Janey Godley
is a stand-up comedian, bestselling author, online blogger and journalist. She was born in 1961 and brought up in Shettleston, in the East End of Glasgow. Aged nineteen, she married into a Glasgow gangster family. For fourteen years, she and her husband ran a pub in the Calton area of Glasgow where she staged the first performances by comedian and magician Jerry Sadowitz. She later became a full-time stand-up comic herself, ran comedy clubs in Glasgow and regularly compered at clubs in Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool.
Janey started performing in the mid-1990s but first gained wider attention on her 2002 tour of New Zealand, where she won Best Show Concept at Television New Zealand鈥檚 International LAUGH! Festival. In August 2003, her non-humorous one-woman play The Point of Yes about Glasgow's heroin problem in the 1980s was premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival; she has since performed it in London, inside a Scottish high security prison and as part of various anti-drug initiatives by local government authorities.
In April 2004, she started writing her daily on-line blog which continues today on 126 sites worldwide. In one seven day period in December 2006, it got 590,247 hits. Her comedy breakthrough came in August that year, when she performed her much acclaimed sixty minute stand-up show Good Godley!, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In October that year she appeared for a fortnight on the daily Channel 4/E4 reality show Kings of Comedy.
In June 2005, her non-humorous autobiography Handstands in the Dark was published. It became the number three bestseller in Scotland and told the story of her tough pre-showbiz life, her sexual abuse as a child between the ages of five and thirteen, the murder of her mother, Glasgow's heroin 'plague' of the 1980s and her troubled marriage amid a world of gangsters.
Janey won the Spirit of The Festival Award at the New Zealand International Comedy Festival 2006 and Good Godley! was nominated as Best International Show. In December she was also nominated by the New Zealand Comedy Guild as Best International Guest of 2006.
Janey has done a considerable amount of community work including being commissioned by a Scottish Drug Forum to run comedy workshops for fifteen to eighteen year olds, and drama workshops for recovering heroin addicts. In 2004 and 2006, she ran 'Confidence in Kids' comedy workshops in Glasgow. She has also worked unofficially in Scottish courts, advising women bringing abuse cases.
In October 2006, Janey Godley was nominated as 'Scotswoman of the Year' and in an open public vote she became the runner-up.
