Born in Wales in 1954, Helen Lederer is a standup comic, actor and author. Raised in south-east London, she broke into the alternative comedy scene in the 1980s as a regular at the Comedy Store. Lederer went on to appear in Britain’s seminal sitcoms – The Young Ones, Bottom, One Foot in the Grave, French and Saunders and Absolutely Fabulous. She has written the books Coping with Helen Lederer, Single Minding, and the novels Finger Food and Losing It. She has a daughter, Hannah, with her first husband, the former editor of the Observer Roger Alton. Her memoir, Not That I’m Bitter, is out now.
This was for the cover of Coping with Helen Lederer, a self-help parody written before people were doing self-help parodies. Inspired by Easy Entertaining, a book from the 1980s by Jane Asher, the image was my attempt to be the perfect hostess. I’m holding a tray of canapes including Weetabix, some kind of red jus, and Liquorice Allsorts on a skewer. There was one version of the photo, taken in a draughtier moment, in which a nipple was very much visible through the shirt.
When this was taken, I don’t think I had started on slimming pills – but I would have discovered them quite soon after, as I realised you could get them easily from your GP. My appearance has never been my selling point; the way I look is not conventional. But when you’re young, as I was here, there’s something fundamentally attractive about you. That’s not to say I was looking in the mirror at the time going, “Phwoar! Look at me!” I knew I was not normal-looking, whatever that is.
The shoot took place on Old Compton Street, Soho, in the flat of Roger Planer, brother of Nigel. We had created Coping together, along with the writer Richard McBrien. That whole period felt like the beginning of a new stage of my life; a peak in which I started to make things happen for myself. I had a book out, I was in a play with the famous actor Denis Quilley. I was living the dream. Then I met a man.
A man named Roger – a different Roger – came along to the book launch of Coping, which took place in a brightly lit room in the Groucho Club. I felt slightly hysterical that night; almost in disbelief that here we were, with an actual book to promote. In spite of the hysteria, I knew when I was introduced to Roger that I’d marry him. But also divorce him. The divorce part I knew about, because in junior school, my friend Mary James had looked at the number of creases in my thumb and gravely confirmed I would both marry and divorce the same man when I grew up. Mary was very prophetic: I got pregnant, married and separated, all of which took me 18 months.
There was sadness when we broke up, but honestly, I just got on with it. I had no other choice; there was a certain war-like spirit to being a single mum in the 90s. It wasn’t really spoken about. At the time, Ben Elton was doing political and observational stuff. Comics were expected to talk about Thatcher, and none appeared to be talking about breastfeeding or dating after marriage. Or nappy bags. All that unsexy stuff I put into my 1991 show Hysteria and the book Single Minding.
Did becoming a mum hold me back? There was an immediate disinterest from agents and producers at my motherhood status, without it actually being said. And practically speaking, it was often hard. There was one play I was offered – a tour with Les Dennis. I wanted to do it and said yes, but when the time came closer I couldn’t manage the thought of being away from Hannah.
I was very used to feeling slightly out of sync with the rest of the industry. Because I went to drama school when I was 27, I’ve always been about three years older than my more successful contemporaries. Did it make me feel like an outsider? I wasn’t ever part of a group, even though I performed with many. Self-starting, doing it alone, was something I always did.
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Before comedy, I had a stint at trying to be a social worker – I wanted to try to be useful, and to earn some money. Then, a few years before this was taken, I did a postgraduate year at drama school. After that, I knew I had to pursue performing. I was happy at drama school – that was a big deal for me, as I don’t really do happiness; it’s not generally my thing. For an anxious person, I had such confidence in what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go. I was committed and excited about the world of comedy. It wasn’t success that I was chasing, and being in showbiz wasn’t even part of it. It was just trying to get the job done, find new projects and to keep working.
I’m always in heaven when I’m playing with a group of other people; nice people. Meeting Rik [Mayall] in Edinburgh in the early 1980s, I recognised how special he was. Similarly, I knew Ab Fab was different straight away, partly from the way the top BBC people behaved to the “principals”. Its appeal was in the genius of Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley and the rest of the cast, but it was also great timing – we needed a caricature that mirrored the PR world and the excess of the era. The TV show Happy Families with Ben Elton and Dawn French was another nice memory. Everyone went off to get their own series, apart from me. But that’s OK, because we were filming near Alton Towers and we got to go on a big dipper.
In spite of being on those TV series, I’ve never felt famous. Naked Video [the BBC Scotland sketch show that ran from 1986 to 1991] was the only experience I had of people writing fan letters to me. I actually couldn’t read them – I had to get a friend to answer them for me as I found it too weird. I wasn’t sure what to write back.
For a while I felt part of something. But in my 40s, I sulked a lot. I tried to get comedy scripts accepted and had good agents to promote me, but it would often lead to more meetings and then finally a “no”. I allowed myself to be very disheartened for a while. I thought having a sitcom would be inevitable – and so did the other people around me – which didn’t help.
For a lot of my life I have been at war with myself. Now I am in my 60s, I’d like to think I am a bit wiser. I still feel a big responsibility to be authentic and true, and I just keep trying. When things go wrong, I’m that mix of being very strong and very frail, but as I’ve had more experience, I know that nothing can be that bad. If I go into a room I know I can work it. It has taken me this long to have that confidence – I certainly didn’t have that with Coping.
The culmination of the mistakes and the rejection messages left on answer machines over the decades have built me up to know that all things pass. There’s always hope, there’s always another idea. There’s always a laugh round the corner.