Encounter - Michael Coveney meets a comedian who shows no sign of settling into calm middle age

The usual place to meet Jenny Eclair, the funniest comedian this side of Lily Savage, and the other side of Dora Bryan, is the Assembly Rooms at the Edinburgh Festival. Here, ten years ago, she became the first (and is still the only) female winner of the Perrier Award. So a trendy new bar right next to Denmark Hill Station in south-east London is a bit of a culture shock, for me at least.

"I bring everyone down here nowadays," she says, dressed casually in designer combat trousers but looking a treat. Flawless make-up, smart designer glasses, noticeably neat and tidy hands, perfect nails. Her well-coiffed blonde/ brunette hairstyle is like a vanilla and chocolate ice cream, or the champion mop of a top terrier at Crufts.

The previous evening, I had seen Eclair giving it everything (to put it mildly) playing Carol Fletcher in her new mono-drama The Andy Warhol Syndrome, co-written with Julie Balloo, at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, west London. As Eclair says in her stage character, she's "forty-flipping-fucking-four" and showing no sign of settling into calm middle age. Her partner Geof ("with one 'f' - he's a minimalist") has redesigned their house. Her 15-year-old daughter Phoebe is taking exams at school and preparing to make her own debut in Edinburgh.

"Just my flippin' luck: I thought we'd all have a nice holiday this summer for a change, but now I have to be in Edinburgh for Phoebe's show with the Young Pleasance Theatre Company. At least I should be finishing my third novel by then."

Eclair's second novel, Having a Lovely Time, has just been published by Time Warner. It's a brilliantly structured story of domestic fallout and renewed love on an Italian holiday. As a writer, as in her stand-up and monodramas, Eclair is the queen of ribaldry, adultery, bodily functions and proper names. Over 300 pages of fiction, she maintains impeccable standards of rude and witty put-down. And as with her first novel, Camberwell Beauty, "which is the favourite novel in the world of about three people", the literary critics have kept pretty much shtum.

"I get very angry that my books are written off as 'chick lit'," she says. "The fact that people say that I am who I am means that the books must be what they are. Ben Elton and Stephen Fry have been 'allowed' because they've been properly educated. I'm not saying I'm in the running for the Booker Prize. But I do know I can write literature for people of my age who don't want to read just about stupid girls."

Born in Kuala Lumpur, Eclair (real name Hargreaves) comes from the posh end of Blackpool, Lytham St Annes, and went to the Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre, which also spawned Julie Walters and Steve Coogan. "Oh yes, I'm trained, highly trained," she purrs, "but I can't sing a note. That's because I have a very large larynx for a woman." Her sister is the same, she says, but she's a barrister (as is her brother), and not being able to sing is slightly less of a handicap for her.

She smiles sweetly at me when I try to entice some post-feminist manifesto from her current activity. "Look, my first novel was about life, love and shagging the plumber. I don't claim a big scenario in my work. I just want to embarrass my dad, who has a car sticker that says 'My other daughter's a barrister'. Only joking!"

Her stage character Carol is a fruit and veg stallholder in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, who tragically misinterprets her 15 minutes of fame in a television documentary as a rite of passage, and a right of way. "More and more," says Eclair, sipping on a giant caffe latte, "there are people in the papers who are applying for long-term notoriety, Shipman-style. Carol's not that bad, but she does correspond to that documentary about a woman and her driving test, or the one about the singer on the cruise ship."

What happens is a terrible conflict of destiny, as the disastrously lionised "wannabe" becomes a sad "has-been" through no particular fault of her own. The show is a moral metaphor for our reality TV times, far more succulent than Germaine Greer's ingenuous expose on Big Brother, and far more entertaining.

As we talk, I get a strong sense that Eclair has no wish to go away. She's here for the duration, the long haul, the big bucks and the top billing. As a stage actress, she made her mark in the latest revival of Nell Dunn's Steaming and, more recently, as a harassed parent in the all-female cast of Mum's the Word, in which she declared that she began each day as Mary Poppins but finished it as Cruella de Vil. She is planning more theatre projects.

Any more stand-up? "It's on the back burner. I think the London clubs are, or should be, an apprentice ground for younger comics. The kids who go there don't want to see someone who could be their mum."

Where does all the anger and the fury in her stage act come from? She laughs. "It's not so much the material as a feeling about the business. Everything's so unfair. People are not rewarded justly in this industry." Then she gathers up her coat and bag and neatly moves out of the bar and back up the hill to her comfortable new home, easy with herself and the friendly acknowledgement of neighbours on her way. Another chapter today. Another show tonight.

The Andy Warhol Syndrome is at the Riverside Studios, London W6 (020 8237 1111) until 20 February, then touring until 11 June (for details, visit www.avalonuk.com/promotions)

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