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About Abi Grant
Abi Grant was born in Shepherd’s Bush, London W12 in April 1965. She attended a local comprehensive but left as soon as was legally possible, starting work variously as a chamber maid in Earl’s Court, an agency cleaner (she has actually cleaned Nigel Dempster’s house) and finally as a park-keeper at Bishops Park for the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham (or Let’s Be Happy Folks, as they said in the hut).
Around this time she bought a motorbike and began late-night DJ-ing on for a pirate radio station called LWR (London Weekend Radio – Tim Westwood’s show followed hers), going on to be auditioned by Capital Radio who turned her down saying she ‘lacked warmth’. Deciding to try her hand at writing, she placed an ad for a co-writer in Time Out’s theatre board section: ‘Wanted – Michael Palin ONO’. Palin didn’t answer, but one respondee asked her to help manage (and later take over) a cabaret club in W12 called Bush Fires, which operated out of the same pub as the Bush Theatre (but downstairs in the back bar).
While running Bush Fires, she began writing for Rory Bremner, ‘Spitting Image’, ‘Alas Smith and Jones’ et al, and having booked singer Barb Jungr, guitarist Michael Parker and comedian Arnold Brown, they then collectively developed ‘Brown Blues’, an Edinburgh show that won the 1987 Perrier award, playing the Donmar Warehouse and touring the country.
Writing for sketch shows, Punch magazine and radio ads for John Cleese in the US (for Altoid mints) kept her going while she finished the book for ‘Radio Times’, a musical, based around the songs of Noel Gay. Intended as a follow up to the smash hit ‘Me and My Girl’ and starring Tony Slattery, the show ran for two months at Birmingham Rep and six at the Queens Theatre, collecting an Olivier nomination, before falling victim to the West End blight that followed the IRA’s last mainland bombing spree. Abi was attacked on the Friday before ‘Radio Times’ last show, and this is where her book Words Can Describe begins…
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