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She’s famed for her acerbic quips – but Jo Brand says she relies on her influencer daughter to guide her through the culture wars and avoid being cancelled.
The comedian, 66, admitted that she now “treads warily” in case her caustic one-liners cause offence among a socially-aware, Generation X audience.
The presenter and stand-up says she uses daughter, Maisie – a star on TikTok who has racked up 8.5m likes for her comedy skits – to advise her on language and views which are no longer acceptable.
The 22 year-old is the elder of Brand’s two children and posts videos and pop song covers under the name Maisi to 160,000 followers.
“It’s very helpful to have children as I do stand-up sometimes in front of people who are 40 years younger than me,” Brand told i. “It’s quite weird so I get my daughter’s input on everything.
“My daughter is on TikTok and because I had kids quite late, in my mid 40s, it’s been a learning curve for me.”
The Great British Bake Off: Extra Slice host continued: “My daughters will tell me ‘Oh don’t say that!’ I go ‘alright, I won’t then’. At least with that generation I do have some sort of thermometer of just how wrong I’m going at times, so that’s a big help.”
“Every generation has their own language, so my daughters are able to be my translators for that.”
Brand, a former psychiatric nurse, who rose to fame on the alternative comedy circuit of the early 80s, sympathises with Dawn French, who this week said cancel culture had made her more fearful of saying what she believes in public.
“I am very aware of it and I know what Dawn means,” she said. “It seems to me that language (considered offensive) changes sometimes twice within a year, so you need to be on the ball all the time.
“Every generation has to tread carefully in some way and be aware of the prevailing conventions of language.”
She warned that the dominance of US streaming platforms was imposing American cultural values on British audiences.
“My parents’ generation didn’t get TV from around the world, they just got some posh bloke with a Radio 4 announcer voice. These days, we’re flooded with Netflix and similar channels and the vast majority of stuff they make is primarily for an American audience.
“So whatever is the prevailing wind in America travels over here so we just get ever-more unspoken instructions to take a particular approach to something or to use language in a particular way and I think people are very wary.”
Brand added: “None of us want to use a word or language that will upset people. If someone pulls you up on it, you should just say ‘Well I’m sorry I didn’t mean to’. But everyone is going to do it at some time or another.”
Having reached pensionable age – “it was rather horrifying to discover that according to the World Health Organisation I’m actually elderly” – Brand now qualifies for her own show on Boom Radio. The station has been picking up older listeners disillusioned by Radio 2’s musical shift to lure Ibiza-partying “mood mums” – 30-something women who favour 90s dance music over classic hits from the 60s and 70s.
In Brand’s show, Open The Box, she talks to notable figures about their lives through the prism of the television shows that marked their career.
The guest list features Ofcom chairman and former BBC boss Michael Grade, Prime Suspect writer Lynda La Plante, poet Pam Ayres and actress Lesley Joseph.
“There are lot of people from the older generation who are absolutely fascinating,” Brand said. “They’re very funny and have got an awful lot to say and I think it’s a shame not to hear from them.”
Launched during the pandemic, Boom’s audience surged after Ken Bruce quit the BBC, saying he was under-appreciated by station bosses. “He had a huge following that was very disappointed when he left Radio 2,” Brand said.
The comedian understands the appeal of Boom’s unapologetic playlist of classic hits from the 50s to the 70s. “It’s very meaningful for people to hear a song and think ‘Oh I remember that, I was lying on the floor of the pub and someone trod on my face’ or wherever it was.”
In Brand’s first show, broadcast on Sunday, Lord Grade argues that television is becoming more “exploitative” of real people in search of ratings.
Does she think the BBC, facing a £400m funding gap by 2027, would today commission Getting On, the darkly satirical comedy co-written by Brand and inspired by her experiences working in the NHS, which ran on BBC Four in 2009 to widespread acclaim?
“That was a fortuitous coming together of circumstances because when we pitched it the BBC was doing a season on elderly people and it came together at the right time,” she said.
A panel show regular on Have I Got News For You and QI, Brand fears the BBC is now being forced to pursue ratings at the expense of public service programming.
“When the money is short it encourages you to be more populist,” she said.
“The thing I’ve always loved about the BBC is the huge range of different stuff that it does – documentaries and history films that not huge numbers of people are interested in – or wouldn’t think they are interested in but they probably would be if they watched it.”
“I personally think that’s very important but I can see why a lot of people are more interested in entertainment TV.”
“I still do think there’s a place for the BBC in just learning something different, from the way they cover history and travel. I think it would be terrible to lose that.”
If she can avoid “cancellation”, Brand sees no reason to retire from the stage. “I’m sure people like me and Frank Skinner (67), Paul Merton (66), Julian Clary (64), all that older generation of comics, we don’t feel that old.”
“You just feel ‘why not just carry on till eventually I feel too old to do any of this?’ There are some amazing examples of people still going into their 80s and 90s even, who make me feel tired when I look at the work they’re up to. I hope I’m like that when I get that old.”
“The difficulty then is keeping an audience half your age interested in what you’re saying if you’re doing a routine about getting older. Because they couldn’t care less and why should they?”
Brand has discovered new skills as an interlocutor through the Boom show. “You do see interviewers who try to interrupt a bit too much and its actually annoying because you just want to listen to the person who’s on the show. I’ve been very wary of avoiding the temptation to shove in the odd one-liner.”
She added: “I am aware I’m known as someone who is quite gobby and inappropriate at times. I accept those criticisms but that’s not really what I’m like. It is very obviously an exaggeration of what I am.”.
“When I was a nurse, I had to be a good listener. You can’t just interject your latest idea for a joke or talk over people, so I learned how to do that a long time ago.”
Could this rebranded, laid-back, anecdote-prompting version of the quick-witted comic be auditioning to become the next Desert Island Discs host? “Ha, ha ha. Hilarious.” She’s joking. Perhaps.
:: Open The Box begins on Boom Radio at 9pm on Sunday April 21
