Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery: July 8

This week on Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery is UK writer-performer, the one and only Jo Brand, whose experience in nursing helped ready her for hecklers and penning Getting On.

Jo Brand is one of Julia’s comic idols, so the opportunity to take her home to Kent was very exciting. Jo is one of the UK’s most popular stand-ups and Australian viewers know her for her appearances on QI and her dark sitcom, Getting On.

In the post-card picturesque village of Benenden, Jo collects Julia in a vintage Austin. After a couple of false starts (the car stalls), they head to Babbes Cottage where Jo grew up with her parents and two brothers. Jo seems thrilled to be back, and Julia is equally impressed by the home and surrounds. Jo describes growing up in a politically aware household and how she fought with her brothers at every opportunity. She reveals the special tree she’d hide in as a little girl and describes the joy of days running wild in the bucolic fields.

They then visit the little primary school Jo attended, and she shows Julia inside the old church where she took up bell-ringing. Then it’s back into the Austin and on to Tunbridge Wells Girls’ Grammar School. Jo talks about how much she enjoyed her time there, before disaster struck, and she moved to another school. Teen angst and trouble followed, which was further heightened by her declining relationship with her father who was suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness.

Jo says she scraped through her last years of school with just enough marks to train as a psychiatric nurse, where she worked until age 30. She tells Julia that her background in mental health prepared her well for audience hecklers, and how their abuse didn’t even come close to what she’d put up with in her former career.

The episode concludes in the school hall where Jo tells Julia how much she’s enjoyed re-visiting her old stomping ground.

9pm Wednesday ABC.