Is getting older a laughing matter? With Jo Brand
What’s so funny about getting older? Why live longer if you can’t enjoy yourself? And is getting grumpier one of the great pleasures of ageing?
This week on Ask Penguin, Rhianna is joined by comedy legend, writer and presenter Jo Brand to discuss Decline and Falling Over, her hilarious and refreshingly honest memoir about embracing the aches, indignities and unexpected freedoms of getting older.
From the pleasures of caring a little less to finding humour in life's darker moments, Jo shares her thoughts on ageing, memory and mortality, why laughter and sadness often go hand in hand, and how her years as a mental health nurse shaped her outlook on life. Plus, can reading be a form of meditation?
And, as ever, we tackle your reading dilemmas, with Jo and our Penguin experts recommending everything from books with characters who grow old disgracefully to literature that will make you laugh out loud and think deep!
Listen to the episode and subscribe to Ask Penguin wherever you get your podcasts.
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Transcription
Rhianna Dillon: Hello and welcome to Ask Penguin, the podcast about books and the people who write and publish them. I'm Rhianna Dillon and this week I'm joined by writer, presenter and one of the UK's best loved comics, Jo Brand. A legend of stand-up and TV, Jo won a BAFTA for her performance in Getting On, the BBC series she co-wrote which was partly inspired by her earlier career in nursing. For the past 12 years she's presented The Great British Bake Off an extra slice to national acclaim and Jo's also written several best-selling books including Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down, Look Back in Hunger and The More You Ignore Me. Her new book, Decline and Falling Over, is a riotous and hilarious memoir about how to do your second half the Jo Brand way. According to Jo, this is not a life that begins after menopause, pep talk. This is a book about relinquishing control, embracing the bed slippers and bathrobe, about not getting work done, the aches, the pains, the trials and tribulations, basically everything that you don't see from age-defying celebs on Instagram. Jo, huge congratulations on the book and welcome to Ask Penguin.
Jo Brand: Thank you very much for having me.
Rhianna Dillon: It's honestly such a delight. I've been really excited about this interview. So Decline and Falling Over is a very frank and very funny reflection on aging and for many people getting older is quite a daunting concept, but you just tackle it completely head on with, of course, a lot of your trademark humour. So initially, when you were approached about writing this or you had the idea for this, what did you want it to be? What did you want it to look like?
Jo Brand: Well, I wanted it to be fairly emotionally blunted because I am. I wanted it to be funny and I wanted it to be a read that was slightly disjointed and have like little extra bits like categories in it because I think sometimes when you're reading a book, which is exactly the same all the way through, and I know most books are, novels are, you know, novels don't have lists in them, but I just wanted something a bit different that people can maybe pick up and put down or, you know, read all the way through if they wanted to, but that wasn't like a difficult read and made them laugh, really.
Rhianna Dillon: I was reading this at my mum and dad's house and there's like a bit where you have like a checklist of, you know, how to tell if you're getting older and I was just reading them and everything like my dad had done like the night before. There were just so many examples of like, this is you, this is you, this is you. It was great because it is so on the nose.
Jo Brand: Well, I really hope that people can identify with it, you know, it's things I've noticed for me, but also other people I know doing as well and I think they're all scarily common as you get older.
Rhianna Dillon: It's interesting because obviously you're writing this book at this time in your life, but your comedy career has spanned decades. I wondered if your humour has changed.
Jo Brand: Well, inevitably if I wanted to carry on working, it would be probably difficult for me to get the rhythm of how it is these days, but thankfully I can just about manage a kind of audience if I do like a theatre tour or something like that. But I do feel that my comedy is very different because I was just such a one-liner merchant when I started off, like very short sentence, massive punchline. It was a lot of what I did and I don't really do that anymore. And also I can't really remember, like I used to be able to remember a 45-minute set. I couldn't do that now, but there's all these tricks you use. So yeah, it's changed a lot.
Rhianna Dillon: I think you say that in like quite an offhand way, but presumably that is a lot of the fear of getting older is memory and you know, not being able to do the things that you used to even like cognitively, which obviously doesn't come across in a normal conversation, but you're aware of your those kind of boundary shifting. I think what a lot of people aging are scared of is actually
Jo Brand: advancing dementia, like diagnosable dementia really, but I think there's so many stages in between. My dad had dementia, but at a much later age and I don't think from what I've read, it's particularly something that's inherited through families. So there's always that fear in the background that your poor memory is going to be indicative of something much more serious. But my way of dealing with problems is I just don't think about them, which I know is like a blunted emotionally and probably not very mature, but it makes me happy, so that's all right.
Rhianna Dillon: But actually you are dealing with a lot of them in this book. So what was that process of having to sort of be quite confrontational with all of these issues that you perhaps would have buried your head in the sand about previously?
Jo Brand: Because I didn't really feel it applied to me.
Rhianna Dillon: Interesting.
Jo Brand: Because I felt like I was distancing myself a bit from it. So I was using a kind of collection of like cliches about getting older. And also I think, relatively speaking, I'm not that old in terms of very old. A lot more people are living past a hundred. Well, I'm not even at 70 yet, you know, so I'm expecting a massive plunge in the next kind of 15-20 years. As it is, I can cope with my poor memory at the moment. I've noticed it's happening to quite a lot of my friends as well. I don't know if I've just collected friends who are going to deteriorate in exactly the same way and at exactly the same pace as I am. But I have a few paranoid ideas about how the environment may not be terribly good for us in some ways. But I'm not really intelligent enough to explore those in the book. So I've just ignored them.
Rhianna Dillon: I would have really enjoyed like reading about
Jo Brand: your views on that. That's part two of my rather half-baked scientific theories. Yes, that's what I'll call it in fact, half-baked scientific theories by an old woman.
Rhianna Dillon: It's perfect.
Jo Brand: We'll fly off the shelves.
Rhianna Dillon: How do you think that, not just your humour and you writing the book, but how do you think humour generally can help us when it comes to thinking about aging and tackling it and embracing it?
Jo Brand: It can help us by just trying to make us stop taking everything quite so seriously, really. A lot of things are really sad and a lot of things are the opposite of really sad. They're happy. But if you take, for example, something like a funeral, funerals are obviously sad, but I would always try and turn it around because I think if you're sad about something, I would rather be sad on my own, not in a group of people either in a field or in a church. So I would like almost save it up and I think funerals are about talking about the person who's died and doing some maybe funny stuff on them because most people are quirky and so everyone will know them very well at the funeral and it's nice to be able to do that and I've done that at a few family funerals and a lot of people in my family just not just me doing it. I mean, a lot of people have think it's a bit of a relief to have laughs at a funeral. I mean, it's not illegal and it just, you know, it's nice to remember the good side of them, the bits that made you laugh. So have a cry when you get home. Also, particularly most people when they cry, they look absolutely appalling. So it's better not to cry in public.
Rhianna Dillon: My friend, sadly, separated from her husband recently and she was like, it's so annoying because I'm such an ugly crier and I'm like, why is that a concern for you right now? I know, but no one's an attractive crier,
Jo Brand: surely are they? Only Jane Austen, many attractive criers in that era.
Rhianna Dillon: Emma Thompson did it very well.
Jo Brand: Yes, indeed.
Rhianna Dillon: For the uninitiated, tell us about Brian Johnson and why he pops up in the book a couple of times.
Jo Brand: Well, Brian Johnson is an American guy who would like to live much longer than he suspects his allocated span will be. So he'd like to live to I think at least 150 and so he's kind of set himself up as the living a long time icon and the first person to really seriously try and get much further along than most of us do. And so the way he's doing that is by eating what sounds the most unpalatable stuff you can imagine and like eating it all within a particular window at sort of eight o'clock in the morning. So you have nothing else for the rest of the day.
Rhianna Dillon: Brian says no, he doesn't and how people
Jo Brand: can live their lives and be that sort of self-denying. Yeah, that is not fun. That will just make his life seem twice as long because he'd be bored from not having anything to do or nice things to eat and then he'll think oh I've got another 70 years of this compared to everyone or whatever it is.
Rhianna Dillon: So interesting to be a pioneer maybe of it, but not really something that I can could get behind. I just found it really interesting the way you sort of approach this, I guess you're like on one end of the spectrum and he's on the other, but about what's the point of living longer if you're not enjoying life, even if you have got an 18 year old rectum or whatever it was.
Jo Brand: Yes, he's milked it. I hate saying that, but it just appalled me when they said he'd milked his son. Oh my God, it was revolting.
Rhianna Dillon: I know, did I read it wrong?
Jo Brand: It's just so weird, but anyway, there you go, God bless Brian and his rather interesting ideas.
Rhianna Dillon: Of the back of that then, what are some of the worst examples you've heard of people kind of sacrificing in their life in favor of a healthier lifestyle?
Jo Brand: I think the thing is that people know that you should not smoke, right? So that appalls me already that you have to give up smoking. I stopped smoking for a long time, but I absolutely hated it and I stopped for a couple of years. Who wants to live till 95 if you can't smoke? I'd rather die a bit sooner. So things like that, I think it's balancing the pleasures and denying yourself. So I would happily take responsibility for smoking. I've decided to smoke probably next year again, because I'm going to be 70.
Rhianna Dillon: You've written it in your diary. This is great.
Jo Brand: Yes, absolutely. I'm not going to do 40 a day, which was known when I was kind of like in my early 20s and like up all night. I'm just going to be fairly restrained and enjoy it, you know, but I'm not going to do anything that theoretically could kill me overnight, shall we say?
Rhianna Dillon: Which is probably most things going for a walk.
Jo Brand: We'll see.
Rhianna Dillon: Okay. So 70 next year, which is such a great birthday. Remember it just being such a fun milestone celebrating my mom's 70th. But for you, what are the things that you're going to do for your 70th or around your 70th or in your 70th year, that feels like that extra kind of mark of freedom almost, shedding of all of those things that you talk about in the book?
Jo Brand: Absolutely nothing.
Rhianna Dillon: Apart from smoking.
Jo Brand: Yes, obviously that. Oh, for my 70th year, I'm just going to smoke a bit more. But I think my family will probably try and bulldoze me into doing something spectacular. I don't know what, like just going somewhere spectacular. I don't really like traveling. I know that's a weird thing to say, but I would rather live my life in my head. I'll tell you what, I knew a guy once, right, and he toured with the Beatles for a bit and et cetera, et cetera. And so I said, oh, tell me all about it. And honestly, I was bored shitless because he didn't have the facility to describe just how great it was. And I think that's kind of a thing. I mean, I'm not saying that I wouldn't go to, you know, up the top of Mount Everest and have a good old crack at sort of describing how wonderful it was. But so many people, they go places. And I think these days, all they want to do is send you 500 sort of pictures of the same thing. So I would rather read a book about Everest or read a novel about it rather than like I'm going to ever get to Everest, for example. That would be hilarious. Seventy year old overweight British woman climbs Everest. That would be quite something, but I'm not doing it.
Jo Brand: Anyway, the queue up at the moment.
Rhianna Dillon: How sad is that? That is sad.
Jo Brand: Oh, have you got a year? Well, where's your ticket in the queue? Oh yeah, number 141.
Rhianna Dillon: I honestly think that really detracts.
Jo Brand: Takes the shine off, doesn't it? Absolutely. It really does.
Rhianna Dillon: That's a really good point that you make though about being a good anecdote teller, which obviously you have in spades, especially when you're writing. You have to be able to tell a good anecdote, spin a good yarn. Tell us about your writing process and especially because you're mining so much from your childhood as well. And you're kind of pulling out these old memories. Tell us about how you managed to do all of that.
Jo Brand: Well, thank you so much for dignifying what I do with a process. I write when I feel like it and I write a lot of the time I'll think, oh God, I haven't done anything today. I better do something before I go to bed. So I'll write from like 10 till midnight or something. There's absolutely no predictability to it or any predictability to how long it'll last because I might think of something else to do. So I think when I've got a deadline, I just force myself, like for example, once I woke up about half four in the morning because I wake up very early and it really pisses me off. And I thought I'll do something useful. So and I was writing the book at the time. I write a chapter of the book. So I sort of got my laptop and I was like sitting in bed, you know, and I wrote a chapter and then later after I got up and everything I read it and it was absolute crap. And I thought I'm not doing that again because I wasn't sitting down properly thinking about it. So sometimes I would write eight hours in a row. I mean with the break, obviously the on toilet break.
Rhianna Dillon: Other times. Yeah, exactly.
Jo Brand: I would do an hour and a half or or I'd think oh God, I need to get some done. So I do like three days in a row just not doing anything else except writing. So it's not that's not much of a process is it?
Rhianna Dillon: It's more of an anti-
Jo Brand: process.
Rhianna Dillon: It's a chaotic one, but I love it. It's you know, it makes sense to you.
Jo Brand: Yeah, it really does.
Rhianna Dillon: But also then how are you because you talk about your daughters throughout this. You talk about your mom quite a lot. So just thinking about like some of the lessons that either you've learned from your mom or ones that you're sort of words of wisdom that you're imparting to your daughters.
Jo Brand: Yes, I would divide it between I do I do keep a diary but not in a particularly organized way. Whereas I've got a lot of my mom's diaries and she religiously filled in every day. It was when we were like tiny and honestly God blessed my mom because she was the most amazing person but her diaries are so boring because she literally wrote what she did and when you've got young kids you don't actually do very much. Do you know what I mean? And so with my diaries I would just write a diary until I got bored and I would stop doing it. So either that would be after a month or a couple of days or so. I've got diaries with some days filled in another and the ones that I've written bits are kind of really interesting to remember and annoying that I didn't do the whole thing at the time but I just couldn't be bothered really.
Jo Brand: I know I'm not a role model honestly.
Rhianna Dillon: No it's so nice to hear that. For all the people listening who have great aspirations in life and very little energy to do anything about it. It's really nice to hear that and you still get a book out of it. You still manage to write a book.
Jo Brand: Yeah, absolutely and I think also it's like I was saying before that there's just separate bits that don't need to be really really long and really kind of profoundly gone into like here's some older women I knew who I admired and here's some that were annoying and what have you and just like pick people that you've known who you think are interesting or quirky or whatever.
Rhianna Dillon: Yeah, are there any bits of advice or not even necessarily kind of verbal but just anything that you picked up from your mum that you have sort of tried to uphold and have also passed down to your daughters.
Jo Brand: I think my mum was someone who kind of always stuck to her principles and she was kind of a bit bolshy really but I kind of like that about her. She wasn't very feminine. I mean I've put in the book how I really didn't like the way she dressed because I didn't but she didn't like the way I dressed either. So we were kind of even on that, you know, but I think with her it was all about an unspoken thing which is unusual in her day of I am as good as a man not that that was particularly something that had any traction at that time. But also she was just she was kind of someone that was very pro-justice. I mean and also she didn't like people being petty either. I can't even remember if I put this in the book but they got the results of their social work exams and everyone on her course was like desperate to know whether they passed or not. And the guy that had the results said I'm locking them in the office over the weekend and you can have them Monday. And they said why can't we have it now? And he just went well you can't. So he went home and my mum broke into his office and got them out and distributed them to everyone. But that's what I mean. I loved her doing stuff like that, you know, and she didn't get into trouble for it. So I'm not quite sure how that worked. But yeah, that sort of thing.
Rhianna Dillon: The rebellious streak.
Jo Brand: Yes, very much.
Rhianna Dillon: Actually I say streak that's very patronising. She was sounds like she was just a rebel.
Jo Brand: It does. And I hope I kind of tradition a bit. I mean, she was proud of me, not proud of me at the same time. Also very worried about me doing shows. She came once to see me and then ran out before I came on stage because she was too nervous.
Rhianna Dillon: I know.
Jo Brand: Whereas my dad, God bless him, just said what you wear when you go on stage and I said, well, I don't really know nothing special. And he went, don't you wear a hat? And I was like, what does that mean? What does that mean? I don't know. I think he was thinking of like the old time, you know, comics like Max Miller. But that was like 800 years ago and I was doing it in the kind of 1980. So I don't really know what he meant.
Rhianna Dillon: Have you ever worn a hat?
Jo Brand: Have I ever worn a hat on stage?
Jo Brand: No, but I have worn a hat to a wedding and got there. No one else was wearing one and the the father of the groom said to me, the only person here wearing a hat and you look ridiculous.
Jo Brand: I love garnering a bit of abuse because actually you can practice your heckle put downs on them.
Rhianna Dillon: That is true. That is true. Thank God for read men. Thank God for them.
Rhianna Dillon: I think in the book you mentioned you'd much rather read a book than meditate, which I am wholly on board with.
Jo Brand: I like the idea. Everyone suggests meditating and I just don't understand. God knows why. Because then you have to be in your own head instead of somebody else's and I'd much rather be in somebody else's world than my own head.
Rhianna Dillon: When you are feeling like you need like a bit of that escapism that perhaps other people get from meditating, what do you reach for? Which books do you go for? Is there a genre or an author?
Jo Brand: Well, I must admit I like a sort of high-end thriller kind of like Kate Atkinson Yes. and a lot of female writers really. In fact, I like a load of Kate Atkinson stuff. I think she's such a great writer.
Rhianna Dillon: Is there a genre that you just don't go near at all?
Jo Brand: I love autobiographies and biographies. My dad wrote a book on scaffolding, which is kind of in a genre all of its own, but I don't like that genre. Books on scaffolding. Does that count? God bless him.
Rhianna Dillon: Did you ask him if he was wearing a hat while he wrote it?
Jo Brand: I wish I had.
Rhianna Dillon: Oh, that's great. Yeah, that's fair, I think. But that's probably not even really a genre, is it?
Rhianna Dillon: What I really kind of love throughout is how you tackle ageing alongside wealth and class. I thought that was a really important thing to look at and a sub-genre in itself. So can you talk about some of your ideas and kind of bringing in those, like your kind of over-arching political ideas into something so broad?
Jo Brand: Well, I think particularly with wealth and not wealth, or male and female, for example, ageing is a very different experience. I mean, wealthy people inevitably age better because they've already had a better diet throughout their life, probably they've lived in better conditions and all those sorts of things, which in a way are kind of very obvious, really, but, you know, I still think very important. It's kind of enormously complex what contributes to making people live longer than others. I mean, we know women, for example, live, I think, an average of four years longer than men. And that's something to do with chromosomes or something, I think. See, listen to me. The ultimate scientist and biologist. Half-baked, Jo Brand. Hooray. Yes, it's coming.
Jo Brand: But I wasn't trying to produce that sort of book anyway. I was just trying to look at things that kind of interested me and rather, and I know they're in a kind of a rather higgledy, piggledy fashion and lists and all that sort of thing. So as far as an overarching theme, that it's just like put that in, put that in. And also, but I try to, obviously there are things that I've experienced or my friends have experienced, like with the sandwich generation, for example. It's a kind of double sandwich, club sandwich in a way now, because I have friends whose kids are still at home, but they have kids as well. And so they're looking after their grandkids while their kids are out to work. And I reckon in some setups, you can add a yet another generation onto that, especially if people have had kids very young. And in the olden days, I know from reading my mum's very interesting diary that, for example, both my grandmas, so her stepmother, my mum's stepmother and my dad's mum, would be around all the time and would come and sort of take us out to the park whilst my mum, well, who knows what she did.
Rhianna Dillon: Did she not write it in her diary what she did when you were up?
Jo Brand: No, she didn't.
Rhianna Dillon: Interesting. I think it involved drugs.
Jo Brand: Not really. No, I think she just went to the hairdressers. She wouldn't have done that later in life, but those small pleasures were the only ones accorded to women in the 1950s.
Rhianna Dillon: What are the best bits about getting older?
Jo Brand: Amazingly, for someone like me, it's still being reasonably healthy still. I think I kind of thought by this age, sort of, well, on my way to the cemetery. And maybe I'll say that and then I'll die tomorrow, right? And you'll go, do you know what she said? She only said that the day before. But actually, I think there's probably nothing worse than getting older and feeling really old and really a bit hopeless. In a way, I would have been retired years ago if I'd been doing stand up, you know, say 30, 40 years ago, but started much sooner. That's what I feel is very lucky for me is that I can sort of pick and choose kind of as a stand up. I didn't think I'd still be working and I am and I'm so delighted because I think it really it kind of pushes your brain to keep functioning. Whereas people that retirement think, oh, I've retired. And so now what you can do I might just sit in my house and and then I might grow some potatoes. You know, I think that sort of thing expectations are just so well, not now so much, but they used to be so small retirement to people like a couple sitting at home staring at each other who couldn't stand the sight of each other after a week.
Rhianna Dillon: Yeah, you know, you can't be doing with all that. Sorry. Is that a bit harsh?
Jo Brand: No, I think it's very accurate.
Rhianna Dillon: I think on another podcast, you said that doing comedy is like another side to being a nurse because it makes people feel better for a bit, which is really lovely way of looking at it. But how did your experience as a mental health nurse help you write this book because of your kind of more intricate knowledge of people?
Jo Brand: Well, I suppose there are bits in it that were direct experience from when I was a nurse in terms of some of the people that I'd looked after and that were aging. And I think also because as a nurse, I worked on a ward for elderly people for quite a long time. That kind of taught me a lot really because I think people a lot of people unless it's kind of their grandma, they don't really meet a big group of old people and let's say they're volunteering or something. And it made me realize that not sort of all old people have white hair and a walking stick and talk about the war, I suppose, which is it was a cliche in my day when I was younger. But and I think opportunities and health treatment there's so many things have gone towards making people's lives longer, but not just longer of a better quality as well. Although that's kind of being threatened by things like the NHS and the lack of sort of good residential care and a lot of places. So it's kind of both ends of the spectrum that there are issues with it really unless people are very independent into their 90s which many of them aren't and so it's a problem really.
Rhianna Dillon: Do you think your experiences there did kind of shape what you wanted your future to look like and I'm talking, you know, when you are in your 80s, 90s.
Jo Brand: Yeah, don't worry. It's not 90s is out of the equation as we speak.
Rhianna Dillon: Who knows about 80s. You'll have smoked yourself to death by then.
Jo Brand: 80s, yeah, I hope so. 80s, I would just say maybe, I don't know. But the thing is because I had my daughters both quite late. I was in my mid 40s. So they're kind of only in their 20s now. So they're lined up for a bit of a hard graft.
Rhianna Dillon: That's the way to do it.
Rhianna Dillon: There are a lot of literary puns in the title, the chapters of these book Grave Expectations. Dickens again. Were you intentionally going through and wanting to allude to some of your favorite novels or classics?
Jo Brand: I only like a pun because my dad was the terrible punner when we were kids. Really?
Rhianna Dillon: And it really got on our nerves when we were kids. But I've somehow absorbed it and I keep doing it. Yeah, dad jokes.
Jo Brand: Absolutely. Yeah, I don't know quite how that happened. I think some of them are kind of reasonably OK and some of them are appalling. But, you know, I just quite enjoyed doing them.
Rhianna Dillon: And there are a lot of Enid Blyton references as well. Did you have a big impact? Did you read a lot of Enid Blyton when you were a kid?
Jo Brand: Do you know how old I am? Of course I did.
Rhianna Dillon: Well, me too, which is why I enjoyed all of them. But I wondered, yeah, what kind of impacted because, yeah, reading about boarding schools and all this kind of world you and I never experienced. No, I know exactly.
Jo Brand: Yeah. Well, Malory Towers, obviously it was something that I just thought was great when I was a kid. Because in a way, it was a fantasy, which is what literature should be. I mean, I lived in a little village called Bennington where Bennington school was.
Rhianna Dillon: You didn't go there, did you?
Jo Brand: No, me neither.
Rhianna Dillon: I went to the one in the village.
Jo Brand: But Princess Anne was a pupil there. The only kind of sniff we got of it was in the holidays when we were allowed to use the swimming pool up there because all the girls weren't there at the time. But huge grounds, massive kind of mansion, you know, how the other half lives. So it was kind of very interesting to me. And Enid Blyton's always been part of that. And weirdly, quite near where I live now, there's a house with a plaque on it saying she lived there.
Rhianna Dillon: Oh really?
Jo Brand: But I've never read it properly so I don't know when. I'll go back and look. I'll let you know. That's brilliant.
Rhianna Dillon: Have you got any kind of favourite characters from books that you think have done life right?
Jo Brand: I think kind of like all the sort of bad tempered grumpy ones. I always sort of reference Betsy Trotwood from David Copperfield because she was kind, but like really, really bad tempered, which everyone wants to be. I think I wouldn't ever want to be unkind to people, but I really want to be grumpy and shout at people. So in some ways, she's the perfect kind of role model.
Jo Brand: I wouldn't reference a huge amount of Jane Austen. Like Mrs. Bennett used to get on my nerves. I'm like, I'm not even sure how old she was in them. She was probably only in her forties.
Rhianna Dillon: Well, yeah, exactly.
Jo Brand: And it's like with Miss Havisham.
Rhianna Dillon: Yeah.
Jo Brand: Apparently she was, like the way she's portrayed in that very famous black and white film, she looks about a hundred, doesn't she? But they do say she was only kind of mid forties in the book.
Rhianna Dillon: So depressing.
Jo Brand: It's so depressing, you know?
Rhianna Dillon: Yeah.
Jo Brand: I mean, the scene in the wedding dress is like so over the top, isn't it? She's kind of got mice eating a bit of wedding cake off her shoulder.
Rhianna Dillon: Is that like a Roald Dahl version of Miss Havisham?
Jo Brand: Absolutely. Oh, the ancient kind of black and white film. But anyway, I think women kind of have always got a raw deal in terms of like suddenly they were over 45 and they were very old because they were like an old maid. No one could possibly ever want to marry them or God forbid, see them with no clothes on. Do you know what I mean? But I think that's starting to change, thankfully.
Rhianna Dillon: Yeah, I'm with you on that.
Rhianna Dillon: We have some listener questions coming up. Before we talk about those, we've been asking everyone about celebrating the National Year of Reading, which is this campaign that's been going on this year, designed to ignite people's passion for reading and books. So we wanted to ask you, which book sparked your love of reading?
Jo Brand: Well, I think it must have been something that was kind of read to us when we were kids. I know when I was much younger, and I hate to say this, but it was another Enid Blyton, but it was called The Faraway Tree. And basically it was a tree that revolved and took you to lots of different places. And I think as a kid, that's kind of a great way to kind of think about how things could be. And I also feel when I was that age, there wasn't that much that was very interesting. I think that kids' books these days are just incredible in comparison. There's loads more of them. They're far more imaginative. They kind of do more things, you know, because it was just the odd picture, but just reading something rather boring about a rabbit that sort of lived behind someone's toilet or something. Do you know what I mean? Now it's so different and so focused on the age. And for a long time, culturally, all books were like monocultural. And so they had absolutely nothing else in them about anyone else from anywhere else. Or if they did, it was like so cliched. It was painful. It's so different now. And I think that's great, you know.
Rhianna Dillon: I agree. Do you have like a favourite habit to fit reading into your life to make sure that you're reading as much as possible?
Jo Brand: It's not a chosen habit, but I do notice that I kind of go in phases with reading. So sometimes for like a month, all I want to do is read. And I don't want to, I mean, I feel ashamed saying this, but I absolutely love TV as well.
Rhianna Dillon: That's okay.
Jo Brand: Because when we were kids, my mum went out to work eventually and trained as a social worker. And we weren't allowed to watch any crap telling, right, because she was very, and she wouldn't let us watch ITV at all. So we just watched it when she was out at work because we didn't have a babysitter. So we used to watch, like these appalling soap operas. And then obviously she'd come in halfway through and have to turn them off. It was really frustrating. I don't think we ever told her either. But so that sort of thing. I developed a taste for forbidden fruit on TV, which was basically not a documentary on scaffolding or not an educational program on some sort of historical episode. So yes. So I like all that. All that scuzz. I love it.
Rhianna Dillon: My mum was also a social worker. And I wasn't allowed to watch TV in the mornings or after school only in the evening. So I always think I had quite grown up tastes because I'd never, I wasn't really raised on children's programs.
Jo Brand: No, that's interesting that actually.
Rhianna Dillon: Yeah, yeah. That sounds to me like quite a sort of sensible, did you resent it at the time?
Rhianna Dillon: I don't think I did because I didn't really know about it because I was reading all the time.
Jo Brand: Yeah, no quite.
Rhianna Dillon: That's what I did instead.
Jo Brand: So that's great.
Rhianna Dillon: So here I am. I mean, I'm now ironically a TV critic as well as a host of the Penguin podcast. So, you know, we both benefited in some way for not having watched that much TV. And now finally considering all of your achievements so far, what is the most radical thing that you are going to do next?
Jo Brand: Oh my Lord. Have a nice flowery dressed sign for me. She lied. Now that would be radical for me to dress up like a proper lady. What have I got coming up? Well, to be honest with you, not much, which actually is quite radical for me.
Rhianna Dillon: You are an incredibly busy person.
Jo Brand: Yeah, I know. And I think really, I mean, if I'm quite honest, our house could do with me having a bit of time off because it literally looks like someone's just thrown it up in the air and it's all fallen down. And so I'm going to try and rectify some of that. So that's radical for me because most of the time I can't be asked.
Rhianna Dillon: Joe, thank you so much. We're going to come back to you in just a second. Joe Brand's Decline and Falling Over is out now and Joe is going to be sticking around to answer some of our listener requests for book recommendations.
Jo Brand: I'm sorry, I've got to go. No, I'm joking.
Rhianna Dillon: You better not. We need you for these recommendations.
Rhianna Dillon: Now, as if by magic, joining me and Joe are our Penguin colleagues, Joel Richardson and Nabila Doma. Thank you so much for being here.
Joel Richardson: Thank you for having me.
Nabila Doma: Thank you for having us.
Rhianna Dillon: Now, first question, what is the most radical scene from literature that you love, which is a really tough one and very broad. Nabila, did you have anything for this one?
Nabila Doma: Okay, me first.
Jo Brand: I'll go first if you want, because I was going to say one of my favorite books is a book called The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, which is set in Hastings. It's renamed Mugsborough, which I think is quite interesting and I lived there for a long time. So I know Hastings really well. It's radical. It's all about a radical socialist trying to convince all these builders that they should be socialists and not just kind of stroke the bosses and give the bosses what they want. So really the whole books like that, which I thought would perhaps be worth a mention.
Rhianna Dillon: That sounds brilliant.
Jo Brand: It is brilliant.
Rhianna Dillon: That's a really good one.
Jo Brand: Thank you.
Nabila Doma: I do have one.
Rhianna Dillon: Go on.
Nabila Doma: Earlier this year, I read Say Nothing by Patrick Radden-Keefe and obviously for those people that know, it's an investigation into a death of a young British boy. The whole story is like super thrilling, but I found like the beginning opening scene of him being recorded. This is not a spoiler. Like it was in the news. Him being recorded from the MI5 security camera of falling to his death in the Thames quite stark as an opening. And obviously the story just gets worse from there and like much more thrilling. So I found that quite a radical opening to a book about a really long complex story.
Rhianna Dillon: That's a really interesting angle to go in.
Nabila Doma: Thank you.
Rhianna Dillon: I love Say Nothing. I thought it was so brilliant.
Joel Richardson: I was thinking really hard about this and I was trying to work out. I feel like a lot of the stuff I read is not that radical.
Joel Richardson: Sorry, questioner. But the thing that I actually read recently that I think really does fit the bill is, I don't know if any of you have ever read Jodi Picoultultult before, her new book is called By Any Other Name and it's sort of hard to talk too much about without spoiling it, but the main character is a young woman. Her mother disappeared when she was a baby. And without sort of giving too much away about the plot line, what Jodi's talked a lot in promoting it, it's about postpartum psychosis. It's about this young mother who's dealing with a lot of really difficult things in her life but crucially is dealing with her own kind of brain falling apart in this really awful stressful environment. And I think what Jodi does so well is that you go into the book with opinions about topics and she just sort of explodes them and she really challenges you and really makes you sort of see every side of an issue, not just the opposite one to what you went in with, but actually kind of really, I think however you go in challenges your preconceptions. And so it's really about a woman who does what I think many of us would say is one of the worst things. It leaves behind her child, but it leaves you at the end of the book, not having excused that, but having really sort of challenged every preconception you might bring in. I kind of think for something to be really radical, it has to be that little bit controversial, that little bit sort of challenging. And one of the interesting things about Jodi is she's written so many books. She's one of the most banned authors in America at the moment because she's written about school shooting. She's written about abortion. She's written about these really zeitgeisty controversial topics, but she always does it with such humanity and such great storytelling as well.
Jo Brand: Is she actually an American writer?
Joel Richardson: She is, yeah, yeah, yeah, she's American.
Jo Brand: See, I didn't even know that.
Joel Richardson: I thought she was French. Yeah, I know what you mean, and I'm not sure I pronounced the name right.
Rhianna Dillon: We've had Jodi on the podcast.
Rhianna Dillon: Yeah, we've had Jodi and it is Picoultult, is it?
Joel Richardson: Yeah, yeah.
Rhianna Dillon: That's reassuring. If not, I would have made you read the whole answer.
Rhianna Dillon: Okay, next question. Do you have a favorite character that grows up disgracefully during the course of a book?
Joel Richardson: So I have quite a fun one for this. We actually just republished this book. So it came out originally in 1944, and I believe from reading the back cover copy, which I'm sure is 100% true, it was the best-selling novel of the 1940s. It's called Forever Amber, and it's about a young woman. It starts in the 1640s and kind of goes into the 1660s, so the Restoration, the Great Fire of London, the Plague are all kind of part of it. But the main character is Amber. She starts off the book as this 16-year-old girl living in the countryside in England, and she just decides that her life is a bit boring. And so she moves down to London, and in the marketing materials that we did for it, there's a list of how many sex scenes there are, how many abortions there are, how many times a woman undresses in front of a man, which is a distinct category for the sex scenes. I'm not sure. It's about 1,000 pages long. It's a real lose-yourself-in-it indulge book. But yeah, it's absolutely about a young woman kind of growing up very disgracefully, but in a way that I think is just so kind of fun and indulgent I think anyone would enjoy.
Rhianna Dillon: That's a great one. I feel like someone might have mentioned that on the podcast before, actually, and it's, yeah, piqued my interest at the time, but.
Joel Richardson: It's really captured. We're doing this whole series of, they're called The Mermaids, and they're all, they're kind of like the classics list, but rather than being focused primarily on the kind of literary side, these are the best-selling books, particularly of the 20th century. So they're books that carried readers away in their time and that have fallen out of having an audience, and we're bringing them back. So that one in particular has really captured people.
Rhianna Dillon: Nabila, let's come to you.
Nabila Doma: So I had to think really long and hard about this one because I do love characters that are really complex and you learn so much about them, some of it not being good, so I love that. And I think the one that immediately came to mind, there's a character called Dicky Barnes from The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. That is one of my favorite books I've read recently. It's an instant five-star read. And I love being in family's business, particularly when the business is really messy.
Rhianna Dillon: Yeah, it is really messy.
Nabila Doma: And I love being in Irish people's business specifically. Because it's always messy. It's always messy, and it's just, I love Irish culture and everything. So he has a very, very interesting story. Again, I won't do any spoilers. It's a very, very great kind of long family saga to read. It starts off, I think, in the early 2000s, and it basically shows how the 2008 financial crash impacts this kind of well-to-do Irish family in this kind of smallish town. And it follows all four characters in the family, so the mum, dad, the daughter, and the son. And I just found the dad's character, Dicky, really interesting because he's obviously the patriarch. He's trying to hold it together. He runs the business. The wife doesn't work, blah, blah, blah. But his whole life is a little part at the seams. And it follows him from his youth, or you kind of go back in time a bit to the present, and he just makes terrible decisions along the way, and then somehow becomes obsessed with being a survivalist and the end of the world and how that's impacting his family. And it's just brilliant. It's so, so, so, so funny, written so well. But also, you kind of do feel sorry for him because he does have this pressure on his shoulders. He's the sole earner in the household, and the financial crisis just impacted all of them in so many different ways. So that's probably my favorite recent contemporary example of that.
Rhianna Dillon: Yeah, that's a great one.
Rhianna Dillon: Jo.
Jo Brand: The Children of Dynmouth. It's a novel about a young man who is growing up in a rather charming little village, and he's kind of a bit of an oddball, and he decides for the church fate that he is going to do a tableau of the brides-in-the-bath murders, which obviously is not something that most young kids of his age would bother with. And he goes around disturbing all the sort of older residents of the village, trying to get bits and pieces off them for his effort, and discovers, whilst doing so, that actually he uncovers a lot of very unpalatable secrets about upstanding members of the community, which are hidden. And I lived in a village like that for a long time. The vicar was absolutely appalling, but no one knew. Do you know what I mean? That sort of thing. So I think it was kind of a very timely novel for me, and he is a fantastic protagonist because he's very unpleasant, but he gets to the nub of things.
Rhianna Dillon: Sounds delightful.
Nabila Doma: Sounds quite naughty.
Jo Brand: Yeah, it was really... He's an Irish writer, William Trevor, I think he's brilliant. And yeah, it was beautifully written.
Rhianna Dillon: Yeah.
Jo Brand: And it's funny as well.
Rhianna Dillon: Yeah, that sounds brilliant.
Rhianna Dillon: If you could erase one book from your memory, just so you could experience it again for the first time, what would it be?
Nabila Doma: This was probably the easiest one for me. Yeah. Because I will take any chance to talk about this book, or it is A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. I would give my life to read that again for the first time. It's such, such, such a good book. It's set in, I think, what spans some decades from, I think, the 90s to the early 2000s in Afghanistan, and it follows these two female characters who both end up in the same household via different means. And it's a really, really, really complex, sad story. But I think when I read it, I studied English literature in college, and one of the English literature, or English language teachers decided to do like a mini book club after the classes. So I was like, I find this is just a chance to read more books. And one of the books she suggested was this book. I had never read The The Kite Runner or anything. I didn't actually know who he was. But she was like, read it and then we can discuss it. And I think at that time in my life, as a 16, 17-year-old who really, really curious about the world, didn't really know anything about Afghanistan. And I think his books are such a great introduction into that world because he treats it with a lot of care. He tells the truth about the experience of women and people, et cetera, and how foreign intervention impacts the land. But he does it with such care and compassion that you just fall in love with these characters. Hate to be so dramatic, but it did actually change my life reading the book because I was just like, oh my God, I wanna know so much more. So I would love to read that again with no knowledge or insight into the book at all.
Rhianna Dillon: I love like an impassioned plea for people to read a favorite book of yours. And that was a really nice one. Thank you.
Rhianna Dillon: Jo, you've got anything that you're equally passionate about that you want people to read immediately?
Jo Brand: Well, I would say one of my favorite books, which is maybe a bit strange for a comedian is a book called In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill. And it's about a woman whose husband is killed in an accident. And it's really just the story of how she gets over it. It's kind of about grief really, I suppose. For me, over kind of the last 10 years, I've lost my mom, my dad, my two best friends and my brothers as well. So I've just had this kind of full on really awful time. And I think I just thought, you know, the way I can deal with it is just by ignoring it. I mean, you can't really, but it's very hard to carry on your life when you've got kind of that much going on. And I think the book is probably the perfect way of how the process of dealing with grief of that magnitude goes. But my way is probably not the right one. And I'm quite happy to admit that.
Rhianna Dillon: That's really, I think a lot of people, that will resonate with a lot of people though. That's a really lovely one.
Jo Brand: Yeah, no one tells you how to do it, though do they?
Rhianna Dillon: And I think literature is great for kind of giving you instructions and things that you're not really very good at yourself. Or equipped to deal with.
Jo Brand: Yeah, absolutely.
Rhianna Dillon: Even a fictional character going through something that you can see is vital. If we're honest, I don't know if you think this, but I think most great novelists just take so much stuff from their real life and experience, don't they?
Jo Brand: Yeah, all of it, really.
Rhianna Dillon: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's that amazing thing in a novel where you read a character having a thought that's kind of a thought that you've had, but you've never quite been able to express it.
Jo Brand: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rhianna Dillon: It's so interesting. I think it's such an amazing thing that writers do. Absolutely.
Rhianna Dillon: Joel, what's yours?
Joel Richardson: I think it's slightly different. So my day job at Penguin is I'm an editor on the crime and thriller list. And so there's a lot of reading books lots of times over and over as part of that editorial process. And the thing that's really hard when you're editing a thriller novel is once you know the twist, when you read it the second, third, fifth, tenth time, you already know the twist, so you can't really tell the extent to which any changes that have been made are working. So I think the thing, if I had to go really literally to the question and completely forget a book and then read it from scratch with no knowledge of it whatsoever, I think I'd want to find the book that had the most kind of surprising plot. Because I think once you know those things, you can kind of never see them coming. So I saw the film of Atonement before I read the book of Atonement. And I sort of don't really want to say too much about it because I feel like the more you say, even saying it's that thing where even if you say that there is a twist, that tells people to sort of look out for it in a way that they might not be doing. But I think it's such a kind of powerful story and it sort of lures you in as one kind of novel about a kind of country house and these kind of very rich people and their sort of the relationships. And then something really awful happens midway through, but the plot just goes in, I think, a really surprising direction and quite a devastating one. And I think the less you know about it, the better going in, but that would be the one that I'd pick.
Rhianna Dillon: Very good. I like that a lot.
Rhianna Dillon: And final question, which is a nice one to end on, which book made you laugh the hardest and think the deepest?
Joel Richardson: The book that made me laugh the hardest, I think of any book that I can remember reading is The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion, which I read on holiday. I was on holiday in Croatia with a couple of friends and I was that obnoxious sort of member of the group where I was just crying with laughter like while we were sat by the pool or while we were on a sort of bus tour. Like it's so, so funny. But I guess it does make you think about some things, but I would say it's more, if you went into it thinking that it was the book that was gonna make you think the deepest, you might be surprised.
Jo Brand: I don't want necessarily books that are gonna make me think really deeply, but if I think really deeply by accident,
Rhianna Dillon: that's great. Exactly.
Joel Richardson: But that one would be the funniest one.
Rhianna Dillon: If there's something that has both,
Joel Richardson: I think the author who came to mind is Marion Keyes. I think she does it really well. Her books are very, very funny, but they're also in that way where I think if you are funny and if you have a storytelling voice, you can actually go to some really dark places. Her books often have really meaty, serious, heavy themes of kind of addiction, of abusive relationships, some really dark stuff in there too. The first book of hers I read was Rachel's Holiday, which is about addiction, but it's so, so funny. Because the character is so funny, it takes you quite a long time and it takes her quite a long time to realize that she's really struggling. I remember that experience as well and being like, oh, this isn't a comedy. Oh, wait, I've been tricked. She's having such a, she's such a funny person and she's so funny about the awful experience of being institutionalized in rehab that it takes you a while to realize, oh no, she really does need to be there.
Rhianna Dillon: Yeah, yeah, that's a really, really great shout.
Rhianna Dillon: Nabila?
Rhianna Dillon: Yeah, Jo.
Jo Brand: Well, mine is a book called Antisocial and it's by a guy called Nick Pettigrew who was an antisocial behavior officer on a bigger state in London. I always think that if you can match the sort of humor to as close to your experience as possible. And I've had a lot of experience of antisocial behavior because I was in charge of a walk-in kind of mental health emergency clinic for about six years in Camberwell. And so I'm very kind of attuned to that whole genre of people just being like arsy and difficult and abusive and all those things. I mean, it doesn't say whereabouts it is in London, but it sounds like South London to me. But the thing about the book is it is hilarious and it did actually make me laugh out loud quite a few times, which a lot of books
Rhianna Dillon: don't really do, do they? They just make you kind of smile.
Jo Brand: Smile, yeah, lightly.
Rhianna Dillon: Yeah, exactly.
Jo Brand: It's not funny by being cruel about anyone. It's funny by being funny about individual situations. You know, and people just like being brilliant in it. And he's obviously a great guy, the lengths that he goes to, to kind of sort stuff out for people. I just thought it was wonderful. And because it's quite close to me, I just found it much easier to understand, you know, like the funniness of it, really. And the whole thing about like finding humor in the day-to-day, the ordinary, I find that stays with you more than most fiction, to be honest. You go on an estate like that and almost everyone, I think, is funny. But that's because I think almost everyone that you meet in life is funny because everyone, mostly people have a great sense of humor and people that have a terrible sense of humor or are really grumpy, they're funny as well in a way, aren't they? So, you know, you can find humor anywhere, really, I think.
Rhianna Dillon: And what a great note to end on.
Rhianna Dillon: Hey, thank you all so much for your brilliant suggestions. If you want any more information on all of the books that we've mentioned today, you can find links to all of them in the show notes. And if you have a question for the Ask Penguin team, you can follow us on Instagram on at Ask Penguin podcast and message us there. Thank you so much for listening to this latest episode of Ask Penguin. And we'll be back very soon. But in the meantime, happy reading. Bye.