‘Janey’: Glasgow Review

Dir: John Archer. UK. 2024. 78mins

John Archer’s lively profile of Scottish comic Janey Godley takes us on a dual journey – on the road for her Not Dead Yet Tour with her daughter Ashley Storrie during a period when Godley was undergoing cancer treatment, and into the stand-up comedian’s own turbulent life story. Though she mines the latter for laughs on stage, it’s a biography that includes sexual abuse at the hands of her uncle when she was a child, gangster in-laws and the death of her mother, who Godley believes was murdered.

Manages to balance the grimmer aspects of her life with humour 

The result is an often moving documentary, although Archer, thanks largely to Godley’s upbeat approach, manages to balance the grimmer aspects of her life with humour to make it a crowd-pleasing choice as the closing night film of Glasgow’s Film Festival, her home town. It will then go on limited release across the UK from March 15. A ’Janey: On Screen & On Stage’ tour will see her perform after showings of the film in a move sure to bolster attendance there. Janey will also air on the BBC at a later date.

Godley has been working the stand-up circuit for years but entered the news cycle in 2018 after she began standing on Trump’s golf courses with protest banners proclaiming: “Trump is a c***” (although Godley is not a woman who believes in censoring her language with asterisks or anything else). She gained further notoriety during the pandemic, particularly in Scotland, with her comic voice-overs of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s Covid-19 briefings and was even chosen to front a Scottish national health campaign until she spectacularly fell from grace after historic racist tweets surfaced.

Godley didn’t shy away from apologising for that at the time and the film also makes no bones about it, as her manager Chris Davis recounts gigs being cancelled up and down the country; although a conversation Godley has with Jimmy Carr late in the film does feel shoe-horned in as the case for the defence. Not long after she was hit by the tweets scandal, the comic was diagnosed with cancer, and Archer’s film is intercut with footage of her friend Shirley accompanying her for treatment. 

Most of the off-stage content is fly-on-the-wall rather than direct-to-camera interviews, as Godley chats to her mate about the prospect of dying – “it’s in my head all the time” – or has heart-to-hearts with Storrie about her daughter’s tricky childhood. Both women are up-front in their exchanges about a period when Godley went to forge her career in London, leaving Storrie with her autistic and frequently suicidal father. He and Godley have been together since she was 19, although he does not appear on camera here.

There is a sense of timeliness to the film, not least because of the inclusion of snippets from Glasgow’s Aye Write book festival in 2023, which saw Sturgeon and Godley share a stage together not long after the politician stepped down from the top job.

The film is driven by the various destinations on Godley’s tour, where we see both her and Storrie interacting with fans or performing onstage in moments from their acts that draw on their life stories. These are then interwoven with reflections on the past, signalled by the sound of a tape being rewound in the edit from James Alcock, including archive footage of Godley as a child and the period when she ran a Glasgow pub.

In order to aid the trips down memory lane, Godley is seen revisiting her childhood street and the pub in question. It’s a tried and tested formula that is employed successfully by Archer thanks to the candour of all the participants, with the conversational approach encouraging everyone to open up not just about factual detail but the emotions surrounding their recollections. She may not always be right, but Godley is forthright even on difficult subjects – and there is a lot to be said for that.