How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - Fern Brady - ‘I make more money in comedy than I ever did from stripping‘

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello wonderful listeners and viewers. Don't forget about my subscriber show Failing with Friends where my brilliant guests get to be agony arts, uncles or non-binary advice-givers. You can learn how to cope with a friendship breakup with Cynthia Nixon, feeling calm with Christine McGuinness and how to recover from a broken heart with Danny Minogue. Join the family, just follow the link in the show notes. Minogue. Join the family. Just follow the link in the show notes. Welcome to this super special episode of How to Fail with Fern Brady, live from Usher Hall in Edinburgh. Thank you so much for listening. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs

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Starting point is 00:01:25 helping your business get discovered fast with integrated SEO tools. Head to squarespace.com forward slash fail 10 for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use offer code fail10 to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. My guest tonight is Fern Brady, a stand-up comedian and award-winning author born in Bathgate, West Lothian in 1986.

Starting point is 00:01:52 Her parents are working class, her dad worked for a haulage company while her mom worked at Tesco, and Brady was raised in a household with two brothers. She went to Edinburgh University where she was editor of the student newspaper and won a scholarship to train as a reporter in England. For one assignment, Brady was sent to try out stand-up comedy. After performing her first show, she experienced a feeling, as she puts it, akin to the early bit of falling in love. Since then, her career has seen her tour internationally, reached the finals of So You Think You're Funny, appear on multiple panel shows,

Starting point is 00:02:32 including 8 Out of 10 Cats and Taskmaster. Last year, she got her own Netflix comedy special, and she's about to go to North America with her tour, I Gave You Milk to Drink, which has already played to sell out crowds here. But her impressive career has not been without its challenges. From an early age, Brady earned the reputation

Starting point is 00:02:53 of being difficult at home because of frequent meltdowns and ended up attending a teenage mental health unit at the age of 16. It wasn't until 2021 that Brady was finally given a late autism diagnosis at the age of 16. It wasn't until 2021 that Brady was finally given a late autism diagnosis at the age of 34. The diagnosis made sense of much of her life, experiences she wrote about with candor and humor in her award-winning 2023 memoir, Strong Female Character.

Starting point is 00:03:22 Often I get told my standup is uncompromising, Brady says, which is funny to me because I'm constantly compromising. Edinburgh, please welcome the one and only fan, Brady. CHEERING Sounds mad when you read it out like that. How are you feeling? How's the squirm level? Yeah, that was more embarrassing than I thought it would be.

Starting point is 00:03:52 I wanted to end on that quote, that idea of being told that your comedy is uncompromising, but you having to compromise a lot. Because I think it really speaks to something that you write about so brilliantly in Strong Female Character about the way that girls and young women often mask autism and therefore don't get diagnosed in time. Could you just speak a bit about masking and how that manifested for you? In case anyone doesn't know what autistic masking is, It's hiding your autistic traits in order to fit in with other people. So I think I present that I'm pretty sociable and I'll chat to anyone but when I was

Starting point is 00:04:33 five I found it difficult to speak at school and I used to come home and have these massive meltdowns after not speaking in school. And then gradually over time you, I mean especially in high school, you look at what other people are doing and try and find ways to fit in and by the time I got diagnosed I had a few years of people telling me they thought I was autistic. I thought I was autistic but I got into my head that I could try and fix it and just learn the right things to say to people and almost learn social skills as if I was learning a foreign language. And that's called social perfectionism and a lot of autistics have that and it's really damaging

Starting point is 00:05:17 for you. It's much better to be able to be your true self than try and mask. If I was to give an example of masking it would be things like, like I find hugging strangers difficult or people touching me lightly on the arm feels like bugs on my skin or I would have difficulty with studio lights at TV jobs and I kind of quickly learned that you have to not mention that or you're gonna be seen as difficult. When Taskmaster came out actually, I'd not long been diagnosed and I thought on Taskmaster it's going to take a lot of effort to mask, right? So I'm just going to be myself and not worry too much about masking. And that meant I would shift around in my chair a lot during the studio shows, just the chairs are uncomfortable. I'd rather sit on the floor. A lot of things, right?

Starting point is 00:06:06 And when the show came out, there was comments from people online being like, why is she, is her skirt too short? Why is she tugging it down? Because I was just naturally fidgeting a lot. There were also a lot of messages from people who recognised themselves seeing you on screen, weren't there? Oh, I mean, yeah, that was the most touching thing. There was a lot of times this happened, but someone messaged saying, my son's autistic and he loves you on Taskmaster

Starting point is 00:06:35 and he recognizes himself in you. Because you know the phrase, real, recognize real? I feel like autistics recognize autistics. And it's often been said that other autistic people are better at spotting autism than doctors. I mean a lot of people I know who got diagnosed after me, I wasn't surprised at all. But yeah. The other weird thing was since the book came out, I wrote the book to be really specific and I wrote a lot of embarrassing stuff in it that I thought was unique to me.

Starting point is 00:07:05 And then I've had so many people come up to me, like so many people come up to me saying that this is like my life. And when I went on tour to America, there was one woman came up to me after a gig and said, this is like my life, except I did foot porn instead of being a stripper. The level of specificity I really appreciated in your memoir, which is just a brilliant book, if you haven't read it, you must. Because we were talking about this backstage, I had never come across the word, a-list-ic, to describe a neurotypical person.

Starting point is 00:07:42 And I really valued that you used that. Why did you choose to use it? In the book I talk about autistics and elistics because I more and more these days I see people using really vague terms in an effort to be polite when talking about autism. I think people are still quite squeamish when it comes to talking about autism. So people will often call me neurodivergent and I understand the reasoning behind that, but it's such an umbrella term that covers everything from dyslexia to ADHD, all sorts of things. And autistic people, I can only speak for myself but I prefer specificity

Starting point is 00:08:25 so that's why I tried to use really specific terms to say that I was talking about non-autistic people in the book. And you also talk about how living with autism is a bit like having an Android phone and trying to communicate with an iPhone. So people talk about autistic people as if we're terrible at communicating, but there was some study that showed that when autistic people work together as a group, we get on fine. It's when we try and work with non-autistic people there's a bit of a communication difference. So we're always making the effort to speak in neurotypical and all the autism advocacy movement is asking for is for a bit of

Starting point is 00:09:16 that in return. But when I read that that autistic people get on with other autistic people it made so much sense because I started to think back over like the number of times I've met someone and thought I think I'm in love with this person I have to leave my boyfriend for them and then they got diagnosed autistic a few years later. Like when I meet other autistic people just most of the time it just feels like this effortless communication. By the way, the Android versus iPhone thing, that's not, I didn't come up with that, I

Starting point is 00:09:50 don't want to take credit for it. I think that was an author called Steve Silberman that wrote a book called Neuro Tribes. It's very good if you haven't read it. There's this very funny story in your memoir, which like many of your anecdotes is funny, but has this darkness to it that also makes it delicious. Oh no. It's a don't worry. It's about you working in boots. Oh great.

Starting point is 00:10:15 Yes. And the badge. Will you tell us that story? Oh listen, I've done about 50 jobs and I worked in every strip club in this area, RIP Liquors Club and Bottoms Up. And yeah, to this day, working in Boots Bathgate was one of the most harrowing jobs I've ever done. It was awful. Because when you don't know you're autistic, you just, I used to think, oh it I'm just this big, tall lump, and other women just don't like me. And I don't know why I feel like this.

Starting point is 00:10:48 Misfit all the time. But even when people don't know you're autistic, they know you're autistic, if that makes sense. They pick up on something different about you, just something just slightly off about you, whether it's the way you move or talk or you blurt out these unacceptable things at weird times and the women in boots picked up on that it's like an animal instinct and I just had such a miserable time there like I

Starting point is 00:11:14 remember one time boots it was the week before Christmas we all had to dress up in Christmas themed outfits and everyone came in with these delicate little reindeer antlers and tiny little angels wings. I genuinely turned up with these wings that spanned my back, these enormous wings, just trying to restock the pile cream going, sweeping everything off the shelves. And that made them hate me more but I also took things very literally it always felt like no matter how hard I tried and in these jobs like I would get sacked from jobs all the time and not know why so we had to wear this badge

Starting point is 00:11:56 that said ask me about the new number 7 mascara and people on the check out would say well tell me about the new number 7 mascara. I'd go, it's terrible, you have to get the L'Oreal one instead, it's much better. And my boss took me aside and was like, what are you doing? There's a promo on the number 7 mascara. So I never was able to read between the lines and every week I would get pulled into the office for another thing and another thing and it's just amazing to see something like that finally. What mascara are you wearing tonight Fern? Oh, Benefit.

Starting point is 00:12:33 Very loyal to that brand. Your first failure is your first year at university and you say that you did it three times. Yeah, wedge tape. Well, these are your words. You say you did it three times because I kept ending up in court cases and it was quite distracting. Tell us about university because there was a sense wasn't there that you didn't quite know how to do it but your identity up to that point was wrapped up in being clever and good at

Starting point is 00:13:10 exams. Yeah I used to just think and again this is common with autistic people with I've got what they used to call Asperger's but is now called ASD1 so that this is common with my flavor of autism is they get called little professors in school and a lot of their eccentricities just gets written off as, oh they're clever. So a lot of the strange things I did when I was little, my parents were like, oh she's just clever, she'll be fine once she goes to uni. So I had really high hopes that I was going to get to Edinburgh Uni and everything was going to be great. We were all going to talk about books and the life of the mind. Like I was going to find my people there. And then I got there. And I remember being in the queue

Starting point is 00:13:54 for Freshers Week and I was talking to my flatmate who was from the Shetlands and these girls in front of us went, what's that smell? Smells like commoners. And that was when I was like, oh shit, this is setting the tone for the next four years. And even lecturers as well. I mean, you might have seen, it's been in the news recently, it was in the Times that Edinburgh Uni has a real problem with English students being, not all of them,

Starting point is 00:14:21 but some of them being horrible, the Scottish students. So it's good to know I wasn't the only one. But yeah, I found uni very, very difficult because students tend to, they tend to get advice from their peers if they don't know where they're going, they get advice from their peers and eventually everything sort of falls into place. But there is a really high dropout rate for autistic students. And there was also a high dropout rate for working class students from my area. I mean, at the time I went to uni, they were very good at encouraging a lot of people from

Starting point is 00:14:52 my school to go, but it's tricky if your parents haven't been and if you don't have a lot of peers or people in your family that have gone. And I remember a lot of clever people from my school dropped out after the first year. So yeah, my first year of Yeni, I did Arabic and Persian with Islamic history. I quickly realized that was a mistake because it's very hard. Although you can still say one phrase in Persian, can't you? Oh haram an-nordarad. That means my sister.

Starting point is 00:15:23 I'm so attracted to you right now. That was so beautiful. That was like ASMR. I'm so attracted to you right now. That was so beautiful. That was like ASMR. I'm worried there's going to be an Iranian in here who's like, the pronunciation is wrong. That means my sister has a pomegranate. So you talk there about some of the challenges being at university and one of the very real challenges was there not being enough money.

Starting point is 00:15:46 Yeah. So the stripping. Tell us about that. So, after I failed first year and second year, first year I got in trouble with the police first, I was 17. Second year, I had a bad boyfriend to put it lightly as in the book and then it just became I was working in a bookies and it just was becoming clear that there wasn't gonna be enough money to keep doing uni and have a go at getting into student journalism. Everyone else seemed to either have no job at all or

Starting point is 00:16:22 the uni said like you could only work a certain number of hours. And then there was this article in the student newspaper that was like student strippers make cash doing lap dances or what it was a snappier headline than that. And it was meant to be discouraging people from going into stripping. But the number of strippers that I met that got into it from that article. Because strippers always like a lot of strippers lie and mention like their best night when they talk to journalists. So this girl was like I make a thousand pounds a night and it's terrible to say that I make more money in comedy than I ever did from stripping. That's how bad I was at

Starting point is 00:17:02 stripping. You have to have a certain personality for it and it involves a degree of openness and good will towards men. And that's why you need to be like 19 or 20 when you're doing it because you've still got that hope in your eyes and that you don't know that men are bad. And then very quickly I got cynical and I remember one guy just throwing money at my face and storming out, because he didn't want a lap dance. Yeah, but I enjoyed writing about it in the book.

Starting point is 00:17:42 You say it radicalized you as a feminist. Yeah. Yeah. Because I remember reading Feminist Theory, I switched, I dropped out Arabic and switched to English Lit, so you do all the feminist theory. And I remember reading it and being like, I don't know how this applies to me. And then started working in the strip clubs and I was like oh yeah I'm big enough, feminism now. That sort of suspicion, I'd say a healthy suspicion

Starting point is 00:18:10 about what guys intentions are has stayed with me forever. Well at the same time as that kind of radicalization was happening you touched on it there that one of the court cases involved an ex and I know we have to be careful how we talk about it. Yeah, this was the worst bit of writing the book, easily. I can't even imagine how horrendous that was to live through and then how horrendous it was to live through it again when you were writing about it. It was a very violent assault. And I wonder whether you feel like there was any part of your autism that made you more exploitable by someone like that? Yeah, so I found out that lots of autistic women are much more likely to end up in abusive

Starting point is 00:19:01 relationships and there's actually just been a newspaper story about this, it's so sad, this girl she was groomed by Nazis in America and thought she was in a relationship with one of them online. I mean I could give you dozens of examples of stories like that where you just, you don't see the danger, you don't see a lot of red flags coming. So the chapter about that relationship was the first one I wrote for the book, or it was one of the sample chapters that I sent in. And it was weird because I hadn't been planning on writing a book, and then something triggered on memory about that time,

Starting point is 00:19:41 and I just sat down and started writing it. And I had this really mad physical feeling when I was writing it. And then when it came to publishing the book, we had to cut so much out. I had to prove certain things had happened, which obviously you have to not get sued. But it felt like it was happening all over again. Like I started having these physical feelings that I hadn't had for years. But it was important to put it in because I read this book called Asper Girls that someone from my audience told me to read. It's a good book but it's quite dry.

Starting point is 00:20:18 It's not a memoir. It just lists examples of stuff that can happen to autistic women. So we're more vulnerable to things like grooming, more vulnerable to violent relationships, school bullying, blah, blah, blah. And as I was reading the book, I was like, this is like a point by point list of things that have happened to me. So I thought it might be more effective to write it as a memoir. But yeah, that was by far the hardest bit of the book coming out, by far. I'm so sorry you went through that. And I'm so grateful that you had the courage to write about it and to withstand it,

Starting point is 00:20:55 because I know so many people will feel seen by your words and it will give them... Yeah. That's all right. Like, I still feel uneasy talking about it in Edinburgh because it all happened in Edinburgh. Yeah. I've never said this before, the first one of the first times I was ever on TV was, I got on it quite early, I was on 8 out of 10 Cats or something and I'm so awkward on panel shows, it does just seem like, how have they put this person on?

Starting point is 00:21:30 And on the Eight Out Of Ten Cats Facebook page, this guy that I went out with, one of his relatives commented, why is she on it? Has she won a competition? Is it April Fool's Day? And I just had this such a strong reaction of wanting to be like, please leave me alone.

Starting point is 00:21:49 And yeah, like Edinburgh's such a beautiful place, but whenever I come back, it's so bittersweet because there's so many parts of the place that are tainted with memories of it. I mean, I came to the Usher Hall with that guy that was in the book and have a bad memory from there. memories of it. I mean, I came to the Usher Hall with that guy that was in the book and have a bad memory from there. So it is like I would never live in Edinburgh again because

Starting point is 00:22:10 I have these really vivid memories of the stuff that happened there. Yeah, of course you do. And I really hope that tonight we can create a completely different memory. Cheers. Yeah. Honestly. thank you for talking about that. And I want you to know that you're safe here. Yeah. It's such a strange feeling. So university, it ended up with a shutdown. You describe it as a sort of autistic shutdown where you went to the doctor and you had weeping

Starting point is 00:22:43 sores over your body. Yeah that was a different time. Is this still a university though? This is starting to sound quite Dickensian. And then you went to the work house. But what did the doctor say to you when he saw your skin? That was a bad week in the strip club with my weeping sores. So before uni I'd done my hires in a CAMS unit which is like a teenage psych unit that you go to during the day instead of going for school. Again the number of autistic people that I've met that end up in CAMS not knowing they're autistic is unbelievable.

Starting point is 00:23:22 So I'd kind of formed this identity where I thought, oh I guess I'm mentally ill and I'll always be mentally ill and I'm always gonna be depressed because they told me in the unit you've you're depressed you've got OCD which was a misdiagnosis. So when I went to uni I kept having these I would work really hard and then I would have these times where I would just take to my bed and I couldn't leave the flat and I couldn't get up and I couldn't really seem to function and I had to get signed off of uni and I now think of these as autistic shutdowns but I just didn't know it at the time I just thought oh well I guess

Starting point is 00:23:59 this is just always gonna be my life and I don't have things like since I don't want to say getting the diagnosis fixed stuff overnight, because it didn't. It's taken years and years. Like all the stuff I talk about in the book, it's taken so, so many trial and error things to try and reduce it. But I think if I'd had that help earlier,

Starting point is 00:24:20 it would have been second nature and I would have been able to prevent a lot of that. These weeping sores that I'm fixated with, the doctor said this is normally a symptom of extreme grief. Oh that was my boyfriend when I was in my final year, cheated on me with a torii. Okay fine, we don't need any further explanation, you're done, draw a line under that. You're done. Draw a line under that. And I was so shocked. I was so, so shocked.

Starting point is 00:24:50 I'll tell you, because he was Scottish as well. He was like... He was like... But he was quite a posh, Glaswegian guy. And then, basically, we'd met in a class called working class fiction. And we were like, oh, there's loads of posh people ahead of the bra isn't there and then we split up but we were still getting on okay and then I found out he was sleeping with this really posh girl and the shock made me sick to my stomach and the next day I woke up with these sores

Starting point is 00:25:19 all over my body, impetigo and I. And I wasn't clarity or anything. It wasn't from, the doctor was like, we've seen people get this from extreme stress. And I was like, yes, this is it. Correct. Yeah. Listen, there's no seamless link from Empitygo to your second failure.

Starting point is 00:25:39 So. But your second failure is believing quite limiting stuff about what you can do in comedy if you're a woman, if you're working class, or if you have a regional accent. Yeah, back time. And you go on that you've got pointlessly annoyed or bitter about this in the past and that wastes time when you could be creating stuff. So after university, you get the scholarship to study journalism, but you discover stand-up comedy, you love it and you drop out of the journalism side of things.

Starting point is 00:26:10 And now you've built this incredible career in comedy. So talk to me about where that idea of self-limitation came from. Who was it who told you? It's not one person that told me. But when I started in comedy there were so few women doing it because I started up here just as I'd finished uni and then I was only here for a couple of months and I moved down to England but

Starting point is 00:26:34 I was in the north of England and there was so few women on lineups that we would often say that we never met each other unless we were doing all female gigs and I remember there being gigs that I thought, oh it's just the male comedians get to do them. Like there's gigs that you can do in Dubai and different gigs in the Middle East. And I thought, oh those are just for the men. And I mean I've since done those gigs. It's not that exciting. I've since done the gigs in Dubai.

Starting point is 00:27:04 Anyone can do them. But that's one of like dozens of examples where I thought, oh I've believed that I can't do this and you actually can. And then, I mean you read out in the introduction that I've been on panel shows, I've actually not been on very many. I've mostly just on stand-up on TV because I'm very comfortable saying a scripted thing I like saying the same thing at the same time every night same same same who would have thought I was autistic but there was a few years in a comedy I just I wasn't getting booked for most stuff I was only really getting

Starting point is 00:27:40 booked to do stand-up on things and I got told I had the wrong energy for QI. My agent said you've got the wrong energy for QI and I thought is that West Lovian energy? I think this is a coded way to say you're too common. And I just had this realization of I kind of looked at who was getting on TV and I thought do you know the comedian Lemmy? Like I love Lemmy, but one of the only times I saw him on British TV was he was on the IT crowd and he was this inarticulate window cleaner that no one could understand because no one can understand their accents and I just thought there's not to be that many Scottish comedians on TV. Like we've got Kevin and Frankie. That's it. That's it. It's done.

Starting point is 00:28:28 And I sort of thought I should maybe try and gig in other countries and see how that goes. And then I started gigging in more countries and it really boosted my confidence massively. And it just made me start thinking, stop wasting time getting annoyed about not getting on programs that you don't watch. I've got this real bee in my bonnet about not getting on QI but I've never seen an episode of QI. Yeah, me neither. Right, I basically realized one day I should try and be in the stuff that I enjoy consuming, because I know I like working in the arts, but I never watch panel shows

Starting point is 00:29:11 and I don't watch most mainstream entertainment. So I thought, well, what do I like? I love listening to podcasts. I listen to tons of podcasts and I love reading books and I love watching comedy dramas. So I'm just gonna put my energy into doing scripts. I'll have a go at doing a book and then I had a podcast with my best friend during lockdown that went better than expected.

Starting point is 00:29:33 And since once I started doing that, everything just fell into place. And I actually got Taskmaster at the point where I had stopped caring about getting on any TV. But Taskmaster is such a unique program. It unintentionally caters to ADHD and autistic people really well and there's never going to be a show like that. I'm never going to have a job like that again. So even after Taskmaster I turned down quite a few TV things

Starting point is 00:30:01 because I don't... I just realised that... It's weird, it's like once I got a taste of getting recognized from comedy and stuff, I realized that wasn't the thing I got the most gratification from. And once I started getting the response to the book that I did, I got so many messages within the first week of it coming out and people telling their own stories. I thought, oh, maybe I am good at writing. This is going to sound shit. The horrible boyfriend that I had said I was shit at writing. So I had kind of given up on serious writing.

Starting point is 00:30:32 It put a real dent in my confidence. And I think that was why it took me so long to get going again. Yeah. Does comedy still have a problem with sexism and elitism? I think elitism, yes, but it's tricky to criticise because I've got so many posh friends in comedy and I've so many friends who are ex-footlights people now and I genuinely don't think they realise they're doing it. But something that inspires me is that people now can get big outside of legacy media by making little videos online or having their own podcasts. So I find it really inspiring

Starting point is 00:31:15 seeing people get ahead in that way. Because fundamentally people want to listen to and watch comedians who sound like them and talk about the things they relate to. You asked about sexism. So the other night I went out with a bunch of female comedians in Glasgow. I did look around and think, God, things have changed so much. And they were all talking about helping each other out at the Fringe. They were like, oh, I'm going to share this email of PR advice for the Fringe.

Starting point is 00:31:48 Whereas when I started, there were so few women that we had this thing called, I think it's called Highlander Syndrome, where it's like, there can only be one. There can only be one female comedian and it's going to be me. So I'm going to hate every other woman that gets in my way. Yeah, so it was really lovely. and it's going to be me. So I'm going to hate every other woman that gets in my way. Yeah, so it was really lovely. Can you explain to me why there is such a stranglehold for panel shows in comedy?

Starting point is 00:32:22 Why are we so obsessed with panel shows? See, I don't think we are anymore because everyone's watching things on their phone. And it used to be the thing that when you did live at the Apollo, you'd be so excited to watch it go out on TV. Whereas everyone I know now who does it, they are waiting for it to come out so they can get the clip of it and then upload it to Instagram in the hope that it goes viral. Most comedians I know now don't care about getting on TV, they just film a clip of themselves at a comedy club and hope that that goes viral. And it does mean that you get a wider range of comedians coming through.

Starting point is 00:33:01 Yeah. There's this bit in the book where you talk about how being autistic, it helps you go against some of the fairly overwhelming messages that you shouldn't speak up as a woman and as a working class woman, but also that you struggled to pick up social cues when people kept wanting to have meetings and what meetings were. Can you tell us about that? Yeah. I mean, I literally used to go in and you have to have a lot of pointless meetings with TV producers and comedy.

Starting point is 00:33:31 And I used to go into meetings and say, so why are we having this meeting? And you're not meant to say that. Or I'd say, what's the point of this meeting? Because I just wanted to know if I was getting money. And you can't say that. You have to play a game of social niceties. And I did try it.

Starting point is 00:33:51 I sort of tried to refine it over the years, but I found playing the game frustrating. And I'm surprised I've got as far as I have without playing games, because I still, I don't like going to industry parties. I mean I didn't even have a party for my own book because I was like why would I have a book party for a book about autism? Why would autistic people want to come to that? We should have it online as a zoom conference girl.

Starting point is 00:34:21 But also when I was when I was pitching the, I could see it very clearly in my mind's eye that I couldn't really separate what bits of my life experience are impacted by being working class women and what is impacted by being autistic. And I think being autistic helped me push myself forward to do stand-up where I might not have. Because when I think of all the women in my family there's like a lot of very funny, very very like blunt women in my family who never went into stand-up and I feel bad for them because it was seen as bad to not speak up. Your final failure is trying to second guess

Starting point is 00:35:07 what you wanted to do on the basis of what other people thought you were supposed to do. For example, entertainment programs. Yeah. So you haven't done strictly Fern Brady. Yeah. Tell us why you haven't done strictly. Because I don't want to do a poignant dance

Starting point is 00:35:24 about being autistic. Oh my gosh, don't you? An interpretive, interpretive pasodobly about my autism. My agent was really saying, oh you know, you charmed them on Taskmaster, maybe you'll charm them on this. And the only reason I could think to do it was my kitchen was being done up at the time and I thought maybe they'll put me in a hotel if I do strictly and that'll overlap with the building work and then I told my agent that and he was like that's the only reason you can think to do it and I also

Starting point is 00:36:04 screenshotted this newspaper story that said, well, Young, I fantasized about breaking my own legs during the making of Strickland. And I sent it to my agent. Also, because all the building work was going on when I had a call with them, I kind of just wanted to get on the Zoom and get off. So I hadn't done very much research for it. This is me being bad at meetings again. And they were like, so Fern, you're able to do live comedy

Starting point is 00:36:32 and you're confident with that, but how do you think you would cope with live dancing? And I went, well, the first couple of weeks looks pretty easy. They were like, it's actually very hard, very intense dance training. I felt like, go on, I don't care, just shutting the laptop. Going back to making tea for the builders. But the fact that you were on that Zoom call, I find it very funny that there's a sort of pre-preparation Zoom call even to get the offer to be on Strictly. But the fact that you were on that Zoom call, was that part of you second guessing your natural instinct?

Starting point is 00:37:10 So after Taskmaster I got more offers of things to do but I also started to get recognised a bit more like Kieran there and my boyfriend had said for years like when I started Stand Up he said you better hope you never become famous because you go daft if people are just looking at you on the train and you don't like it and he said if you got recognizable it would be like that all the time and I was like shut up it's definitely gonna fill the emptiness inside and then when I did start getting recognized a little bit I was like oh, oh, yeah, he was right. So it basically felt like I was at a fork in the road where I could keep doing tour shows

Starting point is 00:37:53 and just have my own little audience who I love, or I could choose to attempt to go down this path of more mainstream entertainment, which I know I wouldn't be good at and I know it's not what I want to pursue. And as time goes on as well, it really sharpens your focus as you get older because you think, if there's certain things I want to do, I want to really start concentrating on it now. And I've got another two books that I want to write, one I'm contractually obliged to write. Will you tell us the story of Celebrity Bake Off, which is one of the light entertainment shows

Starting point is 00:38:27 that you did to, yeah. That ruined bacon for me. Did it? You can't watch it anymore. Oh, I never watched it before I did it. Okay. That was one of the bits where I went wrong was not watching Bake Off before I did it. But one of the funny things about that

Starting point is 00:38:43 is because obviously it was raising funds for Stand Up to Cancer. Yes. And you kept being asked if you knew anyone with cancer. Oh, God. Tell us a story. Yeah, do you know about this? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:38:54 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tell us that story, Fern. Yeah, this is another thing where it would be good to just have made something up. Yeah, my mate Phil did the latest series of it and I went, oh did they keep asking you if anyone had died in your family? And he was like, yeah, my grandma.

Starting point is 00:39:15 And I was like, so jealous, which is terrible. But they really put you on the spot. Oh, come on, for anyone at all, can you think of anyone? Anyone had cancer? And I was like, no, no! And then finally, because I wanted to be good and give them something, I said, oh, God forgive me, I said, oh, Rod Gilbert is a comedian who's had it and we've been so sad for, but I've only met Rod Gilbert once. So I thought all I have to do is make friends with him between finishing filming and the program coming out, and this is going to be okay.

Starting point is 00:39:54 But I went on Bake Off as if I was on the actual baking competition. I went in with an attitude of, I didn't come here to make friends. And, erm, Dermot O'Leary was on my episode and he's like the nicest man ever. And he kept coming over to my island being like, oh how's it going friend? What are you up to? And this is so embarrassing. So I think he was doing, I haven't seen the show but I would imagine part of the format is going over to fellow contestants and talking to them and I just was like what are you doing I've only got another hour to make this roulette. So I started shooing them away and then Mel B who was like my favorite Spice Girl of all time, I got my tongue pierced for her when I was 14 on

Starting point is 00:40:40 Coburn Street so Mel B she was one of the other contestants on it and I actually was, I was crying that I'd met her at the end of the day of filming. I was crying on the phone to my boyfriend. I was like, you don't know how much this means to me. But Mel B is a whirlwind of a lady. She's very distractible and she kept trying to ask me how to turn on the blender, help it out with stuff and I never thought I would see a day where I would be like would you ever get away from my kitchen island, get back to your own baking because she couldn't do anything she couldn't even she could obviously because

Starting point is 00:41:19 she's been like a multi-millionaire since the 20s. She couldn't cook anything. Oh my gosh, so you won't be doing that again. But I do have one question for you. Are you friends with Rod Gilbert now? Oh, yeah, I don't think he would mind. I mean, I've messaged his partner on Twitter, so it's probably okay. But have you met him? But you haven't met him again? No. Oh, Fern Brady, you've been a total delight. I just want to say another thank you Fern for your candour, your humour and the beauty

Starting point is 00:41:56 that comes from your vulnerability and your strength and the work that you do not only entertains, but it also really helps so many other people feel seen and understood. So I just want to add another thank you for you for coming on How To Fail. Thank you, Fern Brady. Please do follow How To Fail to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Please tell all your friends. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.

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How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - Fern Brady - ‘I make more money in comedy than I ever did from stripping‘

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