Janey Godley's Blog

(Please be aware that this Podcast Contains strong language)

In episode 147 of Janey Godley's podcast the comedy mum and daughter discuss the Ohio women who were held hostage and their hero Chuck Ramsay. Sylvia Brown the awful psychic gets a verbal booting, Mark Lester gets sperm grilled and the BBC One Show is revealed as racist over the Scottish accent.

This is the week renowned Scottish football manager Sir Alex Ferguson retires and we explain why Matthew McVarish will do a 10,000 miles walk across Europe. We are appalled at Barbara Hewson a UK Barrister who has suggested the age of consent is 13 years old to stop the hunting down of old men who abused them in historic abuse cases.

Mother and Daughter comedy team get to natter and the world gets to hear it on Janey Godley’s podcasts, expect some bawdy language and home truths, as Janey Godley and Ashley Storrie lead you down the roads less taken in their fantastic weekly podcast. Listen as mother and daughter banter, bait and burst with laughter.

Janey Godley Podcast at: Episode 147

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Seems to be a theme this week of attacking comedians, what with Scottish comic Susan Calman getting bullied for her non- opinion on Independence and Reggie Hunter getting booted for being himself at a corporate gig- the papers raged on with accusations of 'fees to be returned' in Reggie's case and 'Bullying from the Nats' in Susan's case.

Either way it was a bad week for comedy, especially as the Scotsman and various other newspapers emblazoned their headline "death threats for comedian" never since Salman Rushdie have we seen adverse reaction to an art form. Though I still don't know who threatened death to Susan as it hasn't in itself been publicised (maybe due to a police investigation) and can only imagine the horror that it rang- having been threatened online two years ago myself for talking about Old Firm Sectarianism....it's scary stuff.

I took screen shots and reported the website and death threaten-ers to the police and made an official complaint. So what is this special new Scottish force  Police Scotland doing about this onslaught of abuse towards female comics?

In my case they took all the details and assured me to watch out for more abuse, but they basically told me not to be contentious on Twitter....I explained "I am a comedian, I am allowed to make jokes and contentious remarks without being threatened by death" But I was happy I reported it and made sure the cops were aware of the people who being abusive for future reference.

So many politicians came out to support Susan and quite rightly so, but it's just lip service....we want to be protected for our freedom of speech without being threatened by death....what's next a Scolds Bridle for 'cheeky women'?

I would like a Police Scotland and Chief Constable Stephen House to have a full investigation into the death threats given to comedians and am appalled that Susan had to turn to a newspaper to highlight this issue as clearly the cops are so far doing nothing.

Having been a victim of online bullying and name calling, and threats of 'getting my house burnt down' I know how this feels and the police did reassure me they would help me, but by telling me 'not to be contentious' on twitter? what the hell is that about? I will quite happily face criticism and tell me you hate my comedy, explain how much you think am a fat ugly woman...fair play...but to THREATEN ME WITH DEATH? It's not on.

On a side issue I speak about this situation in my recent show, how famous people get the press to highlight their online abuse and how the cops will kick doors in at 6am if some Olympiad is abused, but if you are wee Betty McDade from a housing scheme and someone is threatening you on Facebook....you are on your own. I know this to be true as some of my Facebook followers have testified to such....there shouldn't be a law for one and separate law for others. This isn't Victorian times, where the Middle classes are protected and the lower classes are left to defend themselves. All online abuse should be treated seriously, whether you are an Olympic swimmer, a comedian or someone who is living on benefits trying to use social networking sites.

I want the death threats to stop and the only way they will stop is if we constantly report them, screen shot the tweets and facebook threats and remember there is always a way to trace them. Everything every written on the web can be traced. Stay safe and lets all work together to stop death threats online.

So thanks for reading, if you want follow me on twitter @JaneyGodley for updates.

I was in a supermarket in London last month.

I watched three young children, around five or six years old, sliding up and down the store squealing and pulling stuff off the shelves. They were like chattering, screaming meerkats on a hunt through the Kalahari Desert.

I looked for the parents and spotted three women chatting to two men. Every now and then, the kids would huddle round them and then bound off screaming again. The parents were pushing those extremely expensive three wheeled prams and feeding organic seaweed sheets to a baby who was spitting it all back out. One child had one of those wooden bikes with no pedals, let's be honest pedalling is SOoooo last year.

That wee munchkin was crashing into giant displays of organic cereal. One child ran up and kicked it's mum right on the shin, she merely rubbed her leg and limped off.

It made me recall childhood shopping trips with my mammy in Shettleston. She would frequent the King-Co shop, the nearest thing we got to a supermarket in Glasgow’s East End. It contained about seven aisles of food, a few shelves containing bleach, carbolic soap and some household goods, with maybe four till points. There was a cold meat counter and usually two women in men's socks wearing slippers, pushing a steamie pram full of washing tied in a tight bundle.

Before we entered the glass doors, my mammy would grab me by the neck of my damp duffel coat and read me the riot act: “If you touch anything, I will stamp on your neck”

I would walk the cool aisles of that store, scared to even look at stuff. If my mammy caught me making eye contact with the ice-cream freezer, she would hiss: “Don’t even think about it!” The rest of the shopping trip would be spent with me staring at the ground.

Then we would waddle down the road, struggling with our shopping, a string vegetable bag full of papery onions scratching my legs and plastic bags full of cans cracking my knees. Once we got home, she would take the bags off me.

“Go out and play!” she would yell. “Take your skate with you!”

Rain or shine, we all went out to play, even if it was with just one broken roller-skate tied to the ankle with a discarded brown nylon our mammy could no longer wear. That was how I spent my long summer holidays. You weren't allowed back in for ages or your mammy would shout "you are either out or you are in bastard face" It was illegal back in the 60s to open and shut a door too many times (obviously a joke).

I know I must be getting older, now that I start to tut at other mothers’ parenting skills.

Today’s kids even answer their mammy back! I don’t know anyone who was born in the 1960s who would have dared to mouth off at their mammy. We didn't come from mothers who tolerated a kick to their shins. I would still be in a coma ward to this day if I had.

I know better than most people that the old days weren’t as good as we think. I know there was a lot of poverty, abuse, robbery and murder, but I still believe that kids didn’t dare disrespect their parents the way they do in today’s society.

Then again, in our day we didn’t have shedloads of TV shows that explained how to make your child behave. We had The Golden Shot and The Avengers: two things my mammy was already good at. She could fire a sling-back shoe like a warrior and – trust me – she could avenge like no one I knew.

Ah …the good old days.

So thanks for reading, if you want follow me on twitter @JaneyGodley for updates.

You can guarantee a few things in my life, one is my ears will hurt and the other is I will get abused online.

So I woke up Saturday morning with the usual leaky sore itchy ears and spent the day dosed up with painkillers. There is nothing can be done about my ears, they keep being leaky and wet, and specialists don’t know what to do.

I went onto twitter and saw that Armando Iannucci the Scottish comedy writer had been given an OBE by The Queen (something am not really into) but anyway, he was taunted by Alistair Campbell (former press aide to Blair and who Iannucci based his character Malcolm Tucker on the TV show Thick of it) Campbell taunted Iannucci for accepting the ‘establishment’ and added those three little letters make a lot of difference to which Iannucci replied “WMD” referring to Campbell’s involvement in the illegal war over ‘weapons of mass destruction’ made me laugh my ass off.

Anyway I captured the hilarious online twitter spat and uploaded it to twitpic upon which many famous tweeters decided to reTweet and so my timeline went mental. You need to understand twitter to get that last paragraph, to think the words Re tweet weren’t even forming on our lips until at least 3 years ago now we say it daily. Or at least I do. So thanks to Peter Serinafowitz and Rob Delaney I have heaps of new people reading my tweets.

So, after I got swathes of new followers, I got some twitter people abuse me and call me fuckwit and gobshite etc and I embraced them. The thing about trolls (the name for anonymous people who abuse you on twitter) is that they like to think they can hurt from afar or at least from behind a screen.

It’s a bit like being at a huge super bowl crowd and someone sneaking up through the throngs of people and stabbing you in the groin with dirty needle on a long stick, watching your expression and running away before you can call them out.

I tend to block abusive people not because I am weak but I want to imagine I run back through the same crowd and gaffer tape their mouth and run back again to my own space.

The haters and trolls really take pleasure in hurting people as I have found out.

One troll who is related to a comic I know started writing to my daughter telling her she fantasised about my own childhood abuse...this shocked my daughter for a few moments then she laughed her head off as she imagined him with a long stick and a dirty needle...and then she felt sad he would want to hurt someone and begged me not to get angry at him.

I wasn’t angry- I was amazed nobody had said something like that before, as Ashley and I have both cracked very dark jokes about my past and we like to think that’s our way of coping. That poor bloke just pointed that out and I like to think of him as perceptive to a point, but then we blocked him as he did sound suicidal and that’s not my area.

Witnessing haters on other people really disturb me, for instance a wee chubby pre-teen boy uploaded a really cheesy video of him singing and dancing. Personally his parents should have stepped in and stopped him, thats my opinion.- maybe they were unaware he was uploading videos?

You see something that looks cute and cool to a 13yr old with no critical input can come back and bite you in the arse. Am glad YouTube wasn’t around when I was 13 as there would be a plethora of clips of me looking wistful singing weepy touching songs to photographs of Donny Osmond as I hang over damp rocks near the stream at my old home. (it was the 70s all music montages looked like that)

Anyway the wee chubby boy got millions of hits and thousands of hateful ‘kill yourself fatty’ responses. There is the flip side to this, maybe the wee boy enjoyed the attention and can cope with the haters after all Irish irritators Jedward taught us one thing, stupid people with no talent can make millions.

But I digress, I despise people being hurt by trolls online and yet, I will always strive never to have them charged by the police. Unless someone is psychically threatening my life I can cope with verbal abuse, I am a comedian, I fight for the right to say things onstage so therefore I have to accept the things people say to me offstage.

Follow me on twitter @janeygodley