Jo Joyner: The Accidental British Export Calming a World on Fire

Jo Joyner and the Quiet Diplomacy of a British Soap Star in a World Gone Mad
By our London-to-Lagos-to-Lima correspondent, still jet-lagged and morally compromised

In the grand casino of global fame—where TikTok teenagers sell crypto to oligarchs and retired footballers become UN envoys for gastronomy—Jo Joyner’s career looks almost quaint, like a polite hand-written thank-you note slipped under the door of a burning building. Yet the woman who spent the better part of two decades playing Tanya Branning, EastEnders’ chain-smoking, vodka-pouring matriarch of dysfunction, has lately become a minor export commodity in the soft-power wars, proving that even a fictional pub landlady can be weaponised for international calm.

Joyner’s recent turn in the BBC–AMC co-production “This Town”—a six-part Brexit blues opera set in Coventry but pitched squarely at Americans who think the Midlands is a mood—has quietly landed on streaming queues from Manila to Montevideo. In São Paulo, subtitles struggle to render “proper narky” into Portuguese; in Seoul, viewers binge it as a period piece, the way we once gawked at shoulder pads in “Dynasty.” Somewhere in the algorithm, Jo Joyner’s face has become the visual shorthand for “British woman who can ruin your life with a glance and still apologise for the inconvenience.”

The irony, of course, is that Joyner off-screen is almost indecently well-balanced. She volunteers for hospice radio, bakes flapjacks for the school fête, and once told The Guardian her most exotic holiday was a caravan in Tenby. This ordinariness is precisely what makes her useful on the world stage: she is the anti-Kardashian, a living reminder that not every English export arrives via private jet or shell corporation. When Netflix pushed “This Town” to 190 countries, her performance—equal parts grit and grace—became a small act of cultural diplomacy, soothing jittery markets that had begun to suspect Britain’s chief remaining industry was self-parody.

Her global footprint is measurable, if modest. In Argentina, fans run Twitter accounts that translate her 2008 “You ain’t my muvva!” scream into lunfardo slang. German tabloids, starved of post-Royal-Family gossip, recently ran a breathless sidebar: “Jo Joyner: Ist sie die neue Helen Mirren?” (Short answer: no, but bless them for trying.) Meanwhile, the Japanese network NHK re-broadcast her 2012 Comic Relief sketch—where she auctioned Phil Mitchell’s liver on eBay—during a fundraiser for earthquake relief, raising ¥3 million and several philosophical questions about what constitutes charity in late-stage capitalism.

All of which raises the deliciously bleak question: why do we, the frazzled citizens of a planet lurching from coup to climate summit, need Jo Joyner? Perhaps because she offers the illusion of continuity. While supply chains snap and democracies flirt with autocorrect autocracy, her career arcs like a comforting metronome: Monday, comfort the dying on hospice radio; Tuesday, learn lines about a fictional pub stabbing; Wednesday, wake to find your show trending in Uruguay. It’s a living, and—unlike most people’s—it still involves pensions.

There is also the darker calculus of representation. In an era when British passports are traded like Pokémon cards by the ultra-rich, Joyner’s ordinariness is a rare national resource. She earns Guildford money, not Cayman money. She is not “levelling up”; she is merely persisting, which in 2024 feels downright revolutionary. Foreign viewers may not know what a “council estate” is, but they recognise the universal grammar of a woman holding everything together with sarcasm and supermarket wine.

So when you next see her name pop up in a Netflix thumbnail—hair perfectly dishevelled, eyes promising both maternal warmth and imminent property damage—remember that you are witnessing a tiny, accidental act of geopolitical theatre. Jo Joyner, accidental ambassador, keeps the British end up without ever leaving Hertfordshire. The world burns, currencies collapse, but somewhere a streaming server hums, serving her up as comfort food for the apocalypse. If that isn’t soft power, I don’t know what is. And if it all goes sideways, well, at least she’s already rehearsed how to look disappointed in humanity. She’s been doing it on telly for twenty years.