Jo Brand interview: 'I look like Julian Clary on steroids' I ask if, like Pamela Anderson, she will be flying in a harness - "I'd better bloody well not be" - but she doesn't mind looking foolish. Oh no - if it gets bigger laughs, it's done the job. It's what I particularly like about comics like French and Saunders and Victoria Wood - they don't mind looking silly. I ask if the material she does about her size is a defence mechanism. It wasn't initially. I come from a family who were always larking about - in fact my big brother, Bill, would probably make a much better comic than me - but when I started putting on weight at about 16 I started using humour to deflect abuse in the street. I still find it really fascinating that men - and it's mostly men - think it's OK to make comments about your appearance when you don't know them from Adam. But I must say, as a [psychiatric] nurse for 10 years I got far more creative abuse; stand-up audiences are nothing by comparison. Does she still put down anyone silly enough to insult her? "Yes I bloody well do," she says, laughing. I can't help it, particularly if they're being really unpleasant. But isn't she at that stage in her career when everyone loves her? Oh I don't think so. There are lots of people who believe that caricature of me the tabloids created so they think they don't like me. "I still get blokes who say, "Oh you hate men, don't you?" And I say, "No, I just hate you." I really love doing that, just to see the look on their faces. Brand is still fired up about health care. What depresses me is that this dismantling of the NHS started a long time ago - in the Eighties, when I was still a nurse. Thatcher outsourced the domestics and it's been continuing ever since. The NHS has been made so dense and complex that nobody really knows what's going on and because it's still free at the point of delivery people don't see the creeping privatisation. My worry is that this is all being put in place so that the government can introduce private health insurance - unless people wake up and stop it. But we can't just lay this at the feet of the Tories; I hold Blair equally culpable. Although she won a Bafta for her performance as a nurse in Getting On (which she wrote with her co-stars Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine), Brand brushes off the accolade. I play a version of myself, really, because I can't do anything else. I can't do proper acting. I guess panto is halfway between stand-up and acting. Some reports suggest the BBC dithered about recommissioning another series of Getting On, but Brand demurs. Jo and Vicki have been busy on their project [Puppy Love, a sitcom about dog-walkers, which is due to air next year] and I was yearning to do live stuff again. She's also not a fan of how TV works." I love doing stand-up. It's so self-contained - you go there, you do it, you go home - but with telly there are too many people involved with it with opinions. You have a product and everyone wants to change it. And she doesn't like suffering for her art. We filmed the last series in February in a deserted hospital which had no heating, no hot water and no toilets - lovely. We're in cotton dresses and pop socks and it's minus five and we're freezing our arses off and have been there since six in the morning to be in make-up. I really don't enjoy it. Getting On, its legion of fans will be delighted to hear, "might come back when Jo and Vicki have done their thing" and after Brand has toured in 2014. Back to the panto and Brand says her character is "head-to-toe bling, a Gerald Ratner fantasy," and she'd like to apologise to sensitive types. I look like Julian Clary on steroids. Aladdin, New Wimbledon Theatre, London SW19 (0844 871 7627; atgtickets.com)