Fern Brady - ‘I make more money in comedy than I ever did from stripping‘

0:00Hello, 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 McGinnis, and how to recover from a broken heart with Danny Minogue. Join the family. Just follow the link in the show notes.

0:28Welcome to this super special episode of How to Fail with Fern Brady, live from Usher Hall in Edinburgh. Thank you so much for listening.

1:04It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Learn more at whatsapp.com. My guest tonight is Fern Brady, a stand-up comedian and award-winning author born in Bathgate, West Lothian in 1986. 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.

1:51Since then, her career has seen her tour internationally, reach the finals of So You Think You're Funny, appear on multiple panel shows 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 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 34.

2:37The 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. Often I get told my stand-up is uncompromising, Brady says, which is funny to me because I'm constantly compromising. Edinburgh, please welcome the one and only Fern Brady.

3:10Sounds 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. I wanted to end on that quote that idea of being told that your comedy is uncompromising but you having to compromise a lot yeah 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 like I'm pretty sociable and I'll chat to anyone but when I was 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, especially in high school, you look at what other people are doing and try and find ways to fit in.

4:21By 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. 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 it's really damaging for you it's much better to be able to be your true self than 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 going to 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 um 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 recognize 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 and he recognizes himself in you because you know the phrase real recognize real i feel like autistics recognize autistics yeah 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 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

6:53the 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 holistic to describe a neurotypical person and I really valued that you used that why did you choose to use it? In the book I talk about autistics and elastics 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 like dyslexia to ADHD to all sorts of things and autistic people I can only speak for myself but I prefer specificity so that's why I tried to use really specific terms to say that I was talking about non-autistic people in the book.

8:03And 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've we're terrible at communicating but there was some study that showed that when autistic people work together as a group we get on 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 that in return um 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 don't want to take credit for it I think that was a author called Steve Silberman that wrote a book called Neurotribes.

9:25It'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. Don't worry. It's about you working in boots. Oh, right. 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, Licorice Club and Bottoms Up. And yet, 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, I used to think, oh, it's because 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 misfit all the time.

10:17but 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 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 angel's wings.

10:55I 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 in these jobs, like I would get sacked from jobs all the time and not know why. So we had to wear this badge that said, ask me about the new number seven mascara. And people on the checkout would say, oh tell me about the new number seven mascara. I'd go, it's terrible. You have to get the L 'Oreal one instead, it's much better.

11:37And my boss took me aside and was like, what are you doing? There's a promo on the number seven 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 a benefit very loyal to that brand

12:07eczema isn't always obvious but it's real and so is the relief from EBCLIS. After an initial dosing phase, about four in 10 people taking EBCLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. EBCLIS, LibriKizumab, LBKZ, a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies.

12:43EPCLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to EPCLIS. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EPCLIS. Before starting EPCLIS, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Searching for real relief? Ask your doctor about EPCLIS and visit ePCLIS.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979. The new Popeyes and Hot Ones menu is the definition of fire flavor. We've got the sizzling sriracha dippers.

13:1410 out of 10. Time to take it up a notch with the smoking raho chicken sandwich. Mmm, that's so hot, but it's so good. Now onto the daring dab ghost wings. Yup, there it is. I love the spice level. Attempt the Popeyes and Hot Ones menu in stores. Our hottest collaboration yet. Love that chicken from Popeyes. limited time in participating US restaurants.

13:41Your first failure is your first year at university. And you say that you did it three times. Yeah, which time? 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 exams yeah I used to just think um and again this is common with autistic people with I've got what they used to call Asperger's but it's 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 um 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 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 be it not all of them but some of them being horrible to 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 my school to go but it's tricky if your parents haven't been and if you if you don't have a lot of peers or people in your family that have gone and i remember a lot a lot of clever people from my school dropped out after the first year so yeah my first year of uni i did arabic and persian with islamic history quickly realized that was a mistake because it's very hard although you can still say one phrase in persian can't you that means 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 and one of the very real challenges was there not being enough money 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'd done when I was 17 second year I had a bad boyfriend to put it lightly it's in the book um and then it just became I was working in a bookies and it just was becoming clear that there wasn't going to 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 they 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 uh student strippers make uh 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 stripping you have to have a certain personality for it and it involves a degree of openness and goodwill 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 yet 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 you say it radicalised you as a feminist and it, yeah because I remember reading feminist theory, I dropped out of 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.

18:59And then started working in the strip clubs and I was like, oh yeah, I'm big into feminism now. That sort of suspicion, I'd say a healthy suspicion about what guys' intentions are, has stayed with me forever. Well, at the same time as that kind of radicalisation 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. And 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.

19:34It 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 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 a memory about that time 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 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 Aspergerals that someone from my audience told me to read.

21:14It's a good book but it's quite dry, 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 it was that was by far like 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 because I know so many people will feel seen by your words and it will give them yeah

22:02like I still feel uneasy talking about it in Edinburgh because it all happened in Edinburgh I've never said this before 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 and on the 8 Out of 10 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 and yeah Edinburgh is 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 Asher Hall with that guy that was in the book and I have a bad memory from there so it is like I would never live in Edinburgh again because I have these really vivid memories of the stuff that happened there.

23:12Yeah, 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 sores over your body. Yeah, that was a different time. Is this still at university though? It's starting to sound quite Dickensian. And then you went to the workhouse. But what did the doctor say to you when he saw your skin?

23:58That was a bad week in the strip club with my weeping sores. so before uni I'd done my hires in a 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 it's unbelievable 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 going to be depressed because they told me in the unit you've you're depressed you've got OCD um 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 um i guess this is just always going to be my life and i don't have things like since i don't want to see 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 it would have been second nature and i would have been able to prevent a lot of that these weeping swords 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 Tory and okay fine we don't need any further explanation you're done draw a line under that and I was I was so shocked I was so so shocked 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 basically we'd met in a class called working class fiction and we were like oh there's loads of posh people at Edinburgh 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 all over my body impetigo and I wasn't 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 that's correct yeah um listen there's no seamless link from impetigo to your second failure 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 big time and you go on that you 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 this scholarship to study journalism but you discover stand-up comedy you love it and you drop out of the journalism side of things 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 there was so few women doing it um 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 I was in um 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 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 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 done 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?

28:31But there was a few years into comedy, I wasn't getting booked for most stuff. I was only really getting 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 Westlovian energy? I think this is a coded way to say you're too common. and I just had this realisation of I kind of looked at who was getting on TV and I thought, do you know the comedian Lemmy? 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 going to be that many Scottish comedians on TV like we've got Kevin and Frankie that's it That's it, it's done.

29:26And 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 programmes 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. Me neither. Right, I basically realised 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 and I don't watch most mainstream entertainment, so I thought, well, what do I like?

30:12I love listening to podcasts. I listen to tonnes of podcasts and I love reading books and I love watching comedy dramas, so I'm just going to 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 and since what 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.

30:55So even after Taskmaster, I turned down quite a few TV things because I don't, I just realised that it's weird. It's like once I got a taste of getting recognised from comedy and stuff, I realised 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, people telling their own stories. I thought, oh, maybe I I'm 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. It put a real dent in my confidence.

31:32And 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 realize 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 seeing people get ahead in that way. because people fundamentally people want to listen to and watch comedians who sound like them and talk about the things they they relate to you asked about sexism so the other night i went out with a bunch of female comedians um 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 oh, I'm going to share this email of PR advice for the fringe.

32:46Whereas when I started, there was 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.

33:10This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Checking off the boxes on your to-do list is a great feeling. And when it comes to checking off coverage, a State Farm agent can help you choose an option that's right for you. Whether you prefer talking in person, on the phone, or using the award-winning app, it's nice knowing you have help finding coverage that best fits your needs. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. At Sierra, discover top workout gear at incredible prices, which might lead to another discovery. Your headphones haven't been connected this whole time. Awkward. Discover top brands at unexpectedly low prices.

33:49Sierra, let's get moving.

33:55Can you explain to me why there is such a stranglehold for panel shows in comedy? 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 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 struggle to pick up social cues when people kept wanting to have meetings and what meetings were can you tell us about that yeah um i mean i literally used to go in and you have to have a lot of pointless meetings with tv producers and comedy and um i used to go into meetings and say so why are we having this meeting and um you're not meant to say that or i'd say what's the point to 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 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 like why would autistic people want to come to that we should have it online as a zoom conference go but also when i was when i was pitching the book 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 um who never went into stand-up and I feel bad for them because it was seen as bad to not speak Your final failure is trying to second guess what you wanted to do on the basis of what other people thought you were supposed to do.

36:51For example, entertainment programmes. 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 about being autistic. Oh my gosh, don't you?

37:10an interpretive interpretive pasodobli 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 if that's the only reason you can think to do it and I also screenshotted this newspaper story that said well young I fantasised about breaking my own legs during the making of Strictly 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 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 intense dance training I felt like going 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.

38:44But the fact that you were on that Zoom call, was that part of you second guessing your natural instinct? So after Taskmaster, I got more offers of things to do. But also I started to get recognised a bit more like here and 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 recognisable it would be like that all the time and I was like shut up it's definitely going to fill the emptiness inside and then when I did start getting recognised a little bit I was like 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 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, well one I'm contractually obliged to write.

40:01Will you tell us the story of Celebrity Bake Off which is one of the late light entertainment shows that you did yeah that ruined bacon for me. Did it you can't watch it anymore? Uh oh I never watched it before I did it that was 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 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. Yeah, do you know about this? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tell us that story, Fern. Yeah, this is another thing where it would be good to just have made something up.

40:45Yeah, my mate Phil did the latest series of it, and I went, oh, did they keep asking you if anyone died in your family? And he was like, yeah, my grandma. and I was like so jealous which is terrible but they really put you on the spot like oh come on anyone I talk 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 him 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 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 Dermot 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 Fern 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 real ad so I started shooing him away and then Mel B who's like my favourite Spice Girl of all time I got my tongue pierced for her when I was 14 on 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, I've met her 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 her 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 obviously because she's been like a multi-millionaire since her 20s she couldn't cook anything yeah oh my gosh they won't be doing that again but I do have one question for you are you friends with Rod Gilbert now?

43:12oh yeah I don't think he would mind I mean I messaged his partner on Twitter so it's probably okay but have you met anyway? But you haven't met him again?

43:25Oh, Fern Brady, you've been a total delight. I just want to say another thank you, Fern, for your candor, your humour, and the beauty 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. Thanks.

44:00Please 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.