ITV Loose Women’s Jenny Eclair reveals her ‘totally reckless’ love life | Celebrity News | Show business and TV

With her blond hair, bright red lipstick and instinctive aversion to obedience, Jenny Eclair had never been one to obey. And this morning is no different. She sighs loudly from the unruly office of her south-east London home, deftly leading her PR specialist away from our Zoom call.

“You know, I’m 64 damn years old. You don’t have to keep an eye on me,” she offers. “You probably have much more interesting things to do.”

The middle daughter of a British Army major, born while serving in Kuala Lumpur in 1960, Jenny Hargraves never minced her words.

“It feels like someone is eavesdropping and I find it very distracting,” the former Loose Women panellist continues. “I can’t handle it. It’s like no one trusts me.”

They appear to have her best interests at heart, as is soon demonstrated when Eclair, as she has been known since adolescence, launches into a highly unflattering rant about Ricky Gervais that contains several four-letter words.

But either way, one might assume, it won’t matter much, given the Grumpy Old Wives star’s combative (and brilliantly entertaining) candor. It’s hard not to notice her, both in person and in the pages of her new memoir, Jokes, Jokes, Jokes, published earlier this month ahead of a major UK New Year’s tour.

Growing up in Lytham St Annes in Lancashire, her “predatory” teenage years were marked by an almost wild promiscuity – graphically documented in her scathing memoirs – which only intensified when she achieved a degree in drama at the then Manchester Polytechnic.

“I had an incredibly reckless streak,” she admits of her hedonistic college years in the early 1980s, when she admits that her grit’s ability to take things further was pushed to the limit. Conquests—including dalliances with future Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction star Tim Roth—were as common as city rain, but not always for romantic reasons.

“I just slept with people because, frankly, I didn’t know how to get home,” she admits today. “We didn’t have cell phones back then and you couldn’t buy Uber. There may be a pay phone in a shared house, but often you don’t know the address where you are.

“Have you been to Didsbury? Have you been to Fallowfield? It was just easier to spend the night in a guy’s bed. And I know it’s crazy, but I was hitchhiking around Manchester when the Yorkshire Ripper was on the loose. I’m incredibly lucky.”

Fortunately, relatively unscathed by her sexual misadventures, Eclair, in her early 20s, then talks about her attempts to control her diet. Horrified that she failed to realize her lifelong acting ambitions and upset by insensitive comments about her weight, she admits today: “I had no control over my future and I think what I really wanted was to be too sick to grow up, so consequently I developed anorexia.

“I wanted to feel bad on the sofa and be looked after because I just wasn’t ready for the responsibility of having to leave the house, although obviously there was a part of me that just wanted to lose weight too.”

Unsure of her dramatic skills and possessed of a singing voice more likely to smash trophies than win them, Eclair moved from Manchester to south London after graduating. Now that her anorexia is under control, and after working as a model at Camberwell College of Arts, she has gone from being an under-the-radar “punk poet” to becoming one of Time Out magazine’s most promising young stand-up comedians.

She also went from one-night stands with virtual strangers to a committed relationship with designer Jeff Powell, who has been by her side ever since – although it was 27 years before they finally walked down the aisle together in 2017.

Just as Eclair’s stand-up career was taking off, they had a daughter, Phoebe, now 30 and herself a successful playwright and screenwriter.

“By the time I became the first woman to win the Perrier Prize in 1995, Phoebe was five years old and I just wasn’t ready to accept success,” admits Eclair. “I had terrible impostor syndrome.”

The award has helped launch the television and film careers of dozens of A-list stars, including Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Steve Coogan, Lee Evans and Baby Reindeer creator Richard Gadd.

But the weight of expectation was too much for Eclair, who recalls: “I just thought, ‘I can’t handle this.’ I’d like to give it back.” I wanted to win, but once I did I just thought, “Now I have this, I hate it.”

Her anxiety was almost certainly exacerbated by a period of personality regression, when the lines between her rough behavior on stage and her behavior after the show became drunkenly blurred, and she found herself, late at night, engaging in numerous affairs with a succession of equally thrill-seeking hedonists – none of them was Jeff.

So why wash your dirty linen in public by talking about it in your memoirs and, presumably, in your upcoming play?

“Well, there’s a slight feeling like you’ve opened a drawer of dirty panties. It’s not like I have a dirty panty drawer. The prospect of this is insulting,” she says. “And you feel like some of your skin has been removed, but Jeff knew what was going on, and as I say in the book, he played the long game – even though he loved our daughter more than me for quite a long time. »

She pauses: “But we’ve always been each other’s support system. We would fall apart without each other.

“How terrible it would be to throw it all away for a couple of stupid kisses. And I know it’s hopeless to give myself a reason to say that I was acting out my alter ego on stage, but I honestly think that was part of the problem.”

The slightly toxic ladette culture of the 1990s certainly didn’t help either.

“I got a little carried away with the whole thing,” she admits. “But maybe I should have lied and left it out of the book.”

Lying – or even just softening one’s strong opinions – clearly doesn’t come naturally to Eclair, and discussing the comedic breakup between men and women unleashes a torrent of bile towards one of Britain’s most successful and controversial comedians, Ricky Gervais.

“I don’t think he knows who I am,” she says. “I don’t think he’s interested in women’s comics. I don’t think he appreciates us. I don’t think he thinks anything about us.”

At this point the conversation devolves into what could, to put it mildly, be called a rant. To be fair, she’s not a fan and the air turns blue.

What Ricky Gervais thinks of “Eclair” is anyone’s guess, but their opinions on cancel culture differ.

Gervais refuses to tame his material, often spouting the defense of “It’s just a joke, it’s not true,” and Eclair, for all his candor, loves to learn from experience.

“I look back at some of my old stuff and see a lot of things that I couldn’t do now,” she says.

“Weird dementia joke, weird transgender joke. Things that were simply not considered remotely inappropriate I wouldn’t do now. But I don’t feel any anger about it, I just feel like I got away with it, but I still make mistakes.

“I was at the Romance Fiction Awards not too long ago and I said something about Jeff and I having been together for 40 years. I said, “We’re so old now that we can’t hold hands in public because it looks like one of us has dementia.”

“It brought out moans of ‘Nooooo’ and fell very, very flat on the ground, so I just thought, ‘OK, this is a joke I can’t use anymore.’

Today she “makes up” for her “neglect” of Phoebe by being a very good grandmother to her two-year-old grandson Arlo.

“I’m a very, very good grandmother to Arlo,” she declares. “I really am. And Tuesdays, when I look after him, are pretty sacred.

“You’ll have to pay me a lot of money to give up my Tuesdays with him. Well, when I say a lot of money, I mean over £500. In fact, I’d probably give it away for £250. Or £50 if it was the end of the month.”

The one thing Jenny isn’t ready to discuss is dignity.

“Phoebe has always behaved much more dignified than me, but I never had any dignity. I think dignity is overrated, and that’s not what I’m talking about. I run out of spite,” she giggles.

“It’s very easy to be written off as a woman, as a writer, as a woman comedian, and a lot of my career has been about me proving myself, and what I really want is for people to just say, ‘Oh, I I didn’t do that.” I know you can do it. It’s really good.”

● Tickets for Jenny Eclair’s new memoir show “Jokes, Jokes, Jokes Live!” can be found at jennyeclair.com. Jokes, Jokes, Jokes: My Very Funny Memoir by Jenny Eclair (Sphere, £25) is out now. For free UK P&P visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832.