Corby Downton Abbey actor persuaded 'Godmother of Scottish comedy' to come to town

When Janey Godley's management company booked in her forthcoming UK tour, her pal Downton actor Brendan Coyle decided that she'd missed off an important stop - his hometown of Corby.

"I told him I didn't book the tour, my management did," Janey told the Northants Telegraph. "But the Core Corby were included in the tweets that were sent about it and they phoned my manager and asked if we'd come and do a gig at Corby.

"It was a bit bizarre, but we added the date on and now it's the first stop on the tour."

Brendan has since tweeted his 50,000 Twitter followers to tell them to buy tickets to Janey's Corby gig.

It's not the first time Janey has been to Corby.

"I came once to do a gig in a pub about ten years ago. I arrived under cover of darkness and left under cover of darkness so I can't even remember what pub it was," she said.

Since her tour went on sale, Glasweigian Janey has been on social media talking to local people. Earlier this week she visited Facebook site Corby Chats Back to the delight of Corby comedy fans.

She said: "Social media is really the best way to engage with local people. They were really lovely."

She's been doing comedy for twenty years but it was her ad-libbing of voiceovers over polticians in a heavy Scottish accent that finally made her famous. She's had 40 million online hits and has 6,000 Youtube subscribers.

She'll be doing some of her celebrated voiceovers on the tour alongside her regular standup.

Janey has done stand-up all over the world, and it's far-off locations that have inspired the name for this set of gigs, which she's called The Soup Pot Tour.

“The soup pot is very universal: if you’re in Australia, America, Brazil, France Germany or Alaska, and someone dies or gets married, people will make soup. The soup pot is the hub of the community. When somebody died near us when I was a kid, somebody would make the big soup pot so all the visitors had something warm to drink and eat. It’s part of us all being in it together. Of course, that was before people discovered they were gluten free and worried about being allergic to lentils.”

Janey first discovered that she could develop this new strand of her career on the night of the Scottish Independence vote in 2014. “I first did the voiceovers live at the Wild Cabaret club in Glasgow where the big screens were up.

"When the news came through and it was all looking a bit bleak, we turned the volume down and I started talking over the top of people. The audience loved it and I realised this was

something I could do really well.”

She then poked fun online at the likes of Theresa May, Ruth Davidson and Nicola Sturgeon, replacing their talk of policy and elections with chat about big Isa and her soup pots. A recent piece she did on Kim Kardashian (largely mocking her for walking backwards) also went down spectacularly well, while clips of supermodels, Pathé newsreels and Fanny Craddock (the original celebrity chef) are given the Godley treatment.

“MPs will say ‘are you going to do me?’ I’d like to do some international ones; I do Trump but I want to do Australian and Canadian politicians. There’s a lot of fodder to go on.”

The tour, which also takes in Liverpool, Leeds and London, kicks off at the Core Corby on Thursday, February 13. There are still some tickets available here