S6, Ep 9: Kiri Pritchard-McLean, comedian

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07I'm Grace Dent and this is Comfort Eating from The Guardian. A podcast where we pay homage to the lesser celebrated foods in life. Because even as a restaurant critic, I believe the food that matters most is often that snack you cobble together when you're curled upon the sofa. Each week, I ask my guest to lift the lid on what comfort foods have seen them through their lives. Because you can tell a lot about a person from what they eat behind closed doors. Hello friends, not long till my next celebrity arrives to comfort eat with me. I'm nervous, I'm excited and you find me wedged on the staircase, nose to screen, doing what I always do when I just need to focus for the next few hours.

1:02I'm ruthlessly reintroducing the feeling of 1992 into my life. No, I'm not drinking melon, Bacardi, Brazos and Yates Wine Lodge. I'm talking about a little digital cleansing. Okay, I'm going to delete some apps. That is goodbye to Instagram, au revoir TikTok, are of a dirt sheet of vintage the weather app can go to and yep that's the news gone too poof i think people may have lost sight of how easy and simple a digital detox actually is it doesn't even have to be for that long necessarily i don't have to go to shropshire and give a man called caspian 600 quid to stay in a drafty yurt for two nights it doesn't have to deliver me a raw milk chai latte every morning in between guarding my phone in a black box.

2:02Thing is, these apps, they're never really that far away. You can't really delete them. You can get them back in literally three seconds. They're never gone. But if they're just out of reach, one step further than normal, my productivity, and to be quite honest, my mental health soars by about 200%. If I wake up feeling depressed, honestly, this is the first thing that I do because I don't need a little menty bee first thing in the day over the fact that Sophie Ellis Baxter has a nicer kitchen than me. I really don't. I don't need to get upset because Sarah Cox has her own staples. I don't have staples.

2:45Where's my staples? No. Okay, I've deleted them. And boy, does that feel good. I need to be on form because the woman about to arrive clearly does not fanny about on her phone for 60 % of the day. She is a prolific doer. She is comedian and writer Kiri Pritchard-McLean. After growing up on a Welsh sheep farm, Kiri is now a very regular face on big British comedy shows. You'll have seen her on Have I Got News For You, 8 Out Of 10 Cats and QI. She hosts Best Medicine on Radio 4 and All Killer No Filler. It's a podcast about serial killers. She is about to head off on tour with her new show Peacock about her experience of being a new foster mother.

3:42Actually, when does her tour start? It's on Insta... Oh, I've deleted it. I'll ask her when she gets here. and then I'll redownload all the apps in about four hours.

4:01Kiri Pritchard, my client. Welcome to Comfort Eton. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very glad to be here. I have been watching your shows lately and something has struck me. You have a tendency to scribble notes on the back of your hand. oh yes i saw one show and there wasn't actually a spare knuckle left untouched so what i am actually wondering was in earlier life did you use this to cheat in exams no but you know what i wanted to do in exams is because i've always had quite big knockers i thought i could write like the you know like the formulas on them and then you know because i was like a polo show at school i could just look down and no teacher's gonna be like let me see what you've got on your tits so that was my thing and i just never got around to it i'd probably the fear of maybe sweat them off and i'd have you know like something about speed that way and drive isn't bad kingdom brew now that's weirdly what i call that one as well if you were to make anything that you write on your hands with ink permanent what would it be oh that's so interesting i mean that that's because the things i write on my hand do you know what what's so hurtful about you bringing this up is that i mean i was hoping that would hurt you on the first question so i write here because i think oh you can't see that on the mic but then i write inside because i'm like oh people can't see that but the thing is i gesticulate so much everyone can see it kiri you do know that hd tv picks up all these things you know i mean if you're standing at live at the apollo right and you've got i say i say i say written on this hand and a joke going up your wrist people can see it i okay well i do now but that also like if i'm not bleaching my task for hd i'm not gonna check what's on my hand either what would it have made permanent that's a really great question do you know what it would be more of a like a like a motto than a joke so this is gonna sound so lame but like something my director says to me is like keep it loose like keep it playful because that's when you're keeping it loose that's that's where the magic happens i think is that really embarrassing feels quite embarrassing keep it loose keep it loose every week my guest brings me their trusty snack that is sure to bring their belly joy when the cupboard is bare when time is short or the overdraft says enough kirry i'm staring at a tray yes with a tea towel over it and i'm asking you to reveal your snack okay it's slightly stuck to the tea towel good there we go it is my the smell that's are you getting the hit of the specific smell that's beige snack it is this is a very specific brand of packet noodle yes it's called coca k-o-k-a this will be the chicken flavor um it's suitable for vegans grace is it absolutely full of palm oil yeah enjoy yeah it's really good right it's really good it's just when i was in uni they sell this in in the you'll be familiar with home bargain right i don't know it's literally one of my favorite places that my mother god rest her soul ever wanted to go to there's home bargains it's so good because sometimes you do need like some cheap but good toothpaste and a diamante wine bottle stopper and sometimes you need advice but you can get all of those things but you can also get cocoa noodles and when i was in uni there was 17p a pack me and my mate faith we lived together and and we it would be feast or famine with us we would basically live into the other ones overdraft the other one would get paid and we just rattle that down and cocoa noodles is what we would be sort of eating towards the end of the month but then they're also so good shit you've really really gone into overdraft if you're actually banding money together to get cocoa noodles at home bargains you're the first person who's ever come in that knows what home bargains is oh really i feel really um understood by the front door of home bargains the one that i go to in penrith they have a fake policeman policeman by the door.

8:20I'm so glad you said that because I was like, don't forget to talk about the wood that you get by the door, the birdseed, or the fake policeman. And I think I know which one it is. A fake picture of a policeman. With a tall hat. It's like the real police can't be asked to go down there because even if you backed your car up and took two aisles, it would only be worth 35 quid. Would you eat that coming in from a night when you're on stage? Oh, interesting. maybe because it's quick do you know when I eat this the most my partner is a brilliant cook so when he's gone away yeah when he's gone away this is at least something approaching a meal and sometimes I'll put some pepper on it I'm like she's a chef

9:07I heard that you started eating this snack at uni we'll come back to your early years in a minute but you have said that it was during your uni years that you kind of really found who you were you found your groove you found confidence and that you found your people and I'm always wondering when people say this who were these people who did you find at uni first time around I was going to Liverpool to do psychology and I was like this is a sensible thing to do and you know because I wanted to just perform and everyone was like you have to have something to fall back on that's you know what you're told so i was going to liverpool and doing this degree and i just felt so sort of lost i was kind of homesick i knew i wasn't doing the right thing i didn't really connect with many people but you got out but yeah i left i went to solfid uni and i did a performance degree and as soon as i rocked up there it was tiny degree there was like nine of us and and half of them had fur coats and mad hair and all this stuff and i was like okay yeah these this is right and just straight away you find people you're like I would love you forever after graduating you decided to launch yourself as a stand-up on Manchester's comedy circuit how easy is it to break into this scene as a woman woof um it was still the absolute thing of women can't be funny and I had never encountered that until I did comedy and I found it baffling and anyone was saying it out loud as well was like what sorry what's this hate crime you especially when you are a funny woman who's spent all of her life making your friends laugh and your brother laugh and your mom and dad laugh and the school laugh yeah how am i been paying my mortgage for the past 10 years i remember doing a new act competition i'm one of the judges who is a comic um you have to do your set and then afterwards on stage in front of the audience they would give you feedback these judges and then this guy he He said, they'd be like, oh, you know, we didn't like the first joke or you lost your way a bit or you're pacing or we couldn't really hear you, whatever.

11:11He said the only feedback he had me was great tits. He was quite a big guy. And I said, I'll say the same to you. It's so mad, isn't it, how things happen, even in like the last, say, 10, 12 years, they happen. And you almost want to ring them up now. He's dead, so it'll be hard. I won. Rest in peace. Or just rest. God. Just shh. For a decade, you worked the comedy circuit. So as being a director and a writer for a sketch group, there is something so evocative about late night post-gig munchies that you know the lay of the land in Manchester. It is home to comedy pioneers, rock stars, two Premier League giants, the world's longest run in TV soap.

12:01It is the birthplace of The Guardian. in but apart from that it's got some great restaurants so where do you go to wind down and fill up after being on stage one of the beautiful things is when we all started again this is kind of gang of boys and me we would uh we'd all car share together because you're no one's getting paid so you get as many of you in a car to share the petrol and you drive to gigs together and those are my happiest memories of doing comedy where we're all just having a laugh and someone would die and we'd all be ripping into them on the way back or you know something you'd have the gig and you'd be deconstructing it and you know can you just specify for the audience like someone had died she does mean on stage yes nobody in the group actually just had a heart attack and they actually had him in the back of the car like a weekend of bernie's bringing him home but i'm amazed considering what we ate yeah i remember that we did for a while we would constantly gig in leicester because we really liked the chain of chicken shops there maryland which at the time was the fastest independent growing chicken restaurant in the you okay and so because the chicken was cheap we would drive from manchester to leicester which is less is difficult to get to because we're like we could get maryland on the way home and they never counted how many chicken strips they put in the box so you got more than you ordered i'm trying to imagine greta sunberg hearing that

13:22so you're gigging working hard but things really take off for you when you write and launch your incredibly successful debut show, Hysterical Woman, in 2016. Before we hear about that, I want to return to your childhood home. It's a remote farm on Anglesey in Wales. Your parents moved there with your two much older brothers and you are just eight months old. Why? Well, they moved for work, like lots of people do. So I was born in Gloucester and that's where they were living and dad had a job working for a charity and he'd worked there for a long time and they said listen we want someone to you know head up the whales division are you happy to do that and he was like yeah and they said well if you moved up north because you also do the northwest and he was like yeah great so it moved the family up and it was a big thing for my dad because he he was a sort of mechanic and he'd sort of fallen into this it was to do with animals and welfare and it was the first job we had we had a car and a salary and a uniform and stuff big stuff and so they moved to north wales bought this completely dilapidated farm no indoor toilet or anything the land was in quite bad condition we're like it's fine we've got the job everything's gonna be all right and then uh three weeks later they sacked him and so he's got this baby and two small sons who don't speak the language of the area my father is a welsh speaker and my mum who had sort of like a little hobby kind of on the side where she had these six sheep which she'd take them to shows and stuff like that my mum was sort of frustrated but she wanted to be a vet I think but she loves animals so uh they basically went right that's gonna have to pay the bills and my mum taught herself how to be a farmer in 1987 when there weren't really female farmers and there certainly weren't many only English speaking ones in my area and that was it like they became farmers and they worked so hard on that farm and in a couple of years they went from being like having no no money to been the top like price at market like that just my mum was incredible and the work she put in but like everyone worked on the farm that was kind of the reality of it and that's how we sort of ended up there we had sheep and we had cattle it wasn't an industrial farm it was 52 acres something like that your brothers are seven and nine years older than you uh which is a bit of a gap uh from this what can we read into your parents attitude to family planning well do you know what it took me ages of cotton on i was like this isn't normal because my brothers moved out when i was nine and i said to my dad i said this is not right okay i was like i'm calling you on it there's a big age gap here and i said was i a mistake and he said Kiri none of you are planned that is genuinely what he said my mum said basically my dad just asked my mum to marry her on her birthday every year and she said I'll marry you when you give me a daughter that's what she used to say and then I came along and then her birthday came along and he said will you marry me and she went no the birthday comes around the next year and he didn't ask and then my mum started asking him every year on his birthday will you marry me and he was like uh no and so they were locked in this like mad war of attrition so my parents were married in they got married in 2008 i think and so they at the time they've been together over 40 years so yeah it's a strange thing but it means now that i don't really have that relationship with marriage i don't see a successful relationship and marriage having anything to do with each other necessarily.

16:56Your mum spent decades knee deep in sheepship, but this was not how she expected life to have turned out. You've said that she was aspirational and wanted to be a vet. Did this aspiration ever express itself in the kitchen? Yes, absolutely. So yeah, my mum is, I remember, because I was this kid in a private school. So by the time I went to school, they had a bit of money. So they were like, right, let's throw everything at it and they sent me to this uh kind of like a village school and it's about a grander term but there would still be this thing i remember coming home and saying what class are we because i was very aware i was different to people and some people had said some stuff in school and my dad said working class my mom said middle class christmas dinner that was when her sort of heirs and graces would come out there would be special china for it as well that was in like a china cabinet of my nines which is the welsh word for a grandma so we get nines china out and and then i remember breakfast being kind of the pinnacle of the day because we would eat late anyway because we'd have to go out and like work so this breakfast would be like a multi-course affair where there would be like fresh breads would be baked okay very unusual this doesn't happen the rest of the time we have fresh breads then we have in those sort of little um prawn cocktail almost dishes we have grapefruit segments in there of course i yeah i feel like my mom had knock on the head in about the 70s and so the whole sort of like menu is is very heavily rooted in that but we don't so we'd have grapefruits and then we'd all be like oh this is lovely so civilized we should do this more often kind of thing then we'd also have freshly orange juice bits in huge deal proper butter it's the only time of the year we were allowed proper butter and not just like whatever spread was on offer and then after that it would be uh yeah scrambled egg with smoked salmon uh which is so lovely love that the working classes on christmas day we're not just better people we are totally different people it's like we're play acting coming at three yeah just for this eight hours it's like your family are like visiting dignitaries yeah I also blame in the 80s working class people seeing the last Christmas video with George Michael and wham because that was the first time we saw like people around this table just like having this glamorous time so now not only do we have to have like different food we have to have this huge pullout table that for the rest of the time just like sits in the spare room i just i love how we behave on christmas we've got in the on the farmhouse there was like there's a dining room but it was like my dad had built out of an old dairy it was tiny and the table was enormous that my mum would got some like furniture auction i don't even know if it would like get out the room and it was so ridiculous and no one could move around it so everyone's sort of like shuffling to get and once you're in you're in it's like a plane like that's it until you reach the destination i eat lunch like you can't get out so we're all sat around this thing and my mum would be so sort of like this is so civilized it's so nice when we all sit around the table together isn't it and it's like yeah i just heard you calling dad the c word in the kitchen like we can all pretend so your parents by working their socks off they take second jobs they're able to send you to private primary school and then events change there's uh bse mad cow disease foot and mouth and then what happens uh things were very hard yeah things are very very hard and there'd always been arguments about money as long as I could remember because I caught it took me too late to cotton on but I was the reason they were arguing about money because it was how we're going to pay the school fees and it's not just the school fees it's the uniforms cost more and you know just everything around it and I remember being the only child who didn't do any extracurricular stuff I was the only child who didn't have music lessons and again it's just like I absolutely am from privilege but you don't feel at the time you just feel like the poor one one of my brothers got in trouble for stealing at school and he stole money i think from a teacher and hid it in my mom's purse and this is at the time when i was like so like we did we we didn't have i remember my school uniform because it was so dear my my nana had made my school dress and everyone was like why is your dress different and when you're a kid you're like and you can't say well because can't afford that and i don't know how i don't even know how much it was and you know but i remember being like oh it's because mine's a special one and you know trying to like sort of style it out that's the best comeback did you get away with it you got the old one how embarrassing but I think it was sort of like no further questions so yeah I got away with it but yeah I uh it's difficult yeah it was it was difficult but also like I'm lucky right I went to a brilliant a brilliant school and that has imbued me all sorts of confidence and love creativity and things like that but then that that jump to state school was tricky was a tricky one um I went to state school I completely understand you don't honestly even have to say anything let's just let's just leave silence I remember being so excited by the like romance of school dinners because it's packed lunches in it was a tiny primary school there was I think it was 50 kids in the whole school but then I went to a year of 200 and a school of a thousand and I was like ah and it's so full on So you romanticized the proper school dinner you walk in.

22:30How does it bear up to the fantasy? You walk in, smell of the gravy in those big jugs. I specifically remember the never falling for this one. I'm thinking it was, I was being utterly gaslit by the system in that they would sell iced buns, but it would be a hot dog bun with some icing sugar on it. And I was like, that's a savory bun, guys. And I just couldn't understand that anyone was forking out 70p for this. But I also was, I was blessed to grow up in a time pre-Jamie Oliver. So it was a riot. It was Twizzlers. It was chips every day. curly fries were feeling a bit spicy but yeah it was I loved school dinners I thought they were great as a school girl you did judo yeah um looking at me now I can see you're weighing me up yeah if I walked onto the mat for a tournament do you think you could take me absolutely because you're so petite and I've just got like I've got I've got some heft behind me I've got farmer's daughter strength and an unbridled rage if allowed and i just think you're too dignified i don't drink anymore but first of all i'd have just half of snake bite i'd listen to some acdc and i'd still hammer you mate i'd still be lying there okay we've cleared that in your career you've explored welshness and what it means to belong i'm fascinated by this did you feel that you belonged in that school that we're talking about in that country at that age no no yeah they would that straight away it was like you're a hell of a posher you're a posher the audio posh knob like straight away it was posh posh posh and so i was like what it's because i'm wheeling around from i've had the opposite and then it is a very welsh area it's very welsh speaking area it's in my high school is in gwynedd which is the first highest proportion of speakers in the whole of wales um and the island i lived on uh which is just like over the on the mainland that's the second highest proportion so it's very widely spoken um so i didn't feel Welsh even though I'm in an English school I didn't feel like Welsh I did I used if people asked me I would say I was English even though I had no recollection of being in England at all it was all Wales I'd known so yeah I just felt very yeah I felt I felt too posh I felt too I just remember having so many like whatever group I thought I could hang on to I was always like ousted to the outside in in some way just everything made me feel not like everyone else I think it wasn't until I started finding music I liked and performing more that I found my creative gang in school, and that was in the last couple of years.

25:38Your career really took off when you put pen to paper. You wrote one woman's shows. And in fact, you wrote and toured three shows in three years, which is frankly insanity. It's actually just public insanity, right? Because they're very autobiographical. Hysterical Woman. It's about getting into the male-dominated comedy world. Appropriate adult. It's about your volunteer work with vulnerable children. And then there was Victim Complex. in which you accused your boyfriend of gaslighting you now this last one should in theory have been cathartic i mean we all long to shout from the rooftops about our exes why did you want to go public about it that's such a good question i've never thought about what the answer is to that in fact it came about by accident because i caught myself out so it was a it was guys with a long time ago and we sort of separated and i very i had a sneaky suspicion that he had been unfaithful and what i did which was very not okay and unfair and i do say all this in the show it's like so i started doing stand-up about being cheated on not knowing but just like feeling it and then someone came up and said oh i didn't know you knew about that and i was like and just like everything you know when you're like the it feels like the walls are sliding away from you and they said oh i didn't know that you knew and i was like oh yeah yeah and then i was like oh let's meet up tomorrow and have a chat and like and sort of like talk and i remember being because it had been about four years of being told that i was mad or my friends thought i was mad and you need to stop this now everyone's really worried about you because and i was becoming mad because you stopped listening to your instinct because you stopped trusting her and then you can't believe anything in your own head and you just rely on them to tell you what's really happening and it wasn't it wasn't just the cheating stuff it was i guess in a lot of different areas in different ways it's this is it it's not it's not paranoid if it's fucking true yeah yeah yeah it's like you get told you've been paranoid and then years later you're like well no it's pronounced accurate it was true so i just had a bit of stand-up about this daft bit of cheating and then suddenly that happens and then all i can think to do the only way i can process it is is to start writing about it and then when i started writing about it and the person heard this behavior in a different way escalated and was about discrediting me and mad cannot be believed all this kind of stuff and so every time they would do something my only way of dealing with it was to like i've got to kind of write a routine about that and and it ended up becoming a whole show i did not i did not intend to talk about it or set out and do a whole show about it.

28:29And what happened? And then I did a show and then it goes, it goes, it went really well at the fringe. One of the hardest things, actually, the most difficult creative thing in it was to try and be fair to him. Because I do think that we have all told a lie and then had to tell another one and you just paint yourself into a corner and your mental health is ragged with it and it's stressful and like, and then you do things that are out of character. And that's something I tried to do in the show to sort of be fair because it's not otherwise it's a two-dimensional monster as opposed to someone who's like it's a bad set of decisions that are impacting both of us but in particular you're kind of throwing my brain and my feelings and everything under the bus i'm going to talk about something slightly different in performing so these days you're on telly you've hosted live at the apollo you've been on all of the big panel shows and i'm gonna ask you this as someone who I'm not quite sure that I've ever managed to master this is there an art to being a great panel show guest what's the number one tip it's definitely a skill you have to acquire and you can't practice anywhere than in front of the nation and you know what I remember when I did have I got news for you everyone came like I did it and people were like that was a really great first episode I had like a nice time and I was like great and then you know what happened is my laugh was trending on twitter my laugh was trending on twitter and people were saying i was awful i was so embarrassed i felt like just embarrassed myself and i remember coming down and my dad said oh you must be happy with that because they watched the episode i said oh we can't talk about it dad and he was like what do you mean and i was like oh it's just been all over the internet how bad i was and how awful and and i remembered you know what we went out to the local indian that was like you know the indian you go to as a family right i want to call the Sopner in Manet Bridge my dad chicken biryani every single time right so we went there and we sat down and there was this group of women cacophonously laughing and and everyone's they went they went like that and this is the the night after it happened and that and someone turned and my brother said oh god it's a bit much and I said you do not do that I said I have just been dragged through the mud for daring to be a woman who laughed I was like we don't police women's laughter like we're not going to do that grace they were so annoying but like everyone's like trying to be like no you're right you're right but like they they were like curdling the korma

31:03you live with your partner on a farm back in anglesey now you're both vegan and he is a talented cook he does the bulk of the cooking on a wet welsh day what's the vegan dish he goes to town on to put a smile on your face there's a couple of like specialities i would say because we often have a house full of people so one is he will make um with blue corn tortillas because they're gluten-free and they're vegan and so yeah we i will be in the kitchen drinking just bringing vibes yeah i'm a bad captain so yeah we just blew up onto tears but there's a really recent one which is a so my partner and i um for coming up to a couple of years now we've been um foster carers and uh providing like respite care for young people and one of the young people who came to us um had come here from syria and when we were chatting to his gorgeous foster parents and they were saying you know obviously like so we always say what what do they want to eat what do they like what works well and so they're like oh obviously halal and they were saying you know really relaxed chicken and they said oh there's there is this thing he talks about that's like a boiled chicken from back home but we can't really figure out what it is and i was like all right okay and then i i messaged the fantastic uh deborah francis white because i was like if anyone's plugged into anything to do with like syrian refugees i feel like deborah will know the person to ask and i so i mentioned this is a bit of a weird one do you know of like a boiled chicken dish and so she went she lives with the uh steve alley who's from syria and lives here now and uh and tom who does a partner who does the cooking and said um does anyone know what kirry's on about basically and tom was like what about that thing i make for you cabsa and so i went to this kid and i said cabsa and like his face lit up and so my partner was like right and so went out and got all that and there's lots of different ingredients stuff we hadn't used like black limes and things like that and it is the most delicious amazing hug of a dish and it's a so it's a rice dish i think it originates from uh from yemen originally but it's eaten all over the middle east and it's gorgeous and you literally do a massive pan of it flip it upside down and then put um like almonds and sultanas on the top and it's amazing and you know when something sticks to your bones and it like hugs you from the inside it's so delicious and also so every time we have it we're like what a beautiful thing that is in our life because of this amazing young man who was you know with us for a couple of weeks you just kind of casually drop in there that you've been um taking children on short-term respite cares days why did you want to foster family is really important to me but i just don't biological children doesn't feel like the right thing for me and I also now as I've got older some really some women who are very close to me have become single mums I'm like oh I am there's a there's a role for me here and I don't think being you know I just see how much being you know having young children takes out of you and I just don't feel like I could be as vital a part of my community if I was also like a mum in that respect but that doesn't mean i don't really love children and really love the idea of help helping people supporting people and i love kids and i love having a house full of children how many give me some figures how many i don't even know if i can um but i tell you what i'll give you broad details of how many children are in your house now right now no don't worry they're all in the car cracked a window um but we tend to have teenagers i think the youngest we've had has been about 13 up to about 16 um it feels like you've had a lot like 10 15 yeah about that yeah and uh and we have some who come to us sort of every month um yeah that we just adore and look forward to it so much and you know what food is such a huge part of that is like fill them up especially when you've got a teenage boy you're like our job here is to try and reach the bottom of the endless pit that is that child's stomach it's like a furnace it is exactly what it's like What do you think the thing is that a child gets from spending time on that farm?

35:23And what do they take away with them, do you think? Because it's only short term, our rule is we don't have phones out. We're both there. So the idea is that they have kind of like the ultimate parenting experience. Because we only have to do this for a short burst, we can be everything. We can be all the attention. We can do all the fun stuff. Because we're not absolutely exhausted like all the parents I know are who are just trying to keep their head above water at the moment as well, like financially, mentally, health-wise, everything. And so I would hope that they come away feeling like they have had the attention and praise and experience that they deserve as well.

36:06Because there's a lot of, can be, you know, with children who've experienced trauma, there's like just lots of shame in these kids. that is absolutely not warranted. And hopefully they go away just thundering a little bit taller or even just have tried something new. Like, yeah, I remember one of the kids, my partner made risotto and he was like, he hadn't had risotto before. And they were being sort of like suspicious about the ingredients that were going into it. Dodging. And then, yeah, and he was like, that's hell of a nice. I was like, I told you, I told you you'd like this one. You have convinced Social Care Wales to allow you to make a show revealing the nuts and bolts of becoming a foster parent.

36:45You are about to set off on a huge national tour with this show. It's called Peacock. Yes. You've got so many dates of Peacock. It makes me dizzy looking at them. You're going to be going crisscrossing across the country. I've got to ask the question, what are you going to be eating on the road? Oh, okay. Sometimes I'm not getting out there till half 11 and there aren't many options and usually I'm driving back to Wales because I want to be back in my home. So my partner is so good at it. He's now got into a little routine of, he makes us a little bento box. I love him. That we have in the car.

37:20I know. You've got to marry this one. Oh, yeah. He makes a bento box. Just talk me through the bento box. So it'll be standard rice, but we always buy our rice from the Chinese supermarket because the rice is so much better. It's so delicious. So it'll be a jasmine rice. and then what we'll do he'll do some kind of like marinated tofu there'll be something he does a really good thing with courgettes where there's like a really like salty kick to them um but they still retain their a bit of uh bit of fight to them so they're not boiled with an inch of their life there'll be some um is it bok choy yes yeah some of that in there keep going yeah some soy and then what else there'll be something crunchy in there what does he usually do some kind of like peanutty something and so yeah just this it or yeah so i'll be slamming that back Have you ever considered fostering a 50-year-old woman?

38:10Every day, Grace. Me with my little suitcase. My final question and my biggest question is, when you and I replace Ian and Paul from Have I Got News For You, don't laugh, it's going to happen, which side of the set do you want? Oh, interesting. interesting well i think you're you're quite high status aren't you so i think you should be an e-nc i think i wanted e-nc actually yeah i'll be on paul's side i'll be i'll be keeping it playful on paul's side and you can be high status on e-n's i think we can get 20 years out of this oh yeah and the rest kirry pritchard acclaim thank you so much for competing with me thank you so much for having me this has been so nice This episode of Comfort Eating was produced by Ruth Abrams.

39:05The executive producer is Lucy Greenwell. The music was written by Axel Cacoutier. Visuals by Sophie Harrow. Mixing and sound design by Solomon King. If you love this podcast, then you'll love my book Comfort Eating. It's a slice of joy sprinkled with nostalgia about my family, stories of the making of this podcast and recipes which will leave you well frankly bewildered finally go on leave us a review and you can follow or subscribe so that you never miss an episode

39:48this is the guardian