Jo Brand has told of how an audience member exposed himself to her while she was on stage.
The incident happened early in her career, in the 1980s, when she said crowds did ‘appalling things’
Now 69, the comedian told Jo Wiley and Zoe Ball on their Dig It podcast of the misogyny she’s experienced on the circuit.
She said: ‘There’s a club which I don't know if it exists anymore, that used to be City-type lads and they've done some appalling things.
‘This guy at the front table stood on the table, unzipped his trousers and just flopped out his penis virtually at my chin level and said, "Suck my....".
She remembered responding with, ‘"Oh, I've had my dinner," or something like that. I was kind of prepared.
Brand said she did report it to the club manager at the time, but said: ‘He was kind of, "Oh well, it happens", and I didn't go back there again ever.’
She also recalled her first big TV appearance on Friday Night Live in 1986, saying 'I couldn't believe my luck’ to get booked.
But even that had it problems, as ‘someone heckled me. I’d never performed live on TV before, and that nearly destroyed me if I hadn’t got myself back together.’
She said that although she had enough putdowns from the live clubs, she had to ignore the interruption to stick to the timings of live TV.
Brand added that the heckler came to a Southampton gig 15 years later and ‘proudly announced that it was him that had done it, which was weird’.
She also revealed that her father, Ronald Ernest, was a scaffolding expert and author of the definitive engineering text, Falsework And Access Scaffolds In Tubular Steel.
