Top vox pop

Janet Christie talks to Janey Godley about lockdown and her videos of Nicola Sturgeon which have gone viral

Tours and gigs might be on hold, but Janey Godley is keeping busy during lockdown including posting revoiced Nicola Sturgeon press conferences and turning her dachshund Honey into a Youtube star. The comedian talks to Janet Christie about the viral videos, the drive which took her out of poverty and how running a pub was the perfect training for online trolls

If Nicola Sturgeon is the voice of the nation during Covid-19, Janey Godley is the voiceover. The Glasgow comedian’s videos in which she re-voices the First Minister and other politicians to comic effect, shooting from the hip with a barrage of expletives, have gone viral.

This week Sturgeon acknowledged 59-year-old Godley’s videos, saying, “Janey Godley is a brilliant comedian and her voiceovers are very funny. They’re very rude in terms of the language they use so sometimes I don’t feel able to re-tweet them, but the really clever thing she’s doing with them... is making people laugh, but… she’s also getting the key messages across very, very powerfully.

“Occasionally I watch them and think she must really have an insight into what I was really thinking at that point but I wasn’t able to say it.”

In person, on screen on Zoom when we speak, Godley is much gentler than her on stage persona suggests. Her voice is softer and more high pitched, especially when she talks about her dog Honey and her family, and after a while the swearing which she uses for emphasis, has faded to become a verbal tic that’s part of her warm personality.

You won’t hear any oaths when she’s appearing on the BBC’S Have I Got News For You and BBC Scotland’s Breaking the News, or in her many TV and radio appearances, as she saves it for her sell-out stand up at the Edinburgh Fringe or Glasgow and Edinburgh Comedy Festivals. After 20 years of award-winning comedy shows around the world, her success has soared as the videos have taken off with more than 40 million hits online. She’s on Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, Tiktok, Instagram, does a nightly Facebook Live cast, she’s on Youtube and has her own website. Or you might have read her book, Handstands in the Dark ,afrank account of her life growing up that includes alcoholism, addiction, poverty, murder and her own sexual abuse, yet also pulls off the miracle of being very funny too.

In lockdown at home in her Glasgow flat, with her husband, daughter – comedian and broadcaster Ashley Storrie – and Honey the miniature dachshund, she’s speaking to us from her sofa, in between making a dating video for Nigel Farage and doing her own hair and make-up for the photos. She looks well this morning, her hair thick and hanging in long waves, with an impressive self-administered fringe.

“It’s a f***ing mess,” she says pleasantly, and off we go as she answers our questions.

Who are you in lockdown with?

My husband and my daughter Ashley, and ma wee dog Honey. Perfect people. My husband is the designated survivor, so he goes out to the shops and when he comes back we Karen Silkwood him, scrub him and hose him down.

Is doing the Nicola Sturgeon voiceovers your main daily task at the moment?

Yep, I try not to do them every day because they get too oversaturated but sometimes, like yesterday with the masks, or Friday, with Trump and the bleach, you’re like no, f***, I need tae.

Is Sturgeon a fan?

Yeah, apparently so. She re-tweets them and I was at an event and she got up and said if you ever want to know what I was thinking when Boris Johnson walked through my door, and I can’t stress this enough, it was exactly what Janey Godley’s voiceover said, so…

How are you so keyed into what she’s thinking?

I think everybody knows what she’s thinking. I’ve no’ got a secret mind into her. We a’ know, she’s going ‘oh for f***’s sake, really, that question again, grrrrrr’.

Don’t get me wrong, I mean I’m an SNP supporter but, like when the chief medical officer f***ed up, I did a video aboot that as well, Nicola going, ‘are you going anywhere this week?’ ha, ha, ha. If they’ve f***ed up I’ll be on it, you know.

Do you think humour is an effective weapon, politically?

Yeah, absolutely, I think that that’s what comedy is. You hold up a mirror to society and say this is who we are and this is what we’re doing, you know. I think it’s important, especially in these times.

Do you think it’s more effective than having a go at them without humour?

Yeah, I mean if somebody has a go at me and they make it funny, I’m the first to go yep, you’re right. But if it’s just hate then… The thing is, there are no Tory comics in Scotland. I know a couple of right wing or Tory-leaning comics in England, and I’ll defend to the death, their right to say what they do.

It’s the same as the trolls online, I will defend their right to say that they hate me, because they’ve got every right to say it. I don’t have to listen to it, and I don’t have to keep watching it. I don’t want to be in a society where people who hate me are shut up; that’s no’ a society that breeds a crowd for me either. I want people to call me a c***, because if you’re told to stop calling me a c***, I cannae call Trump a c***.

Where were your political views formed?

I was never right wing. The thing aboot immigrants coming over here and stealing oor NHS isn’t a