Jordan Gray Transplains Herself: On Making Firsts and the Fun of Nudity

Jordan Gray shocked the world when she bared her soul on Channel Four’s Friday Night Live. An exciting new face on the comedy landscape, fresh from a rapturous reception at Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Jordan shared her whole self with the studio audience and immediately cemented her place as an icon. In a time when trans bodies are so heavily policed and politicised, it’s incredibly refreshing to see Jordan’s exuberantly gleeful display, a naughty kid mooning the entire school, teachers and prefects be damned.

If Jordan Gray seems familiar, it’s because she also had a highly successful run on the 2016 season of The Voice, making it to the semi finals and into the hearts of the nation. Now she’s back on our screens and in our minds - with too many projects to count, and the support of major comedy stars backing her up, she truly seems unstoppable. We managed to snatch a few moments with her to discuss her sold out show which is returning after her star-making turn on Channel Four, her new podcast, and everything else besides.

Your show has become a massive hit, I imagine you’ve been caught up in a whirlwind these past few weeks?

So it hasn't really stopped since August 3rd! I took the show to Edinburgh Fringe for the whole of August and we got a lovely review from The Guardian, which kicked everything up. It was the first review, and it was a big one. Everything just escalated and it sold out. So we added more huge shows, and it sold out. So I haven't really had six hours to myself since August 3rd. It's sort of been a bit mad. And then doing Friday Night Live was like putting more petrol on that fire.

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I read that you are the first trans woman to ever receive the Edinburgh Comedy Award.

That's really wonderful. Thing about being transgender is because there's actually quite relatively few of us comparative to the rest of society, it's really easy to be the first person to do things. Like if I get up now and do two little spins and clap my hands, I might genuinely be the first transgender person to ever do that. You know... we're not new. We've been around for millions of years. 

So how did the Friday Night Live thing come about?

The great thing about Edinburgh is they run the National Television Festival simultaneously. So all of TV swoops into Edinburgh for the last couple of weeks and they will come and see shows. That's how they find their talent and pick people. And we just befriended and became chummy with sort of every single UK broadcaster and a bunch of Americans as well. I swear, some nights, half the audience was like just TV people, broadcasters and commissioners. So out of the back of Fringe, we had a list of projects and Channel 4 were just so lovely, and so accommodating. Friday Night Live was the big one, arguably the biggest sort of thing Channel 4's done for quite some time.

There was quite a wild response to the nudity. I think nudity is very fun, bodies are very exciting to see. Did you know that you were going to do it? Or were you going to see how you felt in the moment?

It was very much a planned thing. You're right - bodies are fun and exciting and sort of silly. It's very silly. There's absolutely no desire to offend. As if there would be, as if to say, 'Gosh, my body is so offensive.' It's the polar opposite. I'm just another person. My novel combination of up and down is what makes it offensive to a small slice of people. But that's not my doing. I did have a boob job, that was my fault. How could a bunch of real adults see that show and not think that it was a planned thing. You can't rip off a suit that easily in the spur of the moment, as if Channel 4 didn't know about it. It's a stunt for want of better words, although that has inflammatory connotations.

 It's the big Denouement. It's the finale. It's what it's meant to be.

Any of the songs in my show, I would have loved to have taken to Friday Night Live but that one felt like it would have the most impact culturally. I hadn't predicted the level of vitriol and anger. It’s like when I was on The Voice. I got a complete split of, oh my God, SHE's amazing, and then oh my god, HE's awful. There's absolutely no divide. There's no HE's amazing, or SHE's terrible. Once people have decided their affiliation, talent goes out the window. I've seen very few people that even just wanted to talk about the nature of the performance as a piece of art. But we always hear the worst before the good, our eyes will go straight to the bad stuff. 98% amazing. Everyone's so supportive. Once I was able to wrap my brain around that, then the really angry stuff, death threats included, were easy to just funnel into a drawer and forget about it. I very much empathise with people that are angry, something changed, and you weren't expecting it. That's really annoying when something changes. But it can be really good when things change. We've got toilets that flush now. 

“My story, which I didn't realise until in retrospect, is very much like a Cinderella story.”

I’m so glad you mentioned The Voice because I’ve been dying to ask you about it. Do you think that experience of being on reality TV in the mid 2010s helped prepare you for the levels of media attention you are experiencing now?

Yeah, I think so. It's also taught me the value of the story behind the story. We vote for people not because we think they're the best, but because we feel an affinity with them. If they're the best, that's great. The Voice is one of my favourites because there's no desire to pull the rug out from under any of the contestants. They know you can sing, and they pick the people with the most story. 

My story, which I didn't realise until in retrospect, is very much like a Cinderella story. I went in, and nobody turned around and I was sad and then I got brought back. So it's like, oh, people can get brought back from obscurity. That's great. You watch that and you go, I could get brought back from nothing. And then I went all the way to the semifinals. Now I know how important the story is to people. So if an outrageous lie is thrown at the internet, they'll just run with that. I read a conspiracy about myself. I do a quote from Jim Morrison in that song 'I am the Lizard King, I can do anything' and then Twitter that said, 'Jim Morrison famously exposed himself on stage live, but it was covered up. Coincidence?' I didn't even know about that. That's great.

I really enjoyed your web series Transaction, how did that come about?

That came before anything else really. After The Voice I decided that I wanted to be a comedian instead of a singer. I went straight into comedy from the ground floor and blew up. I think once you've been on TV, it's easy to put that on a poster. So very quickly, I put together a short show and took it to Edinburgh. Off the back of that we made a small pilot of my own silly little show called Tall Dark Friend. It's me playing myself in the Museum of Comedy and me and another comedian are just arguing about comedy. Comedy Central saw that and they said we like that but we'd like you to be somewhere more relatable, so I set it in a supermarket, and it just took off. And then it did very, very well at Comedy Central and then Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's company really liked it. Now it's being made for TV. Simon and Nick are both in it and I'm playing the same character and Tom Grey, my co-worker, is coming back too.

Tell me about your new podcast.

I'm so chuffed with it. As always, work backwards from a pun, so it's called Transplaining. I get celebrity guests and then an up and coming or well known co host as well. The guest asks one big question and one small question and I try to pull an explanation out of nowhere, because it's transplaining, like mansplaining. They'll come in with a big question about how the universe works and I'll just pull an explanation out of my arse and then my co host is usually a lot more eloquent than I am and we find some middle ground where the guests can leave with some semblance of an explanation. It's really a chance to devolve into silly chat and talk to my comedy friends that I never get to hang out with for more than 15 minutes and meet all these cool people. So far,  Nish Kumar, Richard Herrings, Scroobius Pip, just great names and the names we've got coming up…

I love that we are returning to a more long form style on content.

Yeah, so much more nutritious for our brains and souls. They don't have to be sound bites, you can let people run.

Your stage show is back for another run, are you excited?

I want people to have the same experience that people had at the Fringe. At the Palladium, I added an extra song and brought a wolf on stage as well which won't happen in Soho. And maybe because it's Christmas, I might throw in a little bit of a festive twinkle at some point. But I want it to be the show that everyone has spoken about so that they can talk about the show with each other. So yeah, it will stay true to the heart of the original.

‘Is it a Bird?’  is back to Soho Theatre for a further two weeks from Tue 13 – Fri 23 Dec 2022 - tickets here.

Words: Misha MN