Jaquie Brown likes to stretch her mind but is not averse to a bit of trash and admits to enjoying The Bachelor. Photo / Brett Phibbs
TV identity opens up on being rude, the art of calculated embarrassment and why she has knickers in her handbag.
"'Didn't you used to be Jaquie Brown?' THIS JUST HAPPENED!" wrote Jaquie Brown on Twitter on May 13.
Oh, it did not. It was too good to be true. She was making it up. "No! I swear to you! It was the cafe up on Great North Rd. I walked in. I was buying a coffee and she was like: 'Didn't you used to be Jaquie Brown?' The girl at the counter. No word of a lie." These things do just happen to Jaquie Brown, but what did she say? "I just laughed. I thought: 'This is brilliant!' I said: 'Yeah, I guess I did used to be Jaquie Brown'."
This is too good to be true, while being true, because it is just the sort of thing that used to happen to the woman who used to be Jaquie Brown and would have made it into the script of The Jaquie Brown Diaries. A show which, for the illumination of girls in coffee shops, was a comedy of manners about the strange world and fragile egos of people who are on the telly, including Jaquie Brown. Because one of the things Jaquie Brown does for a living is being on the telly - in various guises, most of them bearing some resemblance to Jaquie Brown. I think. It's a bit confusing, not just for girls in coffee shops. We think we know her. Or somebody like her.
I knew, or thought I knew, for one example, that she is quite rude. She is the only person I can think of who has ever thought of describing, in an interview, an embarrassing visit to a gynaecologist. That is not the rude bit. The rude bit is that he mused aloud about thinking he knew her from somewhere while looking: "Up my schnauzer hole".
I said: "You're quite rude, aren't you?" She gave an almost convincing attempt of regarding this as a serious question. "As my base personality? I think my base personality is probably overly polite and that's probably my British upbringing. I've been told before that I'm too polite. To which my reply is: 'Get f*****!'."
She is hosting a new game show called Word Up, which starts on June 11 on TV One at 9pm. It is a bit rude. In the episode I saw, the contestants - comedians and normal people; one was a nail technician to the stars - had to make a pottery vase together, using one hand each, with predictably wonky results. The most wonky of which was deemed to be a model of the host's vulva. Of course she didn't blush (remember that "schnauzer hole".) When I asked about the pottery vulva she said, airily: "Yes. That's a highlight."
You might think, and I did, that she is incapable of embarrassment. Since she was Jaquie Brown of the Diaries, she has got married (in pink), written a book about being pregnant while vomiting day and night (she had severe morning sickness of the sort that goes on day and night), had a baby, written and hosted a show about having a baby (and a post-baby body; she showed her post-baby "fat tummy" on TV), had another baby and gone grey.
She's been dying her hair since she was a prematurely grey teenager and it is now platinum white faintly tinged with purple; she washes it with "purple shampoo, like a nana rinse".
She looks, I said, lovely and she said: "Thank you!" I said that she looked much better than I thought she would and she said: "F****n hell! Say what you really think!" I was just saying what she thinks. I said, "according to you" and she shouted: "What do you mean according to me?"
Jaquie Brown on Twitter. November 22. A picture of her having gone grey and published in this paper is accompanied by this: "I think this is probably the most unflattering photo of me ever taken. Oh well. I am weird looking. I know. Ha!" Also, she is always going on about her double chins. She doesn't have a double chin. "Thank you Michele!" She claims to have had such an addiction to hot cross buns this Easter that she had to go on a juice cleanse. She came out in spots. In currants! She was turning into a hot cross bun! "I'm glad you find that amusing."
But, seriously, why does she bang on about how awful she looks? "I suppose it's just, well, okay, growing up I was always taller than the other girls and I had short hair and I never really identified with that beautiful or pretty girl." She was the quirky girl with the funny hair? "Yeah. Actually I had hair like yours. Wild and curly." Thank you Jaquie! "No! no!" she said. She attempted to make amends. "I was never the girl that all the guys liked, for example", she said, confidingly. She has a knack, like that other Jaquie Brown, for saying entirely the wrong thing and then following it up by saying another even wronger thing. She said: "I thought, 'oh well, I'm not the pretty one, that's okay, I'll just be funny. I'll be good at what I do.' And I think that's probably a self-defence mechanism. I'll say it before anybody else ... and if I hear it elsewhere, it's like: Well, I know I've got a weird face."
Her public embarrassments are, she said, "calculated embarrassment". I had been asking about why she showed her post-baby stomach on TV. This was partly a sop to those model-thin women who post pictures of themselves in bikinis two minutes after having given birth. But also she gets to choose the moments of vulnerability to share: "You know, that's my role. I'm a television presenter." It is also more of the getting in first but still, most people wouldn't choose to make an idiot of themselves (or show their blobby baby belly) publicly. "I am, I suppose, despite everything I've been saying to you ... about doubting my looks and not having confidence, I do have a good strong core of confidence running through me. That means that I feel good about myself. I don't mind making an idiot of myself because life's too short." She said that this was solidified for her when her dad died, in 2002, and "I remember looking at him in bed, dead, and thinking: 'That's the end. Everything he's done. Everything he's worked for.' Sorry, I'm not going to cry but ... It's so final ... Of course you do care what people think, but why let things get to you? Why stress out when ... " She did cry then, a little bit.
She has a lovely face and really beautiful eyes and is skinny, despite going on about being fat and having double chins. But she is always pulling those mad faces so it's hard to get a fix on what she really looks like. The photographer thought she looked angelic; I thought she looked like a 10-year-old bent on devilry. She is probably capable of being both of those things, as well as looking them. Her Twitter account is, like everything she does publicly, an ad for her career as these things are for everyone who has a public career - the difference is that she is candid enough to acknowledge it. Her public image is: "Definitely a lot bigger and a lot more outgoing. There are probably others." Probably. She loves trash stuff and brainy stuff. She not only watched The Bachelor, she admitted loving it. Then she said, loftily: "Then I go off and do something intellectual. Like read the dictionary."
Having ads for your public life does, in an odd way, help to make the distinction between that life and a private life. "Yeah, and now that I'm married I've been able to separate my identities. So I've got my married world, which is small, and Jaquie Brown has been able to be more of a performance me. And I like that separation. It gives me a bit of clarity."
So you don't need to point out the weirdnessess to her. She is a keen and clever observer of herself. She said, about the girl in the coffee shop: "Actually, it was quite interesting because I do feel like I'm not that Jaquie Brown any more. I do feel like I've changed." Now that is confusing because she never was that Jaquie Brown, surely, I said, meaning that ambitious, back-stabbing, shallow C-grade celebrity of the Diaries. "No, I wasn't. But I was known as that Jaquie Brown, so she's taken my name." I said that the confusion might, actually, be flattering because it shows what a convincing character she created. "What, that people would believe I was like that?" I said I thought she was just like that and she said: "Ha! You hoped I was like that, right?" I said I was pretty sure she was just like that because I've been trying to get her to talk to me for years and she never would and so I thought: Huh, stuck up. Just like Jaquie Brown. She's not even acting.
She claims that she refused to talk to me for years because (amongst other sucking up reasons - and what a sincere and astute woman that Jaquie Brown is! I've always said it) talking to me would be like "a mirror to the soul" and that she wasn't grown up enough not to be frightened of that but that now she is nearly 40, she thinks: "People will say what they're going to say. You'll say what you say."
I don't know about mirrors and souls. Will the interior of her handbag do? She began rummaging inside her bag because I said I couldn't find a picture of her husband (the ad man, Guy Denniston who is media shy: "One fame whore is enough") and she would show me one on her phone. She said: "You should see what's in here! It's such an embarrassment." She has, along with a couple of kitchen sinks, knickers in her bag. Who has knickers in their bag? And why does anyone have, not just knickers, but a G-string in their bag? I'm still not sure. Something about photo shoots and "if I've got an outfit and you can see the bottom ... You're making it so embarrassing and complicated!"
I narrowly escaped having to see the knickers but knowing they were there was quite enough for me. She is a very sharing sort of interviewee. She got up and showed us the dancing she does at Body Jam. What sort of dancing? "Just, like, cool hip-hop dancing. Want me to show you?" It was energetic dancing, I'll give her that. She said: "I'm still getting over the fact that I wasn't asked to do Dancing With the Stars." Would she do Dancing With the Stars? "No. I don't think so. A part of me would want to... " It would make her look like a loser. "Okay. Definitely not. I want your seal of approval."
Despite that barefaced lie and the exchange about hair and the refusing to talk to me for years, of course I adored her. She has a great talent - and I don't mean this at all cynically - for making you feel that you know both the public Jaquie Brown and the private one, and that they are both, in all their vulnerability and confidence, the sort of BFF you'd love to have. She should lose the knickers though. Oh dear. That's the sort of thing that either of those Jaquie Browns might say. I've got to stop hanging out with those girls.
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