Janey Godley
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Janey Godley first gained wider attention on her 2002 tour of New Zealand, where she won Best Show Concept and critical acclaim at Television New Zealand's TV2 International LAUGH! Festival. At the same year's New Zealand Comedy Guild Awards, she was nominated as Best International Guest and as Best Visiting Comedian.
At the 2003 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, her show "Caught in the Act of Being Myself" was hotly debated by the Perrier Comedy Award panel. It was eventually barred for consideration when it was realised she was ad-libbing the entire 60-minute show every night. She became noted for her totally unscripted 60-minute comedy shows at the Fringe.
Godley's non-humorous one-woman play "Point of Yes" about Glasgow's heroin problem in the 1980s was also premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2003.
In May 2004, a BBC Radio 4 documentary series on relationships to which she contributed "Stuck in The Middle" won a gold at the Sony Radio Academy Awards. In June, she performed at the Glastonbury Festival, after being recommended by 'father of alternative comedy' Malcolm Hardee and became the first woman ever to compere the often unruly late show in the Cabaret Marquee.
Throughout August, she performed her new 60-minute stand-up show, hotly-tipped Perrier contender "Good Godley!", at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, winning 40 stars in reviews - said in press articles to be more than any other comedy show. In October, she appeared for a fortnight on the daily Channel 4/E4 (channel) reality show "Kings of Comedy". In December, she performed "Good Godley!" at the Soho Theatre in the West End of London and contributed to Channel 4's four-hour "The 100 Greatest Christmas Moments".
In 2005, she again performed at the Glasgow Comedy Festival. In June, her non-humorous autobiography "Handstands in the Dark" was published in the UK and Ireland by Ebury Press, a division of Random House. Edited by John Fleming, it told the story of her tough pre-showbiz life, her sexual abuse as a child between the ages of 5 and 13, the murder of her mother, Glasgow's heroin 'plague' of the 1980s and her troubled marriage amid a world of gangsters.
That same month, a new version of her one-woman play, re-titled "Smack - The Point of Yes" was staged at the Soho Theatre and she again performed at Glastonbury. In August, she contributed to "We're All Grown Ups Here", another radio documentary by "Stuck in The Middle"'s Sony Award-winning producer Sara Conkey; other appearances included the Radio Scotland football show "Off The Ball" and the BBC TV documentary "Scunnered" about the Scots dialect. Her new stand-up show "Janey Godley is Innocent" was staged throughout the Edinburgh Fringe. In October, she was special guest on BBC1's "Craig Hill's Out Tonight" and Radio 4's "Loose Ends".