From singing and stand-up...to screenwriting and bestsellers

Friday 13 May 2022

With a career spanning stand-up comedy, TV presenting, acting, and sitcom and soap storyline creation, Jenny Lecoat's career is the perfect example of the many different roads writing can take you on.

Taking place this week, the second edition of the 13th Parish Film Festival will welcome the first of a series of interviews looking at creative women from Jersey who have forged interesting careers.

Sponsored by Soroptimist International Jersey, the series will start with ‘In Conversation with Jenny Lecoat,’ a “lovely, informal fireside chat kind of event” between Simon MacDonald and the writer at 13:00 tomorrow (Saturday 14 May).

Express caught up with her ahead of the event...

“I thought of myself as somebody who started writing in my early 30s, when I started doing it professionally, but writing had always been part of everything I do,” Jenny reflects.

“You could trace part of my career to when I was about 14 and started writing songs on my dad’s guitar in my bedroom.”

Between the age of 16 and 18, Jersey’s folk clubs such as La Marquanderie were a “big part” of Jenny’s life as she performed her own songs regularly. She kept the habit when she went away to Birmingham for a drama and theatre arts degree and then found herself getting into comedy when she moved to London in 1981.

Pictured: “Folk clubs gave me a really good grounding for getting up and doing 10 minutes, it was something to build on,” Jenny recalls. 

“There were a lot of clubs opening, it was really being in the right place at the right moment. At the time it was fairly straightforward to walk into a club, particularly as a woman as there were not many women doing it back then. What started off as writing songs became writing stand-ups with some songs in between, it’s what got me going.”

The performances opened new doors for Jenny.

She was asked to present for TV and radio, which involved writing her own scripts. "One thing led to another", and she was soon writing on a semi-regular basis for Cosmopolitan. 

Jenny’s first TV job was ‘Birds of a Feather’ where she met her husband, fellow writer Gary Lawson. Since then, she has worked on sitcoms, soaps, dramas, children’s series and The Catherine Tate Show. 

Jenny’s most recent projects have been “almost exclusively about Jersey and Jersey history”.

2017 saw the release of the feature film Another Mother’s Son, in which Jenny told the story of her great aunt Louisa Gould, who sheltered an escaped Russian slave worker from the German forces during the Occupation. Three years later, Jenny published her first novel, The Girl from the Channel Islands, which is being re-released on 7 July.

Pictured: The Girl from the Channel Islands is being re-released in July.

“My most significant work, Jersey has been at the center of it,” Jenny said.

“When I left Jersey in the 70s, it was something I had to do because I would not have been able to make these connections. We did not have an arts centre, there was no festival, it was a lot more isolated growing up there. For the career I wanted, it was something I had to do, and I have never regretted it because I enjoyed it.”

Whilst writing was always “part of the deal” for Jenny, the many twists and turns her career took remain a surprise to her.

“My career has been a complete astonishment to me,” she says. “When I was younger, I was always ambitious and always had my eye on where I wanted to be. As a 16-year-old, I think if I could have seen my CV as it is, I would have been flabbergasted and would not have believed it.”

While she says luck played a huge part - recalling how she was asked to write a script for a drama documentary about Princess Diana after the woman who commissioned it saw Jenny’s card in the home of a mutual friend – Jenny admits there was also “a lot of graft” involved.

“The most important thing I can say to any aspiring writer is to just do it,” she replied when asked what her main advice to budding writers would be. “It’s really just one of those jobs where no amount of theorising is going to get you to achieve. You have to do it and show it to other people, unless you are doing it for your own therapeutic reasons, which is fine.

"Get up and get on that keyboard every day and just do it.”