Star Helen’s death ‘a tremendous loss’ – Jo Brand on her pal

STAND-UP comedian Jo Brand has opened up over the loss of her dear friend Helen Griffin as she prepares to take to the stage in Swansea to perform a night of comedy in her memory.

Jo forged a lifelong friendship with the Swansea actress when they met at nursing college.

They went on to pursue different paths, in acting and comedy, and even worked together many times through the years, including in 1997 for the show Mental, which was based on their shared experiences as psychiatric nurses.

Ms Griffin was best known for her roles in Twin Town, Doctor Who and Human Traffic, and the entertainment world was saddened by her death, aged 59, on June 29, 2018.

Jo has now decided to do something special to honour her pal, by putting on a show at Swansea Grand Theatre on March 31 , featuring Andy Robinson and Noel James.

Jo said: “It was a tremendous loss in my life. I think that’s why there was a gap between when she passed away in June 2018 and now. I didn’t think if I set up the show at that time I would have been able to handle it.

“I actually went to see her the day before she died. I went to visit her in hospital in Swansea. We knew she was very close to not being with us any more and I went to the hospital with two of our other university friends because we wanted to see her. She was not conscious when we went, and we didn’t stay because we felt it would not be appropriate as her family was there.

“I suppose with something like lung cancer you are lucky to recover from that. The prognosis was never brilliant when she got the treatment, but she really stuck at it and lived way beyond what the doctors predicted. She was a strong person.”

Jo said that after meeting during their studies they became “really, really close friends”.

“When we first met each other we immediately clicked,” she said.

“She had a brilliant sense of humour, quite wild and badly behaved and we had a great time at university and we knew we would be friends for life. There was a group of four of us altogether.

“All of us really wanted to do something else after doing nursing for a while. Our other friend wanted to be a jazz singer and our fourth friend wanted to become an artist. In a way Helen picked a harder and more competitive arena than me. A lot more people want to do it. When I first started doing stand-up I was one of the only females doing it.

“It was strange, we both did OK in our chosen areas. We worked together quite a lot through the years. We did a play in Edinburgh together, when my kids were six months old and two years old. She came and lived in the house with us and was really brilliant with the kids. She was like a slightly out-of-control aunt! A really brilliant person, a lovely person.

“I think a lot of people in Wales absolutely loved her. She was one of those actors who you would talk of – it would be a case of ‘oh, her’. You’d recognise her straightaway from her roles in shows.

“I think she had a real presence about her, she was remarkable, strong, politically active, an all-rounder so many people just thought she was great.”