Helen Lederer was born in Carmarthen, Wales, in September 1954. Her mother was English and her father was sent as a refugee to England from Prague in 1937, his parents escaped with his sister two years later. She was raised in south-east London.
Her comedy breakthrough came writing and performing in BBC Radio 4’s In One Ear and she broke into stand-up with performances at London’s Comedy Store. She went on to acting roles in The Young Ones, Happy Families, Naked Video, Bottom, One Foot In The Grave and French & Saunders, among many others.
She has written and performed her own comedy series Life With Lederer and All Change as well as being a panellist on shows such as The News Quiz, Just A Minute, Quote… Unquote, A Good Read, Open Book and Woman’s Hour.
Her first comedy novel Losing It was nominated for the PG Wodehouse comedy literary prize. Helen set up her own Comedy Women In Print Prize (CWIP) in 2018 in order to celebrate and enable witty women’s writing. Since then, CWIP has enabled more than 24 authors to become published.
Speaking to The Big Issue for her Letter to my Younger Self, Helen Lederer recalls the anxieties of youth, the struggles of breaking into comedy as a woman in the 80s and much-missed colleagues.
I have got the evidence of exactly what I was like at 16 in my diaries. I kept them all. This is evidence. So, at 16, anxiety was big with me. And I was very driven to achieve boyfriends. That was the theme of my whole life – to get a boyfriend. Those were the times. We had a sixth form common room with a kettle, which proved our adulthood. And there were some people who had lost their virginity. Not many. Actually, maybe only one in our school. But that was our goal and that was our identity.
I was an innocent troublemaker. I felt I got into trouble by accident quite a lot. Our headmistress had a small dog who went everywhere with her and sniffed your legs. If you had to go to her office, that was bad. You knew the shit would hit the fan. One thing I did that wasn’t so innocent was a strategic stink bomb campaign timed to go off during an assembly. A few people were in on it. But then somebody told on me and the whole class got detention. So maybe my moral compass wasn’t straightforward.
I struggled at senior school when we had to knuckle down. My exam results weren’t great because I couldn’t concentrate. So I knew I wasn’t fulfilling what good pupils were able to do. I was always in that bottom group. And that’s quite something to grow up with, knowing what it feels like to be in the bottom group. Those ideas of your worth stay with you.
When I was a teenager, I loved English and acting. We didn’t do many plays but there was a sixth form revue which I wrote and did all the parts. I had a genuine need to express myself. And it wasn’t to show off, which I was accused of. I just had an urge to act. And when you’re younger, you have less life experience to tell you that actually, this will not go well.
I was a social worker before I went to drama school. I knew I wanted to help people and I was a very caring, but very anxious and chaotic social worker for about 18 months. I’d also found community theatre in Crouch End [North London] and had a very intense relationship with the guy who ran it. We’d smoke dope and listen to classical music and we’d wear wonderful ponchos and maybe an earring. It was all very exciting.
I was the happiest I have ever been at drama school. Having had a real job and been a student before that, it gave me real happiness to be just playing every day. There were real actors walking around and, oh my god, we’re having a voice lesson, oh my god, we’re going to write something, oh my god, we’re going to just sit around and talk about a playwright. It was all play and I was in heaven.
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I’m amazed I did it on my own. I would get myself to these venues and get on stage and I can’t believe I did it when there wasn’t really a precedent. So why was I doing it? All I know is that even as a child I was writing plays, I was performing. If you know you can make people laugh and that you find life funny, then you don’t question it. But I still got terribly nervous. My early shows were just me talking about the ridiculous nature of being single or going on self-assertion courses.
1992: Helen Lederer appearing in Bottom with Adrian Edmondson and Rik Mayall. Image: Don Smith/Radio Times/Getty Images
I was billed as a ‘woman comedian’. It feels odd to differentiate me from the rest of the people on the bill in that way but that was the world then. I didn’t talk about feminism as such on stage. I didn’t do the politics on stage. I thought it was enough to just be doing it.
The early days of the Comedy Store were exciting but there was a sense of not being part of this new scene. I remember one night French and Saunders coming on and they were wearing matching outfits. So I was aware of them. I was about two years behind them but still writing and performing topical stuff. But there wasn’t the camaraderie I know there is now or the sense of women together.
2018: Helen Lederer at the Edinburgh Fringe, performing her show, I Might As Well Say It. Image: Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images
This was very much pre #MeToo. I look back and don’t see myself as a victim. But, on the other hand, I did get myself into some extraordinary situations that were not of my doing. It was quite usual for people in power to behave in a more sexually overt way to women. And people didn’t lose their jobs like they would now. But I’m not horrified at things – I’m an adventurer and taking risks probably went over into my sexual relationships. That was the behaviour of the time – people weren’t married and didn’t have children, you’ve got adrenaline, you’re working at night. My upbringing was to be polite and I do find it difficult to say no. But I’d advise my younger self that when your father said, “It’s rude to reject somebody if they’ve asked you to dance”, it just means do one dance. You don’t have to end up snogging the guy.
Who wants fame? That’s not a goal in itself. I was there in the 80s and the 90s during the comedy boom but I wasn’t the elite. And that’s OK. Not everyone can be in the elite. There’s no room, especially with women in TV at that time. There was no room for more women, the slots were taken. I would get knocked back a lot. I remember going to the BBC with a political comedy and they said, we’ve already got something in place for Dawn French. I love her, and the BBC were right to be championing her. It’s just that I was having ideas as well. If Ben Elton and Stephen Fry had both come up with ideas, they wouldn’t be told no because they already had a male comic.
They put a lot of stand-up comics into The Young Ones. Ben Elton, who I admire so much, gave me parts and was very generous. We’d all come from that stable. So I did parts in French and Saunders. I didn’t expect success. That’s not in my make-up. But they carried on giving me jobs, so lucky me. I can’t have fucked it up completely.
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One moment that would excite my younger self was going to the first Montreal Festival for Laughs. I was there with Lenny Henry, Hale and Pace, Dawn was there and we all went white water rafting. Jeremy Hardy didn’t tell anyone he couldn’t swim. It was all just madness. We all screamed and said “I love you” and that was a fantastic moment of people right at the beginning of it all.
2024: Helen Lederer as Elspeth with William Roache’s Ken Barlow on Coronation Street. Image: ITV/Danielle Baguley/Shutterstock
Love evolves as you get older. You want different things. I would tell my younger self to calm down a bit and not be quite so eager and desperate. Trust that when you know who you are, you will attract the right person for you. It would have been nice to make fewer mistakes. I took a year off from relationships before I met the first husband, the father of my daughter. Then I did a rapid marriage, divorce, parenthood thing in a short period of time. Then I couldn’t get a boyfriend for ages. I’ve been married to the person I’m with now for quite a long time. That sounds so smug! But life goes through different phases and I’ve probably tried most sides of it.
I set up the Comedy Women in Print book prize a few years ago. I’d written a novel and wanted a prize to win and realised there wasn’t one. So that has been a priority for me in the last five years. I’m not good at admin. I’m not good at managing people. So it’s stressful. But people have got publishing deals because of it.
If I could have a conversation with someone who isn’t around now, I’d like to talk with Jeremy Hardy. I went on The News Quiz and was really bad. It was so embarrassing. And we didn’t talk to each other in the pub afterwards. I was just not funny. I wish I’d said, Jeremy, I was so bad! I wish we’d laughed about it and that I could have owned it. The heavier reply to the same question is that I would like to talk to my father one more time to say I hope you wouldn’t be too disappointed. And that’s the trick of the comedian. I’d say it like that so then he’d have to say, no, not at all, you’re doing great. That would be the agenda.
Helen Lederer’s memoir Not That I’m Bitter is out now (Mirror Books, £20).
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