Helen Lederer
‘I know I’m not going to Hollywood – and I don’t mind anymore’
‘There’s a lot of anger,” says Helen Lederer, blue eyes blinking beneath her trademark blonde fringe. “I’m sat on a lot of bitterness.” They’re not words you might expect the self-titled “supply teacher of comedy” to come out with; least of all the woman on the sofa opposite me who, on the arrival of her coffee, squeals with delight at the “little cakey” that comes with it. Yet after three decades in the industry Lederer, a 63-year-old punk-cumpixie in silver and leopard print pumps and lace-cuffed blouse, has become somewhat more circumspect.
“I accept where I’m at now,” she says. “It wasn’t where I thought I might be, but it’s kind of all right, and maybe that reflects in a lot of us.
“I’m not an elite,” she continues, “my ambitions have changed, and there’s a more realistic sense of what’s possible; I know I’m not going into Hollywood, and I don’t mind anymore. I think there is hope in just getting on and doing stuff, just getting on and doing”.
In the spirit of getting on and doing, this month Lederer has been performing a one-woman routine every day at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for the first time in 14 years, hosting a chat show, and making endless radio appearances on channels from LBC to the BBC. On top of which, she is launching the Comedy Women in Print prize this week – a new literary award to recognise talent in the industry, from fiction to comedy, backed by The Daily Telegraph.
Submissions open on Friday, and Lederer is brimming with wide-eyed excitement to rake through entries alongside fellow judges: Telegraph columnist, Allison Pearson and Marian Keyes, both celebrated, best-selling novelists who have in recent months highlighted that only three women (yes, just three) have won the Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman Prize for comic fiction in its 18-year history.
Why is it, exactly, that women are being roundly dismissed as unfunny, or lacking the comical heft of their male peers? “Popular women’s books are written off as Chick Lit, but no novel by a man has ever been dismissed as Dick Lit,” Pearson wrote in these pages two months ago; “Male voices are automatically given extra weight … Anything that’s been said or done by a woman just matters less,” lamented Keyes. And so, Lederer is seeking to redress the balance with CWIP, through which the winner will receive a place on the University of Hertfordshire’s Creative Writing course and £1,000 if they are as yet unpublished, or £2,000 if their work has previously been in print.
“This is a passion project, it’s not a money earner for me” explains Lederer, who played dizzy Catriona in Absolutely Fabulous and has starred in comedy shows from The Young Ones to French and Saunders and Bottom. Now, after two years of meetings with industry stalwarts and “business people in black jackets”, she is excited to see her baby take flight.
It is a project that had long been in the offing, but put on hold as Lederer brought up a baby of her own, on her own, following the breakdown of her first marriage to newspaper editor Roger Alton in 1989, two years after they had wed. “It was a difficult time,” she says of the early years raising daughter Hannah, now 28 who, after dabbling in acting, has since turned her hand to the restaurant industry. “I couldn’t get a boyfriend, couldn’t get the job I thought I wanted.
“I have behaved very badly in my past,” she adds, with one memory – of refusing to stick to a presenting script, much to the dismay of the programme’s production team – continuing to haunt her. Though Lederer repeatedly assures me that her 60s have seen her hit her stride, she still has “the ability to obsess over things”; steering clear of offering up any political opinions, or sharing thoughts on social media, should backlash strike. “I’m quite feeble,” she says by way of explanation.
That much, I doubt. In spite of Lederer’s obvious flashes of apprehension, repeatedly calling herself “old”, worrying about today’s outfit and that she forgot to bring concealer with her for the photographs (she is currently “too busy” to have Botox), surviving 30 years on the comedy circuit – and, surely the ultimate test of anyone’s mettle, Celebrity Big Brother – suggests otherwise.
“In the Eighties, my generation of women were very competitive. There wasn’t much friendship at all – there couldn’t be, because we were after the same work,” she says, noting that she spent most of her early career vying for the same stage or screen slots as two other female comics her age – in spite of their work being totally different.
“Embracing the power of the individual”, she says, is key. “Women are forced to support each other and all be the same … Women should not be like each other – and that’s a message we haven’t received at all. All of one’s life, one has to talk about collaboration, and how we are supportive of our situation and our gender, but,” she adds, “you can’t homogenise humour.”
The warmer strand of comedy women are often responsible for is, like its literary counterpart, viewed as less “commercially valuable” than the more rough and tumble offerings men typically provide, Lederer believes. Her own brand oscillates between self-effacing, approachable and confessional, but even when we meet ahead of her Fringe run, the prospect of how she will be received is giving her cause for concern. Like any comedian, she has had her share of “very disappointing” gigs and, industry veteran or not, knows she is never immune; “when the demons come in your head and you start anticipating judgment, that’s when you lose it, when I lose it.”
That notion is one she has explored in detail. Her 2015 novel Losing It –a tale of a woman in debt, divorced and desperate – was shortlisted for the Wodehouse Prize and the Edinburgh First Book Prize that same year. Though Lederer did not become the face of a diet pill brand as a result of her predicament, as her protagonist does, she knows the gruelling reality of seeing the career you made pains to create, head down a different path. “I am quite a naive person, or have been in the past,” Lederer says. “I had a genuine belief that, because I had a passion for stand-up, writing and performing, that I’d just write my own sitcom and be in it. That wasn’t arrogant,” she adds, “just a natural belief, and it didn’t happen.
“It happened to other people and not for me, for whatever reason. Bad timing? Inappropriate disposition? And 101 other reasons as well.” It was during that fallow period, I realise, that I met Lederer for the first time on Butter Fingers, a children’s cookery show on the now-defunct Taste TV in which she demonstrated
‘In the Eighties, my generation of women were competitive – all after the same work’
‘I accept where I am now. It wasn’t where I thought I’d be, but it’s kind of all right’
how my 10-year-old school friend and I were to make a trifle and a sandwich, the most notable aspect of which was her correcting – with trademark enthusiasm – my mispronunciation of Edam cheese (I pronounced Ed-am). An Ab Fabesque small screen hit, it wasn’t.
But she has come to accept her place in the show business pecking order, and even dreamt up new ways to handle other high profile egos’ inability to do the same, opting “to find a coffee or glass of water and look busy” whenever the inevitable Green Room tussle over who has top billing ensues.
The turning point came, Lederer found, when she began touring with her book. “I would think, ‘Oooh, I’ve found my tribe’, and that had never happened before in 30 years of working. That was my happiest time,” she mulls. “I just felt there was a sense of membership. And I think that’s what I had been seeking all along.”