She made a comedy career from pouring scorn, but when it comes to the sea and those who rescue people from it, Jo Brand is positively gushing

It’s Jo Brand’s turn to jump in. She grabs her nose and falls 4m into the clear, cold waters of the RNLI’s Sea Survival pool. Surfacing with an excited smile, she swims towards a group of volunteer crew members.

They form a line like a fluorescent synchronised swimming team, and make for a liferaft. As she is helped onboard, Jo’s smile disappears: it’s stuffy and cramped in there, and the wave machine has kicked in. The raft begins to sway and bob. ‘Shall we sing a song?’ suggests one of the lifeboat crew members, cheerfully. Jo’s face turns green. She is well and truly out of her comfort zone.

The experience was all captured by a TV crew for Jo Brand’s Big Splash, a comedy series broadcast on the Dave channel last year. The programme often revealed the 53-year-old comedienne’s vulnerable side as it plunged her into a variety of water-based challenges, including a 457m mud race, outdoor swimming, and an exploration of a London sewer. ‘It was very physical and challenging,’ says Jo. ‘The worst was the Molden Mud Race in Essex – there were thousands of people laughing at me as I was up to my neck in mud!’

Anyone who watched the programme may have been surprised to see Jo caring what people think – or smiling. After all, she built a successful comedy career with a demeanour that suggests she couldn’t care less. But that, she reveals, is all part of the act.

‘I started as a stand-up doing places like the Comedy Store in London,’ she explains. ‘The audience were so drunk that you really got it in the neck.’ Jo had an ace up her sleeve, though: a decade of experience as a psychiatric nurse. ‘I had come from a clinic where I was used to dealing with drunks, people wanting drugs, psychotic people. And they gave me a much better quality of abuse than comedy club hecklers – more eloquent, more imaginative. So I had learned not to show any chink in my armour, whatever insults were coming my way.’

Something else that Jo says worked in her favour, as she left nursing behind and focused on comedy, was her gender. ‘On the alternative comedy circuit they were desperate to get a change from the usual middle-class white blokes that were performing, so they always said yes when I asked for a slot.’ With successful Edinburgh Festival shows and stand-up tours under her belt, she began to get television work. Her style divided opinion – for many, she was too rude, too grumpy, and appeared to hate men.

But that was also part of the act – an act that has mellowed over the years, while her career has diversified. The married mother of two has since published eight books, has been seen cracking a smile on TV panel shows such as QI, and she wrote and starred in the BBC sitcom Getting On, which earned her a BAFTA in 2011.

Whether she is writing for screen or print, Jo draws heavily on her own experiences. As the Lifeboat was going to press, she was about to start filming the third series of Getting On, in which she plays a nurse in an elderly patients’ hospital ward. And, in addition to two autobiographies, she penned It’s Different for Girls, a coming-of-age novel about two teenagers living in Hastings, the East Sussex seaside town where she spent her adolescent years. ‘I absolutely loved it in Hastings because of the contrasts between Summer and Winter. Winter I loved because it was empty and dramatic on the seafront. And in Summer it would fill up with European language students, which was quite exciting!’

Jo’s connection with the sea and her hometown led her to sign up as a member of the RNLI. ‘Everybody knew about the lifeboat in Hastings. We saw the sea every day and how powerful it is.

'It’s always in the back of your mind. I have always loved the sea but been wary of it. I love stories like Grace Darling rowing to rescue those people. And I love that hymn – Eternal Father, Strong to Save, with the words “For those in peril on the sea”. I wanted it at my wedding but the vicar didn’t think it was appropriate because we were miles inland!’

So when Jo Brand’s Big Splash brought her to RNLI College in Dorset last year, she was delighted to meet lifeboat volunteers face to face. She later wrote a message of support for RNLI fundraisers, which was emailed to them as a thank you for taking part in the charity’s events. ‘I can’t say enough good things about the RNLI,’ adds Jo.

So, given her connection with the sea and taste of crew training, would she fancy joining a crew herself? ‘If I didn’t get seasick, maybe I would have tried to do more on lifeboats,’ she muses. ‘Although I’d probably cause trouble!’