‘When a teacher s the naughtiest gir
IF YOU only know Arabella Weir as long-suffering Beth Baird from Two Doors Down, you will be startled by how different she is in person. Beth is easy-going, kind-hearted and put-upon by all of her neighbours in the hit BBC Two sitcom, a veritable saint; whereas Arabella is... “much more like Cathy in real life” the actress gleefully assures me – that’s self-centred, wine-swilling party animal Cathywhyte, played by Doon Mackichan.
“Everyone who knows me asks, ‘Why are you playing Beth?’ You should be Cathy!” Arabella laughs. “I have to channel my granny to play Beth.”
Well, she could hardly channel her mum. Arabella, 62, was at war with her snooty, demanding, academic mother Alison practically from birth. Even on her deathbed, she was criticising her daughter for eating fattening food.
Their toxic relationship turnedweir into a teenage monster who mercilessly tormented her teachers at Camden School for Girls in North London.
“I had a pretty turbulent childhood,” she tells me. “I changed schools a lot until secondary school. My parents had split up by then so I knew I was there to stay, so I thought, ‘I’m going to make my mark’.
“I remember making the whole class laugh by being naughty and thinking this is what I want!when a new teacher said, ‘I hear you are the naughtiest girl in the school’ I thought ‘YES!’
“I was suspended three times and thrown out of class, and I never backed down.
“One exasperated teacher told me, ‘I’ve just about had enough of you’. I waited a few seconds and then put my hand up and said, ‘Can you let me know when you’ve actually had enough of me? You said just about... and I’d like you to let me know exactly when’. I was 12!”
Another time she got the whole class to put their hair up with pencils so they looked like “crazy geishas”.
“The teacher came in and said, ‘Take the pencils out’. I said contemptuously, ‘You know nothing about modern fashion’.
“I was fearless and by then I knew I was funny. I got no O levels but I was the most popular girl at school.”
The ultimate victory came later when her mother taught at the school and complained that she couldn’t hold her head up in the staff room.
Arabella recalls: “I went back for a school reunion and apologised to our elderly music teacher for how I’d behaved. She replied, ‘That’s so sweet. I’m sure you weren’t that bad.what’s your name?’ I said, ‘Arabellaweir’.
“She said, ‘Oh my god, absolutely the worst person I ever had to teach in my entire life’. My excuse now is I was troubled...
“Only my art teacher got me. She was eight years older than me. She said, ‘I know what you’re doing but you could use your brain’. We became friends, and I ended up with three A-levels – history of art, French and English.”
Arabella was born in San Francisco to puritanical Scottish parents. Her d father Sir Michael Weir later becam ambassador. She went to nursery s Washington DC, attended Sacre Coe in Cairo and passed her 11-plus in B
Her parents had met at Oxford U and home life was “appalling dysfu While her father was “incredibly re mother was remarkably cruel, criti for being fat or stupid from an earl of which is dissected in Arabella’s s show, Does My Mum Loom Big In title is, of course, a play on her Fas catchphrase (and title of her best-s book), “Does my bum look big in t
On stage she jokes: “I monetised now I’ve monetised my mum.”
Her childhood wasn’t funny thou she was eight, her mother announc “Arabella can’t have potatoes, she she dared ask for food, she’d snap, so **** ing bourgeois.”
After the divorce,arabella’s olde were sent to boarding school and s the brunt of her mother’s sharp tong younger sister was spared, being th “I was always made aware that I w disappointment.”
Her mother never changed. “My