‘I wish I’d been kinder to myself’

Comedian Helen Lederer on extreme dieting, career setbacks and the darker side of comedy

AFTER 40 years in comedy, Helen Lederer seems to be able to see the funny side of everything, whether it’s popping up most recently as Ken Barlow’s online date on Corrie, recalling her stand-up hecklers or experiences on reality TV including Celebrity Big Brother.

Yet reading her new memoir, Not That I’m Bitter, it’s clear life hasn’t always been fun and games, as she recounts darker misogynistic anecdotes in her early years, inappropriate behaviour from a producer, and agents who either sacked her or stole from her.

If she can get a laugh out of the situations in which she finds herself though, she does so in the book.

“If I think I’m going to get a laugh, I bloody well do it. To me, laughing is everything and I’ve been quite ruthless with myself,” she says today.

“I’m just hoping this [the book] is a little window of time gone by where I hope I am, in my new, original way, trying to find humour in life.”

Lederer’s comedy career began among the cream of the crop of the Eighties alternative comedy circuit, with Ben Elton, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. She gueststarred in Bottom and Saturday Live and later starred as Catriona in Ab Fab. She says in those early comedy days in the Eighties and Nineties sexual harassment was not given the attention it is now: “The climate for people in control to go beyond was obviously there, because nowadays people would lose their jobs for similar behaviour.”

She never thought too much about bad behaviour in the industry when she was coming through it, she admits.

“You’re not there to attract those situations, you’re there to do your work,” she says. “I suppose the skill of maturity is that you can navigate inevitable excitement. I wasn’t ever a victim. Situations which were not ideal occurred and our job was to navigate them.”

Aside from that, the comedian and writer, now 69, has much to say about frequently being the co-star – on the peripheries of true stardom, but hungry enough to accept smaller roles – and it’s difficult to work out if she’s finding this funny or upsetting. She appeared in The Young Ones and Ab Fab but never got her own TV show or found a comedy partner like French and Saunders.

Elton has described her as one of the “early (and not sufficiently recognised) heroes of alternative comedy”, and indeed Lederer highlights how the world of stand-up could be difficult when you’re a woman, an outsider, not quite in the gang.

“French and Saunders were brilliant, they were a double act, organised within The Comic Strip in a group, being given opportunities that they were brilliant in,” she adds.

“I wasn’t in a group. So if you’re on your own, and you don’t belong to Footlights, or anything, you have to invent your own path. But the irony of the [book] title is, I really genuinely don’t feel bitter about it because I wanted it so much.”

Was she envious of her peers?

“No, they gave me wonderful jobs,” she says. “But I did have a bit of a sulk in my 40s because I wanted a sitcom and didn’t get one. It was recognising that the thing you wanted, or you thought you wanted, wasn’t going to happen, and that other people were getting it. And that is hard.”

She recalls the young Miranda Hart getting her own sitcom series.

“Miranda was amazing, and was everywhere, and much younger than me, of course,” she says. “I missed that opportunity.”

But very few women in the 1980s were given licence to have their own shows and write their own material, she points out, and there was a huge gap until Hart and Fleabag-creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge hit the spotlight more than two decades later.

“Now, it is so different and so brilliant,” Lederer enthuses.

The book has perhaps helped her accept herself for who she is. Sometimes, she agrees, people can think she’s too much, being honest and outspoken, but she’s great at filling in awkward moments at dinner parties.

She writes with great love of the generosity of her fellow comedians, including Saunders, who gave her the part in Ab Fab. French is godmother to her daughter, Hannah, now 33, and remembers every birthday, she points out. They keep loosely in touch.

Lederer says: “I probably connect with Dawn once or twice a year, which is lovely. I wouldn’t expect to be part of a community of people where I’m not evolving and creating. I think it’s a misnomer that if you’re seen in one programme, that you would then be best friends with them. Because I don’t think that is how the landscape lies for anyone.”

While chasing her comedy dream – often on the tails of her peers – she faced many issues along the way, fearing she wouldn’t get work unless she kept her weight down, which she did with varying degrees of success over the years with slimming tablets and injections, and even losing three stones in three months on a powdered food diet which required borderline starvation.

She spent the money she earned from her appearance on Celebrity Big Brother on a gastric band, writing humorously about how she put weight on after having it fitted (and later had it removed). Laughter and pain pepper every chapter.

Lederer lives in London with her second husband, Chris Browne, a semi-retired GP.

“I wish I could manage people better,” she says. “I think I’ll probably make a mistake every day. I wish I’d got to know my personality a bit more and been a bit kinder to myself instead of battling.”