Summary
Jenny Eclair lives in a three-storey terraced villa in Camberwell, south London, in a short street lined with cars. Bet the Mercedes is hers, I think, crossing the road to her house past a gleaming 26-year-old vintage car. It is. Eclair, you see, has a 15- year-old daughter called Phoebe Mercedes. Poor kid. It's like Jonathan Ross calling two of his kids Betty Kitten and Honey Kinny. Why do comedians try to bring their work home?
Eclair initially wanted to name her daughter simply Mercedes, but relented in case she turned out to be more Fiat Punto in personality. "If you wanted to be quiet and mousy and work in a library, Mercedes could be something of an albatross around your neck," she admits. It is hard to imagine Eclair with a little mousy daughter - unless she became timorous simply from living under the weight of her mother's personality. "People say I'm controlling but it's sheer old-fashioned bossiness," Eclair admits within minutes of us meeting.See the full content of this document
Extract
Big Mouth Strikes Again
This is one of the strange things about Eclair. She is this very warm, funny, bright woman but she keeps bombarding you with information about how awful she is: bossy and jealous and neurotic and horribly, horribly competitive. This is probably just part of her control issue; she wants to point out her own warts before you uncover them unexpectedly and say, "Ooh, Jenny - what the hell is that?" Comedians are very good at exaggerating their little foibles for comic effect but I think that Eclair's wart collection is genuinely rather interesting.
Eclair adores Phoebe Mercedes. She "fell in love with her all over again" when Phoebe was nine, and began writing as well as doing stand-up so she coul...See the full content of this document
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