AUTHOR INTERVIEW

Extreme dieting, career setbacks and the darker side of comedy all feature in Helen Lederer’s memoir, writes Hannah Stephenson

After 40 years in comedy, Helen Lederer seems to see the funny side of everything, whether it’s popping up 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 do it. To me, laughing is everything and I’ve been quite ruthless with myself,” she says.

“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 ’80s alternative comedy circuit, with Ben Elton, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. She guest-starred in Bottom and Saturday Live and later starred as Catriona in Ab Fab.

She says in those early comedy days in the ’80s and ’90s sexual harassment was not given the attention it is now. She adds: “The climate for people in control to go beyond was obviously there, because nowadays people would lose their jobs for the 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.

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.

Ben 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. 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. But I did have a bit of a sulk in my 40s because I wanted a sitcom and didn’t get one. I’m not saying I have completely accepted it, but it’s just trying to accept the world as it is and the limits of what you can do. Writing the book was saying: ‘Look, I was there.’”

She recalls the young Miranda Hart getting her own sitcom series: “Miranda was amazing, and was everywhere, and much younger than me, of course. 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.

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

The book has perhaps helped her accept herself for who she is. She writes with great love of the generosity of her fellow comedians, including Jennifer Saunders, who gave her the part in Ab Fab.

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.

Ultimately, she hopes the book will make readers laugh. “If I do something, I just have to find the funny bone in it.”

Not That I’m Bitter by Helen Lederer is available now.

FUNNY LADY: Comedian Helen Lederer.