Janey (2023), BBC Scotland, BBCiPlayer.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001zby4/janey

Janey is of course Jane Godley. The assumption here is many folk will know who you are. Trump, for example. Or ‘Trump is a cunt’. Archive footage shows Janey holding that banner, protesting the moron’s moron when he visited Scotland in 2016 after being elected President. I certainly wasn’t disagreeing with her, then or now.

I also thought Thatcher was a cunt. But that didn’t stop Janey and her husband joining the  Tory Party and meeting the Iron Lady when she visited Scotland around 1984. There was a bit of backstory here about The Weavers Pub in Carlton in Glasgow’s East End. I knew this from reading her memoir, Handstands in the Dark. My review of her book then (and possibly now) got more reads than any of my novels. It told of her childhood rape by her mum’s brother, Percy. It’s part of her show, Not Dead Yet tour, which took in most of Scotland and ended in Glasgow’s 3,000-seater SEC Armadillo. I’m not suggesting an ending where she died, but she does hint at it several times. She has got stage-3 cancer.

Black humour is part of the Glasgow psyche. Her mum was murdered but since she was an alcoholic and drowned, the police put it down to her dying of natural causes. She married into an East End family that was having a turf war with Jimmy Boyle. As a wedding gift, the murder of her Uncle Percy was put on the table. She didn’t take the offer but did have him jailed for historic sexual abuse. I’d have preferred Jimmy Boyle to nail him to the floor. That’s what friends are for, even when they’re natural enemies. He could even have used a nail gun. We’ve got to move on with the times.

Janey’s love-in with Nicholas Sturgeon no longer gets the clicks as the former SNP first lady fades from view. Janey’s black humour and historical racist tweets caused the mainstream media to ghost her as well. That too has faded as all things do. Janey is once more dame of the mean-city game. She’s a working-class woman many of us can relate to. And she’s funny. Long may her lungs reek, (whatever that means).  

https://bit.ly/bannkie