‘Mum couldn’t bear the sight of me’
Former ‘Fast Show’ star Arabella Weir tells Elizabeth Grice how her fat-shaming mother fuelled her new stand-up show
Arabella Weir says that her mother had to be long dead before Does My Mum Loom Big in This? could be written, let alone reach the stage. In a one-woman comedy routine, Weir exposes her mother’s cruel, snobby campaign to shame her into losing weight – but also pokes abundant fun at her own shortcomings as a mother. Some of the stories are as appalling as they are hilarious. “I’ve taken the damage from this dysfunctional family and made it work for me,” she says.
Alison Weir’s humiliation of her daughter began when Arabella was a small child. “I wasn’t even that fat,” she says. “We’re not talking of a morbidly obese kid. But my mother was obsessed with fatness. She made me feel you aren’t lovable or deserving if you’re fat. She couldn’t conceive of me doing well in life or making boys like me unless I was slim and pretty.”
The first time she was put down, eight-year-old Arabella had remarked innocently: “I really like chocolate”. Her mother retorted: “Well, chocolate doesn’t like you.” Domesticity was beneath Alison’s attention. “I remember saying to Mum once: ‘There’s no loo roll.’ She said; ‘Why the devil are you telling me?’ I soon learned to fend for myself.” It became a war of attrition. “Have you any idea how fat you are?” she demanded when Arabella was a few months pregnant. “To her dying day, we had a combative relationship.”
Despite this, Weir believes that her mother would have enjoyed the show. “She loved being the centre of attention.”
Does My Mum Loom Big in This?, co-written with the novelist Jon Canter, is about to go on its Coviddelayed tour. The show was much praised at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe but some critics found the sickening emotional abuse beneath the hilarity unsettling.
The title is a clever pun on Weir’s catchphrase from the 1990s television hit The Fast Show, where her character, the Insecure Woman, seeks constant reassurance with: “Does my bum look big in this?” Weir wrote a bestselling fictional diary of the same title in 1997 where the whip-tongued mother figure, “probably a hyena in a previous life”, is a thinly-disguised Alison Weir.
Now a 63-year-old mother of two grown-up children, amicably divorced and contentedly unencumbered by a relationship, Arabella Weir has a better understanding of her mother’s erratic parenting. “She was a very neglected, unloved only child of intellectual, remote Scots. The ethos was very much: least said, soonest mended, stiff upper lip, cold porridge.”
Weir tells me that she talked to her mother about her childhood, so that she could try to understand. “I wouldn’t say I forgave her, though, because with her income and her intellect she could have changed. She could have had therapy, as I did. She chose not to.
“She was witty and intelligent and read English at Oxford but was ridiculously over-educated for a diplomat’s wife who needed only to look nice in a cocktail dress. She found herself biologically very fecund but totally ill-equipped to do this relentlessly hard job – mothering. There were no mother and toddler groups, no books about mothering – and you could never admit you were struggling.” The lightning rod for her mother’s misery, Weir was singled out from her three siblings for special abuse. “Being fat was, as she saw it, a deliberate ploy to annoy her. It reflected badly on her. People who went to Oxford and drank real coffee in the Sixties didn’t have fat children. Winners don’t have fat children. You see that now. Kim Kardashian would be unlikely to be parading her overweight daughter. There’s still plenty of fat-shaming out there, particularly of women.”
Her parents split up when she was eight and her father, the distinguished Arabist Sir Michael Scott Weir, was posted to Bahrain. They pretended that the marriage was hunky-dory but Arabella sensed otherwise. She was already a combative child – “that was my survival” – and bombarded her mother with questions until she exploded with: “I can’t f------ bear the sight of you. You can go and live with him.” Her five-year-old sister stayed at home and her two brothers were at prep school.
“I realise now that when she quite literally got rid of me she was not being rational. She just couldn’t cope. Being a single parent is a uniquely hard job, and she wasn’t cut out for it. I loved my mother in spite of her.”
Weir had a happy year in Bahrain with her father, but when he was posted to New York she had to return. Camden School for Girls, where her mother was by now a teacher, became the new theatre for her rebellion.
“I knew I would never be popular by being swotty and high-achieving so, from the first day, I decided to be the funniest, cheekiest, rudest person there. When my mother said: ‘I cannot hold my head up in the classroom’, I was expected to say ‘How terrible’, but I squealed: ‘Oh yes!’ ”
Across her kitchen table, Weir describes her teenage anarchy with great élan and perfect diction. She’s dark-eyed, messy-pretty and so exuberantly fluent it makes you want to draw breath for her.
‘Being a single parent is a uniquely hard job, and she wasn’t cut out for it’
Friends come and go. Her daughter Isabella, 23, drifts in to make breakfast. Neither she nor her brother Archie, 22, both graduates, feature in the show except generically. Isabella hoped her mother wouldn’t embarrass them by dancing to “their” music, Drake – she does – but Archie’s response was “Whatever”. He added sweetly: “But Mum’s quite a good dancer.”
Weir says she was determined to be “the most perfect mother in the entire world” and not to make the same mistakes as her own mother; instead, she just made different ones. Crucially, she didn’t want to be a single parent, but when it became “inevitable” that she and her husband Jeremy Norton would split, “I decided to make the best possible fist of it.”
Thanks to the career-changing
Fast Show, she had independence and status. Its predominantly male line-up meant she had to work harder to get her material accepted but that was more than compensated for by the recognition and the pay, compared with previous years as a jobbing actor. And she liked flying the feminist flag.
“It was seen as a bit of a lads’ show,” she says. “Listen, I’ve got two older brothers. I thought: this is like my family and I’m going to fight for what I’m entitled to. You’d be hard pushed to find a woman my age in my industry who didn’t feel quite a lot of it was a battle. I’m a combative person anyway who, for obvious reasons, learnt to survive by being a scrapper.”
In her quieter moments, she imagines sipping tea in a Jane Austen adaptation. “I do get a lot of satisfaction from gardening and seeing my mates, so maybe I’ll just potter around and wait to be cast in
Sense and Sensibility.” Who’s she kidding? Before lockdown, she had an idea for another solo show and even has a title for it – F------ Men.
“Nothing gives me the buzz performing does. The other day, I was watching a documentary about climbers on Everest and was incredulous: they’re doing it more than once? But that’s kind of what I am doing, going back up the mountain.”