Seizing the Day

into another Big Boys’ Club: the BBC. “I was asked to go and be a BBC radio comedy producer.” This was no small responsibility. “There was a lot of pressure, being the first woman. You pretty much know that if you muck it up they will never hire a woman again.” Her peers were Gryff Rhys Jones, Jimmy Mulville and Geoffrey Perkins. “It was like some sort of country club. Geoffrey Perkins told me that the head of the department took the chaps aside for a little cautionary word: “Now Jan’s a woman so you will probably find that at certain times of the month she’ll be a bit difficult.” She shrugs. “It was a different world.” But it was one she helped change.

However, producing was never on the Ravens To Do List.

She did drama and education at Cambridge and trained as a teacher. Coming, as she did, from Birkenhead, it was generally accepted one had to have “something to fall back on”. But in her heart, she always wanted to be an actress. Specifically, she wanted to be Glenda Jackson, who also came from Birkenhead. And an actress she became, list of RSC credits and all.

She left her groundbreaking producing job at the BBC, got back into performing via shows with Sandi Toksvig and, later, her first husband, musician Steve Brown. On the basis of the quality of her studio warm-up performances, she was taken on by agent Vivian Clore and kicked off her career in impressions on Carrott’s Lib. When Spitting Image came along, she had found her comedy fiefdom and has ruled ever since.

Although Ravens and the Fringe are not exactly strangers, this show will be her first solo performance. Fifty-nine might seem a tad late for a debut but, in fact, that is part of the point of the show.

“The show is partly a celebration of a tide in the affairs of women. There are so many women in positions of power now, and it became a question of if not now … when ?”

The timing is not just about catching the a neap tide in womanly power, but also marks a turning point for Ravens personally.

“There were suddenly a lot of things in my own life that I couldn’t control. I thought, ‘I have to give myself a kick up the arse and get out there’,” she says, suddenly sounding very Iron Butterfly. “I’ve been through the change – it’s a funny time of life – and I felt I needed a reboot, so I changed my agent, I put some films out on Youtube and I decided to do Edinburgh.”

That rebooting process is also a lot of what the show is about. “It is about me and about women in their 50s … and the kind of choices there are for you... if you are not going to be Prime Minister.”

Do not worry, Dead Ringers fans. Theresa May will be there. But so will Jan Ravens.

“In my mum’s time a menopause was… here you go, have a shampoo and set and a hysterectomy. It was a full stop. Now it’s a comma. Now we