Janey

Janey Godley is immortalised in a biographical documentary illustrating her stand-up legacy following a diagnosis of terminal ovarian cancer. Reflecting on her childhood, she considers how this has informed the raising of her daughter whilst navigating her relationship with comedy, performance, and identity.

Janey was screened as part of the programme for the 2024 Glasgow Film Festival.

“First I was cancelled, then I got cancer”, quips Glaswegian comedian Janey Godley within this film’s opening minutes. This candid humour, we’ll learn, is typical Godley, who garnered international recognition for her sweary anti-Trump protest placards and dubbed comedy versions of Nicola Sturgeon’s Covid briefings. Godley’s online fame led to her becoming the face of a new Covid initiative, but she was promptly dropped when problematic old tweets were unearthed from her account, temporarily placing Godley at the centre of the ‘cancel culture’ debate.

In John Archer’s uncompromising directorial debut, he gives Janey space in interviews to reflect on her life following the diagnosis of terminal ovarian cancer, exploring her mortality, and how her legacy will impact her daughter, the comedian Ashley Storrie. Though its short runtime (78 minutes) means much of the film becomes a whistlestop celebration of Godley’s award winning career, and international presence on the comedy circuit, Archer finds moments of calm in the interactions between mother and daughter. Alongside interviews with Janey, he includes footage of Ashley filming her sick mother – offering a look behind the curtain of Godley’s on-screen and stage personality. The grief is palpable.

Archer uses Ashley’s footage to explore the pair’s relationship, and how Ashley’s upbringing was shaped by her mother’s troubled upbringing (Godley explains on camera that she was raped as a child). As she shares details of such personal trauma, the interview footage is intercut with clips of her travelling 2023 tour Not Dead Yet, transforming it into macabre material. However, it’s the moments before and after the shows, in the dressing room, and on stage during rehearsals, that communicate the strain Godley’s declining health has placed on her relationships.

The film packs a great deal of trauma and information about Godley into a shortened runtime, presenting issues with pacing: topics such as Godley’s experience with cancel culture are given little room to breathe. The fallout from the unearthed tweets is explored through a single conversation with comic Jimmy Carr.

The alluded pivot for her career could have been one of its stronger hooks to carry its runtime beyond the ninety-minute mark. Instead, Godley revisits her childhood home, illustrated with supporting archive stills that possess a coldness that makes them difficult to connect with. The locations remind our subject primarily of the traumas she suffered.

In the end, what we’re left with is a roughly sketched portrait of Janey Godley, only offering inclinations as to who she is. The documentary is both a darkly comical pre-emptive ‘in memoriam’ and stand-up special, but between the two, there are real, poignant moments of sincerity between a sick mother and a daughter as they prepare for the worst. Death is coming for Janey Godley, but she’s not done yet.

Janey is in select UK cinemas from 15 March.