Who says my body isn’t fit to appear on billboards?
A poster of Jenny Eclair in pants nearly didn’t get shown, but the comic sees the funny side, says Victoria Lambert
‘Every other bus that passes my house has a halfnaked girl gurning on the side of it’ ‘Is nudity written into male actors’ contracts now?’
When Jenny Eclair first saw the promotional photograph taken to publicise her new comedy tour – a full-length, unabashed, un-airbrushed portrait in which she is wearing nothing but a practical-looking white bra, big black pants, only slightly smaller spectacles and sheepskin slippers, no less – even she was a little taken aback.
“I was just shocked – or perhaps bemused – to think that is what I look like now,” says the writer, stand-up comic, and star of television shows Grumpy Old Women and Loose
Women, today swathed in elegant black draped top and trousers.
“You have a suspicion, of course, but I don’t have a full-length mirror at home. Naturally, I could see the humour in it straightaway. And I’m not vain; vanity gets in the way of comedy.”
When the photograph was turned into a poster, however, not everyone got the joke. In particular, managers at Transport for London (TfL) weren’t laughing, with reports last week claiming that they had banned it because of its “nude” content.
“I got an email saying that my poster would have to assessed by a higher authority for suitability before it could be displayed in the Underground,” Eclair expostulates, dark eyes widening beneath her trademark shock of peroxide hair.
“Of course, they were getting into murky waters. Every other bus which passes my house has some half-naked girl gurning across the side of it.”
The 55-year-old comic promptly tweeted a picture of her poster next to one depicting a scantily clad girl showing off her “bikini-ready body”, which has been plastered all over the Tube for months.
“The only difference is the bra,” says Eclair, with a wickedly straight face. “Or – possibly – that there is nothing man-pleasing about my photograph.”
TfL quickly backed down, agreeing to stick the poster up, but at Eclair’s “own risk”. “I think they were trying to warn me that it might get defaced – the pants filled with chewing gum, or curly hair drawn down my legs.’’
Clearly unworried, Eclair assumes she will never even see a poster: “With my budget, they’re probably A4-sized, sent to the end of the line in some unfashionable postcode.”
Indeed, the poster is clearly not designed to attract the sort of men who leer over pictures on Tube station walls to her current show, How To Be A
Middle-Aged Woman, which is halfway through an 80-date British tour. Its humour is mined from mid-life and menopausal female challenges.
“It’s me as Everywoman. I thought of it like the picture of a girl on the back of the Bunty comic, which you used to cut round and dress up in paper clothes with tabs.”
Those paper dolls were, of course, gloriously unsexualised, unlike many of today’s figurines for girls. Now, however, Mattel has brought out a new range of Barbies, with a variety of body shapes, skin tones and hair colours. One even appears to have proper hips and chunky thighs.
“Well, it’s a progressive thing on the one hand,” says Eclair, “though a cynic might think, ‘Hmm, that Barbie with the hips is not going to fit into her old jeggings, is she? She’s going to need to buy a whole new wardrobe’.”
Eclair herself knows all about a changing body shape; born in Malaysia, she grew up in Lytham St Annes, Lancashire, before attending Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre in the late Seventies and early Eighties, where she developed anorexia, weighing just six-and-a-half stone when she left.
“Every young woman at drama school had an eating disorder of some kind – it was practically on the curriculum. I joke about myself on stage: ‘Who knew you could recover this well from anorexia?’”
She’s being too harsh: Eclair looks in great shape, despite admitting she hits the gym infrequently. “You have to be organised about fitness, and I tend to be very lazy.”
Not so the next generation, including her own daughter, 26-year- old playwright Phoebe Eclair-Powell. “They don’t starve themselves as much [but] they feel pressure to go the gym. These days you are expected to know what you are doing. It’s like learning a language or technology; you are meant to have those skills.”
It’s not just young women she worries about; cue a short, refreshing rant over the pressure men are now under. “I loved Aidan Turner in Poldark but I was absolutely ashamed for him in And Then There
Were None,” – the dramatised Agatha Christie novel that was on television over Christmas. “There was no reason for him to appear in a bath towel so low down on his hips. It jarred. Are we now going to do that to male actors? Is nudity written into their contracts?”
To be clear, she has nothing against naked flesh, per se – as evidenced by the offending poster and a brief turn as a life model – “that is the toddler element in me, which likes to take its clothes off and parade about”.
“I am very un-prudish,” she adds. “I’m an old-fashioned libertarian – most people can do what they like as long as they don’t f––– over anyone else. I [ just] don’t like anything that smacks of shame of the female form.”
And, she explains: “I hate it when middle-aged women are meant to react to that sort of thing [half-naked younger men] with a squeal. It’s that hen night mentality: if you see a fireman, you are meant to giggle. Well, f––– off.
‘‘I don’t like mass hysteria about young men. I entertain no fantasies about that kind of thing, no regret I can’t pull them. I look at them like a different species. And I’m not interested in men who can’t make me laugh.”
Eclair has been in a happy partnership – she thinks marriage is “naff ” – with Geof Powell, a 66-yearold property developer, for 28 years. He is, she confides, comfortingly hirsute.
“He’s half-man, half-Thelwell pony. It’s handy at night because he doesn’t freeze when I get too hot, and throw the covers off.”
Hair – female chin hair, to be precise – is a common topic of Eclair’s show, in which she encourages audience participation. “Stray hair comes up a lot. As do sleepless nights and hot flushes.” (The latter often linked to young women at work who won’t open a window because they didn’t bring a cardigan in.)
After the solo tour finishes, Eclair will perform several dates with the Grumpy Old Women: Fifty Shades of
Beige show and then take a short holiday before beginning a fifth novel (the last, Moving was a top 10 bestseller) and some writing for Radio 4.
In the meantime, she is keen to keep lifting the lid on middle-age women’s concerns in as frank a way as possible: “I’m surprised when people are coy about periods, or can’t talk about the menopause easily.”
And for all her complaints, “getting older isn’t that bad,” she concludes. “One of its great advantages is that you can fritter your tampon money on pickles and chutneys.”
Jenny Eclair is on a UK tour with How to Be a Middle Aged Woman (Without Going Insane). Her novel Moving is out now. jennyeclair.com