She also dressed so as to downplay her gender, so as not to attract any more abusers.

He parents had separated by the time she left Eastbank Academy in 1977, in the morning of her 16th birthday, without any qualifications. She had, however, been a clever pupil. “I had nits, scabies, we were poor,” she told the Guardian in 2019. “I remember eating out of bins and being a teenager with dirty clothes. But I was bright and I loved reading, so I had the chance to escape. And I’m not ashamed of it, because it wasn’t my fault.”

In her late teens she met Sean Storrie, one of seven sons of George Storrie. Sean’s six brothers all subjected her to derisive sniping, but the couple persisted and they were married in September 1980.

They ran the busy, colourful pub - The Nationalist Bar, later renamed the Weavers Inn - diligently but eventually Godley and her husband, with their young daughter, Ashley, in tow, broke away from his "stifling" family and made a new life for themselves.

“I was funny behind the bar”, Godley once recalled in an interview. “I’d get big, burly men come in shouting and I'd have to shut them up and the best way to do it was to have an answer for everybody. Then one night, this man phoned me and said, 'We're having an open mic night and you're really funny; why don't you give it a go?'

"I didn't know what an open mic night was, but I went along and won the gong. The stand-up became addictive. When I started headlining clubs, people would be amazed at my crowd control because I could shut up 700 loud drunks, but that's just being a good barmaid. When I started doing comedy, I felt like I'd come home”, Her comedy career gradually took off. There were appearances at the Edinburgh Fringe and, later, appearances on radio and television, But she was far from being an overnight success.

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Talking to The Herald in March 2020, she reflected that she had been a stand-up for 25 years and had made podcasts and videos and had written her autobiography. But it was an amusing video based on Theresa May’s resignation speech that helped her crack a wider audience and get her into such venues as the King’s Theatre in Glasgow. The response to her May voiceover, she said, was “un******g believable.”

The voiceover was done “in a Virgin Train toilet that wouldn’t stop talking. I had to put my arse against the speaker to silence it from telling me not to put my jumper down the toilet pan, just so I could capture the May moment”.

Godley also found viral fame with her dubbed videos of Nicola Sturgeon's Covid briefings during the pandemic.

Her diverse achievements over the years included being a panellist on Have I Got News for You, winning numerous awards at home and abroad for her comedy, and writing a novel, Nothing Left Unsaid.

In April 2023 Sir Billy Connolly described Godley as a "great comedian" as he declared her the winner of the inaugural Sir Billy Connolly Spirit of Glasgow Award at the Glasgow International Comedy Festival. “She's a great girl, a great comedian and an extraordinary life story to dwell on”, he said.

Writing on X on September 27 in response to some adverse remarks on the platform about Godley, the writer and commentator Gerry Hassan said: “Janey Godley is a national treasure who has enriched & added joy & laughter to the lives of people the length & breadth of Scotland”.