Writing her first memoir was like having homework for six months, comedienne Jo Brand tells Steve Pratt. But she’s done it all over again and is ready to face the public on a book-signing tour that brings her to the North-East tomorrow.

GOING out to meet the public isn’t without its dangers for a performer.

Book signings would, you’d imagine, be civilised occasions although you only have to recall what happened to X Factor singer Leona Lewis – she was attacked by a “fan” – to realise this isn’t the case.

When we spoke yesterday, Queen of Comedy (to borrow a phrase from her press release) Jo Brand was getting ready to embark on a book-signing tour that brings her to Gateshead MetroCentre tomorrow.

Reaction from the public when she toured in support of her bestseller Look Back In Hunger was “really lovely”, she reports.

“I presume that people would not come up and get the book signed if they thought you were awful,” she says.

That didn’t stop a woman approaching at one signing and telling her, “I don’t like you and you were rubbish on QI – and can I have this signed for my mum?”

Brand is a woman who’ll have a go at anything.

Witness her doing a Britney Spears songand- dance number for Comic Relief’s Let’s Dance or running the London Marathon for the same charity. Her first book became a number one bestseller and a second volume was more or less inevitable because she only told half her story in that memoir.

If she wasn’t thinking about another book, her publishers almost certainly were. “I’m workshy,” she admits, although someone with a career and a family hardly falls into that category.

She wrote the first book “because (a) I was asked and (b) as a mum of two fairly young children any opportunity to stay at home and work is always great for me”.

It’s the done thing for comedians to write books these days. Yes, she’s aware there’s a faction that believes “we should shut up and do comedy, but on the other hand, if people are interested enough to read it, then why not?”.

The second book was “kind of mooted” while she was writing the first, so the story is chronological, taking her life to the point where she took up stand-up comedy.

“The books were both really difficult to write because of the pure volume really and time commitment and stuff like that. It was like having homework to do for six months,” says Brand.

She’d written for her stand-up act, but that was a mix of proper jokes written down, ideas for jokes jotted down or simply deciding on things in the car on the way to the show.

The second volume takes her life “up to last week” so something different will be needed if she goes for a literary hat-trick.

Can’t Stand Up For Sitting Down, with its tales of life on the comedy circuit and motherhood, would seem more personal than her first memoir. Not necessarily, she says. “I would say the opposite because the first one was just about growing up, previous jobs and my family. So in some ways it was more personal for me.

“It was easier to write because it’s a long time ago. With stuff that’s more contemporary I’m more reluctant to drag my poor family into the spotlight. So I have kept personal stuff to a minimum.”

Another stand-up tour is something she’d like to do because that’s her favourite thing.

“It’s clean and simple. You go there and do it and go home at the end,” she explains.

“With television, if you are writing a series or something it drags on for ever, with people asking things like ‘can you come and look at the plan for the studio?’ All of which is incidental to me.

“I love going on tour, but having said that about telly, I’m writing a film script for the BBC.”

She’s already completed a second series of Getting On, the BBC4 comedy set in a hospital geriatric ward, partly inspired by her earlier career in nursing and co-written with Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine.

The second series, due for screening at the end of this month, runs to six episodes.

She’d been reluctant to do another series after doing a couple of C4 projects in the late Eighties and early Nineties.

“I found that really stressful,” she says. “I would catch myself occasionally on stage in a TV studio thinking all these people are here because of me, I can’t cope with the pressure. I had to try not to think about it or would have melted in a heap like the wicked witch in The Wizard Of Oz.

“Getting On is a much more collaborative affair and I’m really fond of the two main actresses, who are friends of mine. It’s much more of a pleasure, the stress has shifted to all three of us.”

In the absence of a stand-up tour she can appear on more TV panel games, regular employment for many comedians these days. She enjoys a challenge. “Maybe Prime Minister, I don’t know,” she says.

Politics are no joke to her. A new government means it’s like being in the Eighties, which gave rise to the birth of new-style comedy performers.

“It will be interesting to see if there’s a wave of new alternative comedians,” she says.

Politically, she’s “one of those who’s clinging to my original beliefs”, says Brand. “I do as much as I can which is probably a bit pathetic given my other commitments.

“I am a big supporter of the Labour Party and seen it go through so many changes and clung on by my fingertips when I have felt so little confidence in them.”

■ Jo Brand will be signing copies of Can’t Stand Up For Sitting Down (Headline, £20) at WHSmiths, Gateshead MetroCentre, at 5pm tomorrow.