Jo Brand

About

Jo is a BAFTA winning British comedienne, writer, and actress. She has had several solo television series, and presented shows such as Jo Brand’s Commercial Breakdown, and in 2003, she was listed in The Observer as one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy.

Jo Brand started her career with a move from psychiatric nursing to the alternative comedy stand up scene and early performances on Saturday Live.

In 1993 she became a resident panellist, along with Tony Hawks, on BBC monologue show The Brain Drain. Her transition into mainstream television continued when she obtained her own series on Channel 4, Jo Brand Through the Cakehole, co-written with comedy writer Jim Miller, who was already her main stand-up writer.

She had a cameo appearance in the 1994 episode of Absolutely Fabulous, “New Best Friend”, and also appeared on Star Spell, a spin off from Hard Spell in 2004.

Brand has made a number of guest appearances on shows such as Have I Got News for You and QI. As a fan of Countdown, she achieved an ambition when she was invited to appear in the show’s “Dictionary Corner” as the celebrity guest.

In 2007, Brand narrated Laughter & Tears: The Les Dawson Story, a documentary tribute to Les Dawson, which was broadcast on BBC Radio 2 in October 2007. In the same year she appeared on Play It Again where she was required to learn how to play the organ in just four months. This was in preparation to perform Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor for an audience of 8,000 people at London’s Royal Albert Hall on the second largest pipe organ in the United Kingdom.

Brand took part in the first celebrity version of Comic Relief does Fame Academy. In 2007, she appeared as a celebrity contestant on Comic Relief Does The Apprentice, again to raise money for Comic Relief.

Jo co-wrote and starred in the BBC Four sitcom Getting On alongside Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine, for which she won the 2011 Best TV Comedy Actress BAFTA award.

In 2010, Brand took part in Channel 4’s Comedy Gala, a benefit show held in aid of Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, filmed live at the O2 Arena in London on 30 March.

She played the Demon Dinner Lady in the 2011 British live-action 3D family comedy film Horrid Henry: The Movie. And also in that year she provided a voiceover for the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre’s Pantomime Aladdin.

The hilarious Jo Brand is always ready to give her honest and passionate opinion on a number of topics, and they’ll usually have the audience in stitches!