FOUR STARS
A WOMAN with the wise-but-weary tone of a matriarch imparting tough love to a wayward teenager, Fern Brady has packed a lot of life experience into her 30 years.Enough to know, to use the title of her 2015 hit, that People Are Idiots. This isn’t affected misanthropy but the natural result of having her eyes (her very widely set-apart eyes, as she, and the Gentlemen of Twitter like to point out) opened at a formative age to the fact that those with power over our lives are often bumbling, complacent incompetents. In Brady’s case, this was a two-month stint at a mental health unit which left her more angry and alienated than when she went in – and was the inspiration for Radges, her pilot for BBC3.
I’m reminded of a Camus quote (bear with me): “In a universe suddenly divested of lights, man feels like an alien, a stranger”. As in the title of the show, the gender there is significant.
Brady says she has never felt comfortable as a woman, suspects other females “sense there’s something wrong” with her and her fan demographic is mostly young men.
“Look at my huge hands,” she half laments, before dropping a bawdy quip about manually servicing her boyfriend.
Her blunt, extensively researched filth is no doubt part of her appeal to guys, but it surely is to many women too: Brady talks about sex from a place of agency and autonomy – surely foundational values of feminism. So it’s odd to hear that she has few girl pals to “point at shoes with”, a point conveyed in an amusing, Beaches-style idealisation of female friendship.
As if to trade presumption with presumption, my own shovel-sized hands were itching to shoot up to say: “There’s going to be no talk of shoes when we’re friends, OK? You’ve just not met the right women.” That her bristling dislocation is often channelled into digs is unnecessary too; Brady has far stronger cards to play.
For while she’s certainly not the first student to view a few hours of sex work as preferable to a full-time job at minimum wage, she has the smarts and the glorious brazenness to see that making money in a lap-dancing club is not too far removed from how other women navigate their daily lives in a sexist world.
She’s at her most effortlessly winning when dismantling the hypocrisy we often ignore in the name of convention, often with a pay-off or analogy that is at once mundane and pin-sharp. Because rather than some Brian Spanner-style pseudo gadfly, Brady is the real deal.
And perhaps she doesn’t need friends when she has a bullshit detector so meticulously calibrated.
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