The Hour

Comedienne Janey Godley has given up her agent and forgone the conventional publicity machine required to stage a show at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival in order to save money and get the family involved.

Godley, who picked up three awards at last years festival including Best Performer from 2008 Fringe Report Awards, has drafted in her daughter to work on PR for the show, while adding her own artistic creativity.

“When you do the Edinburgh Festival it’s costing about £10,000, so normally you have to pay £2,000 to a PR girl who is just called Sophie with an interchangeable head and you have to pay loads of money to lots of different people.

“I’m from Glasgow, I’ll design the poster, I practically took the picture myself but I didn’t, my daughter will do the PR, we’ll get Scottish flyer-ers and do everything in-house.”

The tight-fisted, former pub landlord’s new show, Godley’s World, explores her recent travels to New Zealand and the US where she admits finding friends among the down-trodden of society.

“I went to Venice Beach in Los Angeles and there were loads of homeless people there and I had great fun with them…I love them. They’re my kind of people,” said the comedienne from Glasgow’s East End.

Despite her show selling out last year, Godley was ever the optimist about this year’s performance.

“It is a bit difficult because we’ve got the credit crunch, we’ve got swine flu, we’ve got rain and we’ve got Edinburgh,” said the Glaswegian of all the things against her.

However, she maintained: “People like comedy and folk know who I am and I’ve got a wee bit of a following. People go, ‘It’s Janey she just gets up and talks. She’s not really a comedian, she just an over friendly cleaner that talks too much.’”

Janey Godley will be performing at the Pleasance Dome throughout the Edinburgh Fringe, 5th-31st August.

For more information visit Pleasance Edinburgh