Jess Green admits she is crazy about Jeremy Corbyn and is presenting a show about her love/ hate relationship with the party - and her infatuation with the Labour leader.

She tells us how it came about... and what we can expect

​When I joined the Labour Party at university in 2007 I doubled the number of members who met weekly in the Liverpool Philharmonic pub.

Since then I’ve stuck by the party through the downfall of Tony Blair, the disappointment of Gordon Brown and the election pledge monolith of Ed Miliband. After a decade of keeping my membership card firmly at the back of my wallet, in 2015 along came this back bench MP who none of us had ever heard of who represented so many of the things I wanted the Labour Party to stand for and who, against all odds became the leader of the party.

Whatever your opinion, it’s a fascinating story; the rise of a man who’d been in the party 32 years, fighting two leadership elections and coming back from a no-confidence vote against the main stream media and many of his own front benchers. And all of this at a real turning point in politics. I think Jessica Hyne’s character in Russel T Davies’ Years and Years summed it up well with ‘the country’s gone mad, no-one used to care about by-elections’.

When my publisher approached me in 2017 to write my second collection I looked at what I’d been writing over the past 2 years; I’d been documenting this shift in politics, the rise of Corbyn and the division of The Left and I wanted to write a book which explored how Labour will ever win another general election when The Left is so divided. Although we knew the title was a bit of a risk, the collection was published in 2018 just in time for the show, which I had produced alongside the book, to go up to the Edinburgh Fringe.

Oxford Mail:

I performed A Self Help Guide every day for a month, picked up three 4* reviews and the audiences got bigger as word of mouth spread until the final week when it was standing room only. Throughout August I noticed that more and more people were tweeting Corbyn telling him about the show and that he must see it, which led to an unexpected phone call on the final day of the run! To top off what had already been a brilliantly rewarding month, in the last week of the Fringe I won the BBC Poetry Slam becoming BBC Slam Champion 2018.

The show received Arts Council funding at the beginning of 2019 for a 6 month tour around the UK. I spent six weeks rewriting it to bring it firmly up to date and we began touring in March.

One of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of A Self Help Guide is that it is updated depending on what has happened that day politically so I never do the same show twice. The tour ends in my home town of Leicester in November and that show will no doubt be unrecognisable from the first one in March (probably with a few more references to PM Boris Johnson).

I’m half way through the tour now and have performed all over the country including Liverpool, Suffolk, Newcastle and Brighton to a wide range of audiences; lefties, Tories and people fed up with politics, and the feedback has been overwhelming positive. As well as receiving a 5-star review last month an audience member got in touch to say the show had inspired him to ‘join the party and becoming more proactive in the struggle against the far right’.

A Self Help Guide To Being In Love With Jeremy Corbyn comes to The Old Fire Station in Oxford, tomorrow (Saturday). Tickets available at oldfirestation.org.uk or by phone 01865 263980.