Jenny Eclair: the comedian on growing up in Lytham

It’s almost 50 years since she left, but Jenny Eclair is pining for Lytham.

‘When I was young I couldn’t wait to leave Lytham but I can appreciate it much more now and I get pangs for Lytham,’ she says. ‘Some days I just want to be there, find a 50 per cent sale in Seasalt and buy a new pair of trousers.’

She’s lived in London since the early 1980s when she was just starting out in stand up comedy, with gigs in small rooms above pubs. She is now known as much for her novels, television presenting, radio plays and appearances on reality shows as for her comedy.

And away from the stage and the screen, she’s just as busy

‘I’m a nana now – I have my two-year-old grandson on Tuesdays – and paint and I write and I make stuff and I do two podcasts a week, which I love, and I do tapestry and I press flowers and I go on courses to learn new things and I want to write more novels and my husband Geoff and I try to go to a gallery at least once a week.’

And with her 65th birthday coming in March, she is determined to keep her foot on the gas, although when she goes on tour this month she’ll have someone else to put their foot on the gas for her.

Jenny turned to stand up after deciding against a career as an actor ‘I don’t drive on motorways so it’d take me forever to get anywhere. I have a driver-cum-tour manager who books the hotels and does the driving.

‘I sit in the passenger seat and do wool work tapestries – I'm just finishing one my mum started. I do it for the prison charity Fine Cell Work. I do 15 inch square pieces which are then turned into beautiful cushions by prisoners,’ she says.

‘The decision to go out on tour is always a financial decision, I need to make a living, but I am looking forward to being back in front of an audience. I wrote a memoir last year and this show is basically the memoir on legs. It’s a slide show and it’s very relaxed – there's some nostalgia and some old gags.’

The tour starts at The Lowry in Salford on January 25 and arrives at the Grand in Lancaster on February 2 and she’s looking forward to a gig in her old home town in June.

‘I’m hoping to visit my aunt in Lytham and to stay at the Queens with a sea view and look at the windmill,’ she says. I love Lytham but I couldn’t move back – I'm a committed Londonophile. I live in Camberwell – it's not glamorous but it’s home, and it’s on a bus route so I can be in the city centre pretty quickly. I’m doing the tour so I can afford to keep living there.’

Jenny Hargreaves was born in 1960 Kuala Lumpur where her father, a major in the British Army, had been posted in 1952. When she was two-years-old the family moved to Lytham and she grew up close to Fylde Rugby Club and attended Queen Mary’s School, now AKS Lytham, before leaving for drama school in Manchester with a vague dream of being an actor.

Around that time, the story goes, she made up the name Eclair in a Blackpool nightclub where she was pretending to be French to impress a boy.

How much truth there is in that tale, it seems not even she knows. ‘I think I made up the story but it stuck and I can’t be bothered to come up with another story, so it’s sort of become true over the years.

Jenny's memoir came out last year ‘The drama school I went to was meant to be really good but looking back I think it was very sloppy. I think they got away with all sorts of nonsense. At that stage I wanted to act – it was never really in any doubt that I would be a performer – I'm absolutely unemployable anywhere else, I’d tell everyone where to go,’ she (almost) says.

‘I have dabbled with acting over the years – I've West Ended – but I was never going to be the Dame Judi Dench of my generation and it would just have got harder and harder. By the age of 22 or 23 it was obvious to me that I wasn’t going to be an actor.’

She had roles in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and The Bill but moved into stand up in the early 80s and she adds: ‘I have been incredibly lucky. Around that time in London there was a flourishing comedy circuit in rooms at pubs – and not just comedy, but spoken word and other kinds of performance.

‘I was very nervous before my first gig – I was a basket case over that for years – but it was a great time for comedy with people like Julian Clary, Mark Steel and Helen Lederer and others all starting out.

‘I was sort of under the impression that those clubs were dying out but I think the circuit has returned to its roots in recent times – I've found some really good small clubs in London where comedy is thriving. I went out with a friend recently and we saw six acts for about £14 and we had a good laugh.’

The nerves are a thing of the past now. ‘These days I couldn’t care less if people don’t like me, I’m just not concerned about that at all,’ she says. ’If they don’t like me, they shouldn’t be in the audience. And the ticket price is a brilliant natural filter – no-one's going to waste good money on seeing someone they don’t like.

‘A lot of our generation of performers are still around because we’ve never been paid well enough to go away. The previous generation had retired to the golf course by the time they were my age, but I’m still going.’

Jenny’s Lancashire dates

January 25, The Lowry, Salford, thelowry.com

February 2, Lancaster Grand, lancastergrand.co.uk

June 4, Lowther Pavilion, lowtherpavilion.co.uk

June 7, Liverpool Playhouse, everymanplayhouse.com

jennyeclair.com