After 70 years of service, no one can deny that the Queen is a true grafter

Whilst the Queen celebrates her Platinum Jubilee, 2022 marks my 40th year in show business as a solo stand-up, writes Jenny Eclair

I shouldn’t imagine the Queen thought she’d still be our reigning monarch 70 years after she first came to the throne back in 1952 (PA Wire)

This year marks the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and regardless of whether you’re a royalist or not, no one can deny the woman is a grafter. And don’t give me any of that: “I’d be a grafter too, if it meant sitting around on a throne all day, eating swans with a crown on my head”. Most of us couldn’t hack wearing the crown for more than 20 minutes. “It’s too heavy, can’t I just have a baseball bat with a few diamonds stuck on it instead?”

Whilst the Queen celebrates 70 years of dutiful service, 2022 marks my 40th year in show business as a solo stand-up. This means it’s my ruby anniversary and I might buy myself something red to celebrate, I fancy jewellery, but a lipstick will do.

There are no definitive dates, all I recall is that in 1982, I came down to London from Manchester, anorexic and with a collection of self-written punk poems (thank you Dr John Cooper Clarke, I owe you everything and I love you). Once settled in a miserable bedsit, I answered an ad in the back of The Stage for novelty acts required for an evening of “new wave comedy”, in a pub in Wimbledon.

Other acts that night included a mime act called The Great Smell of Brut and The Hat Maker, David Shilling’s mum, Gertrude, who wore hats and sang songs. It was an odd mix of the modern and the music hall. I wore a black cocktail dress and hid behind a strong northern accent.

Forty years on, things have changed massively for women in comedy, not just in the industry itself, which has grudgingly concluded that women, given the chance, are hilarious and more than capable of holding their own – onstage and on the telly – but also in terms of the everyday nuts and bolts of the job.

When I was in my early 20s, scoring gigs involved buying Time Out and City Limits magazines and scouring them for the contact details of comedy clubs, followed by hours on the phone, persuading club promoters to give me a chance. To be honest, back then, being a “lady act” was enough of a rarity to secure a slot. After all, the early 80s probably enjoyed what was the first wave of national wokeness. Having a girl on the bill (but never two) was seen as a good and progressive thing to do, particularly if the venue was funded by the Greater London Council.

Even though I was hopelessly inexperienced, I was able to get my foot in the door. Nothing makes stand-up easy, but what made it harder in those days was the sheer lack of communication. As a very young, vulnerable woman, I would roam around London, mobile phoneless and short sighted, squinting at my A-Z and trying to work out how to get from Camberwell Green to Wood Green and back again.

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The circuit sexism that women certainly suffered in later years is something I struggle to recall back in the early 80s. The audiences could be dreadful, but my fellow performers, who were 90 per cent male, were incredibly respectful, if not slightly socially awkward. To be honest, there were a hell of a lot of misfits knocking around the comedy scene at that time. Most of the chaps looked like they might ask you back to theirs to clean out the budgie cage, rather than a night of orgiastic debauchery.

The swaggering, sexy, media-savvy comic didn’t come along till the 90s, when all of a sudden, everyone started wearing leather jeans, doing cocaine and having their publicity photos taken in black and white, while they looked moody against a brick wall. For a while, comedy became the new rock and roll, and the pretty boys had groupies – a phenomenon rarely extended to the women in the game.

These days, women outnumber men at my gigs by 10 to one. I don’t mind not having much male attention. I love my ladies and last week, one of them left me some fluorescent bicycle clips at the stage door. Who needs groupies?

Forty years ago, if you’d told me that I would still be gigging, as I approached my 62nd birthday, I doubt I’d have believed you. I shouldn’t imagine the Queen thought she’d still be our reigning monarch 70 years after she first came to the throne back in 1952, either.

I’m not sure I have another 30 years of slog left in me, as dear old Barry Cryer who died last week said: “it’s not the gigs that the audience pay me for, it’s the travel”. The travel is the killer. I may not be smoking my head off on a night bus anymore, but when there’s yet another motorway diversion that puts an extra 90 minutes on your journey, it’s hard not to feel weepy.

The shows are my reward. I don’t know what the Queen’s reward is, but I hope she’s still having fun, because once it’s not fun, it’s time to stop. After all, there’s always someone waiting in the wings.