‘JOKES, JOKES, JOKES’ is Eclair’s account of how she elbowed her way into the male dominated world of 1980’s stand-up, via drama school, cider, sausage rolls, sleeping with men who looked like they lived under a carpet, punk poetry, anorexia, bedsit misery, waitressing and not really having a clue about anything. This is about years spent getting changed next to a deep fat fryer in rooms above pubs, and audiences expecting ‘a song’ or at least ‘some impressions’. This is about a world before microphones, before mobile phones, before everyone gave up smoking and before everyone started taking coke. Eclair was on the comedy circuit before there really was a comedy circuit. Still gigging forty years later, this is a snap shot of a ‘once upon a time time’, from Lancashire by way of Manchester before it became Madchester, when the canals still stank and the entire population was nicotine stained, to London, where Covent Garden was still a market and before then, when little Jenny Hargreaves, daughter of Major Derek Hargreaves (spy) and June Hargreaves (spy’s wife) sister of Sara (born to be head girl) and Ben (of very little interest). Jokes, Jokes, jokes, charts the changing face of women in comedy since the very early 80’s.
