Since lockdown began, people have woken up to Janey Godley’s comedy by the hundreds of thousands.
They have been drawn to her work by the sweary reheats of Nicola Sturgeon’s daily Covid-19 press briefings.
Godley has provided moments of relief from the state of national anxiety with her gallus Glesga interpretations of the FM’s national address, which have been shared around the country with much glee.
Now everyone knows about Godley’s voiceover sketches – such as You, Me, Isa McNamee, Philomena and all the Sandras.
The former bar manager, from Shettleston in Glasgow’s east end, started building up a fanbase when corona was still just a beer with a lime in it, over-dubbing soundbites from the likes of Theresa May, Ruth Davidson and Sturgeon with an irreverent dose of pure up-oor-close patter.
Godley first struck on the idea of comedy voiceovers when she and her daughter Ashley Storrie, who is also a comic, were sitting at home watching old movies on the telly.
She said: “We’d be watching films with John Mills and Anthony Quayle on some U-boat and we’d be going, ‘There’s no entertainment on this ship’ and make each other laugh. It just started there.
“Then, in 2017, we had Theresa May, Ruth Davidson and Nicola on the telly every day going, ‘Blah blah blah’ and I used to say stuff like, ‘Her dug sh*t in my gerden’, and ‘Oor Isa’s coming up wi’ the big soup pot’, just making them say something different – it all stemmed from that.”
Back then, it was all about Brexit. How things have changed.
Godley said: “The coronavirus has definitely pushed our creative juices to the limit and people are finding new skills they didn’t know they had.
“I suppose the good thing is that, whether you like it or loathe it, people are watching the First Minister’s updates through my voice and I’m not contradicting the message, I’m reinforcing it.
“It’s just that I’m adding in bits about my Pippa Dee top, my feet killing me, cutting my own hair and getting a wee sausage supper with a pickle.”
Now, her ad-libs – recorded in one take, without a script – have become a central part of the decompression, which has seen people sharing comedy memes united around one subject like never before.
It has even led to a fundraising campaign around one of her character catchphrases, which she shouts at the end of every speech as Sturgeon leaves the scene. She said: “‘Frank, get the door!’ has become an iconic phrase. People have posters of it in their windows.”
But Godley is at pains not to disrespect the seriousness of the situation.
She said: “These addresses do start very sombre. They start with a death count. I make sure I scroll past all that, so it’s not just, ‘People are dead – and I’m talking funny sh*te.’ It is an incredibly difficult time.
“But people should remember that when people were dying during World War II, you had entertainers like Bob Hope and Peter Sellers.”
She added: “When coronavirus hit, I saw Nicola Sturgeon was out every day with journalists asking the same questions and I thought I would just translate it into, ‘This is what I f*****g mean’.”
Sturgeon, in turn, has endorsed Godley’s message (she’s not the only one – everyone from influential Scots satirist Armando Iannucci to Bond star Britt Ekland and tennis legend Martina Navratilova have shared her work).
But this isn’t political cosying on Godley’s part.
She said: “If it was a Tory putting out the same message to stay safe and stay at home, then I’d do exactly the same thing.
“I’d be impartial to the politics of whatever government in Scotland was pushing out the message to keep us all safe, just to get that message out.”
She is one of a number of entertainers who have signed up for the National Theatre of Scotland’s online response to the crisis, to be screened on BBC Scotland in the coming weeks. Alan Cumming, Greg McHugh, Denise Mina and Lorraine McIntosh will also take part.
Anxiety and stress risk becoming a pandemic themselves as the psychological impact of enforced restrictions takes its toll on our psyche.
There has been a global reach for decompression valves and comedy memes are chief among them.
It’s partly why she has gone viral, in the only good sense of the term – and not for the first time. A photo of her holding up a sign calling Donald Trump the “c” word on his arrival in Scotland in 2016 first shot her to worldwide attention.
Yet the comic scoffs at any notion that she’s become a key figure in the response.
She said: “I’m not a first responder, not a critical worker. There are people risking their children’s lives going to feed an old person or give someone oxygen. I’m just a clown with a camera phone.”
