Suzi Ruffell - ‘I didn’t know I was gay until I saw Titanic’

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0:55Welcome back to How to Fail, and if you're new here, welcome. This episode with the hilarious Susie Ruffell was recorded live at New Theatre in Cardiff. Enjoy. hello Cardiff oh my goodness it's so wonderful to be here thank you thank you for coming out to this very very special live recording of How to Fail presented by our friends at Hey You it is a delight to be in Wales it really really is thank you for the warm welcome and my guest tonight is the comedian and writer Susie Ruffell growing up in Portsmouth she struggled to fit in at school and by her own admission became the class clown to get people to like her.

1:40On screen her heroines were Victoria Wood, Catherine Tate and French and Saunders but it wasn't until she attended drama school in London that she first tried stand-up. Since then she's gone on to perform five sell-out runs at the Edinburgh Fringe as well as appearing on Live at the Apollo and filming a 2022 Amazon special of her show Dance Like Everyone Is Watching. She was nominated for Best Stand-Up Show in the National Comedy Awards and has won critical acclaim from reviewers and audiences alike. Her newest show, The Juggle, will start touring nationwide from June. Alongside her comedy, Ruffle is a radio and podcast host and regularly appears on Radio 4's The Now Show and The News Quiz.

2:26She's also just written her first book, Am I Having Fun Now? A funny, moving memoir which asks big questions about everything from anxiety to success and the seminal importance of Kate Winslet in Titanic for a generation of lesbians. I can be a bit cheeky on stage but not coarse, Ruffles says. My general rule is I have to be able to say it in front of my mum and dad. Cardiff, please welcome to the stage the one and only Susie Ruffles.

3:03It's so nice to get to interview you because we're friends. Am I okay saying that? Oh my god, yeah. I mean, what I need people to know is that if you really love Elizabeth's podcast, do what I did and just get in those DMs and sooner or later you will be her friend because she doesn't have enough backbone to say no so it's actually worked out really well for me yeah it's my low quality control that has enabled you to be here this night thanks god i won't be thinking about that when i go to bed tonight yes because you've written extensively about how anxious you are so i hope that helps it really does um so talk to me a bit about am i having fun now your brilliant book and it was prompted the title was prompted by a question your daughter asked is that right?

3:45Yes, so we were in a soft play centre when my daughter was three and she was running around and then she came over to me and said, Mama are we having fun now? And I thought, I fucking hope you are because we're in a soft play centre on the outskirts of Bromley on a Saturday afternoon. We're really not here for me. It then made me start to question myself how much fun was I having and what was holding me back from that. And the book, I mean you've read the book you gave me a very nice quote um it's very nerve-wracking talking about i'm still getting used to talking about writing a book because it's more serious than anything that i've done before but the the book is uh it's about anxiety and it's about each chapter is a different moment of my anxiety whether it was school anxiety i had real trouble making friends which we'll get to later then um coming out becoming a parent uh being having my heart broken and then having a job like I do where you sort of stand on stage for the validation of strangers every night, which is an unusual thing to do with your life.

4:51And at the end of each chapter, I sit down and talk to an expert in the field. So I talk to psychologists and psychotherapists. I also talk to Dolly Auditon about how you mend a broken heart. I speak to you about highs and lows and how you keep a sense of yourself when you feel like one part of your life isn't working. I didn't try and write the book with a message. But the thing that I realised in writing it was that what I had done through writing the book and having therapy alongside the book was that over the course of the year of writing the book, I stopped fighting with my anxiety, which is what I've done since I was very small.

5:27As a child, I was really anxious to sort of, last year when I finished writing it, I stopped fighting the anxiety and I allowed it to be my companion. And then it has made the anxiety much better. That's so beautifully put. And we're going to talk more about anxiety. I'm sure. part of your failures um but i'm one of the parts of the book that i really loved is your description of your family so your parents yeah and growing up and what that meant to you tell us about your family okay so i'm from a very working class family in portsmouth from a family of like geysers and birds um i often say on stage my dad's the kind of man that can only write in capital letters you know those so it means no matter what he he writes it looks aggressive you know happy birthday love dad no that sort of thing he's that kind of a guy he's lovely and warm and but you know just slightly rough around the edges um and and my mum is sort of a very working class woman that you know has the confidence to wear two kinds of animal print at the same time you know and that's not to be sniffed at yeah it's just me and my brother but I've got about I think 20 odd cousins so growing up there was like loads of us all around at my nan's house it was always very, very loud.

6:39They were always really encouraging. No one really cared that much about education. There was no real push for that, which was good because I didn't like school. Now I see that it's quite different to how other people grew up, but in Portsmouth at that time, and all the people that I spent time with, it seemed very normal. People find it weird that my dad has four roast dinners a week, but to me... I don't know, is that normal in Cardiff? what then what does the word class mean to you well you don't know do you think that there's a class system still in operation yes I think so I mean it's something that you see that I saw quite a lot through comedy when I first started stand up and you mentioned me going up to the Edinburgh Festival I went up a lot of times and I sort of noticed that there were lots of people that had been to Cambridge or Oxford that there knew people that worked at the BBC and could get on things and there was a I don't know is that a class thing or is that a connections thing or are those things the same I don't know I think that certainly we're living in a time now when actually in many ways class feels more prevalent than it did 10 years ago because of austerity and because of people really struggling at the moment and then not being the sort of enough support around the welfare state that sadly I think there was real steps being made forward and now it feels like it's really stagnated or if anything it's slipped back a bit yeah what class do you think you are now it's hard to say because my dad is like a geezer that did well so what my dad's job was he delivered coal to people's houses um i'm 104 and i should mention that um so my granddad used to deliver coal with a horse and cart and then got a little lorry and then my dad got a little lorry and that's what he did when he met my mum and then he bought and sold lorries that was sort of his trade and then he also had horses but in the way where posh people have horses that they ride for fun whereas my dad would like do people's weddings and funerals and things like that so it was like a job alongside having a horse it was his dream to be the sort of the man in the big house who he delivered coal to and when I was a kid he he worked really really hard and uh made some good decisions made some bad decisions there was a brief period where he was bankrupt and there were bailiffs at the door and it was all very stressful and he lost everything and then he had to start again my dad's thing would always be like one day we're going to have this nice house and he would point it out to me and my mom and go we're going to live in that house one day we're going to live in that house one day and 25 years later he bought that house with an enormous mortgage yeah um so it's hard so is he still working class because then does it change?

9:18Because he was certainly someone that grew up with not a lot of money, with quite a few kids. There was five of them and they all had to, you know, they all left school at 14 so that they could work because they all needed to. But then, you know, he did all right and now I've done all right. And if I've got a house that, again, I've got quite a big mortgage on, but, you know, I don't know. Am I still working class? Is it about a heritage thing or is it about a social economic group? I don't know. I want to move on from our joint obsession with class to your specific obsession with Kate Winslet.

9:51Oh my God. This is another bonding moment in our friendship is when you listen to the Kate Winslet episode on how to fail. And I know she was formative for your sexual awakening, but I also know... I'm gay. I don't know if I need to with the tie. Is it too much? I also know that when you went on Celebrity Mastermind, your specialist subject was the movies of Sandra Bullock. Yeah, because someone had already done Kate Winslet. Oh, someone had already done Kate Winslet. Yeah, you have to give them choices. And so I did Sandra Bullock. And how did you do? I did okay. I think I came second in the whole thing.

10:23Okay, so in your kind of league table of celebrity crushes, is it Kate Winslet first, then Sandra Bullock? Oh, it's Kate Winslet forever. I didn't know I was gay until I saw Titanic. So I went to the cinema when I was 12. I went to the cinema when I was 12 to see Titanic. And yes, there is nudity. but she is also like a kick-ass character who like owns her sexuality and knows who she is in the world and doesn't want to be sort of closed in by what the world expects of her and I went home and and was really confused by it and then I went to see the film seven times at the ABC Portsmouth and and and you know the first time I cried because I was sort of thinking oh my god it's so sad that all these people died and the second time I cried because I was like, oh no, what I've realised about myself in watching this film really changes my life.

11:18And I didn't want to be gay. I didn't want to be different. I didn't want any of that. I mean, I'm fine with it now, but it was a journey. As you know from the book, there was a massive journey of acceptance of who I really am and being confident enough to dress how I want to dress and look how I want to look. and you know it was you know nine years after I watched Titanic that I finally came out it wasn't like I was brave immediately but yes because of that Kate holds a really special place in my heart and then when I realized that she had been on how to fail I couldn't believe it and then was really angry that I couldn't didn't pretend to be your runner that day to be like sorry some tea Kate anything my life anything would you like i don't know to live with me um but i but as you said in the intro i it it's there's quite a lot of lesbians of my generation that'll be like oh yeah and so it was um it was very formative for me it actually brings us on to your first failure which which is not your failure to be kate winslet's runner but your first failure is your failure to fit in and so I touched on the fact that at school that was a bit of a struggle yeah when did you first feel that you weren't fitting in when can you remember that feeling well I think sort of primary school was sort of fine and then secondary school I think I probably became I became aware of my sexuality in about year seven or year eight and then became sort of terrified of it so I didn't want to be too friendly with any of the girls in case they realized so therefore I sort of took myself out of friendship groups and then needed something to be obsessed with that wasn't hot babes and so I became obsessed with musical theatre and so I was really into musical theatre and you know while everyone else was into Oasis and so people would be talking about sort of Blair versus Oasis while I'd be like so Bob Fosse was this guy that was a really great choreographer and so I just didn't feel normal and that was a queer thing it was a I found it quite hard to make friends and I'm severely dyslexic so I think that when you're at school I felt really sick because if you're dyslexic English is hard but also all of the other lessons because all of the other lessons you have to read and no one at my school sort of said to me don't worry there's loads of other things you can do I was just made to feel like a bit of a thicko.

13:57So then I wanted to constantly divert people from like, please don't work out I'm gay and please don't think that I'm massively thick. So I just was a bit of an idiot to not be noticed. When you say a bit of an idiot, was that where your love of comedy came from? I think so, yeah. I would try to say stupid things. I'd get in trouble, loads. I remember calling the teacher a wanker. And sure, he did tell me that I would amount to nothing. And so I called him a wanker. And I mean, I was like a hero at school. And then they called my dad in, and they explained the story to my dad. And I said to my dad, well, he said that I wouldn't amount to anything, so I called him a wanker.

14:33And my dad turned to the head and said, that does sound like the type of thing a wanker would do. That is a brilliant rejoinder. So I think that when you're constantly juggling those things, yeah, being funny or being outrageous was, you know, would divert attention from the things that I didn't want people to know about me. So even though you say that you struggled to make friends or you deliberately chose not to make friends, do you think you were popular? No, no, I don't think so. I mean, it's quite hard because I didn't stay in touch with anyone from school. My last day of year 11, I was like, bye, and I haven't really seen anyone since one or two people might have come to a tour show and there's one or two people that are in the year below that I've stayed loosely in touch with, but that's because they were my mum's friends.

15:21I mean, you don't care. My mum's friends' kids, who I sort of know still. But other than that, no, I didn't stay in touch with anyone because I didn't feel like I'd made a connection with anyone. And I had friends from my dancing clubs and my acting clubs but I didn't feel like I had a group of mates. I mean, it's why so much of what you've written has been really interesting to me when you talk about friendship because I feel like I really missed that bit of learning about friendship because I sort of opted out of it in many ways because I was so frightened of rejection because I thought, well, there's this really big thing about me that some people will reject one day.

15:53Maybe mum and dad will reject one day. Maybe society will reject this thing about me. So I was terrified of being rejected by my peers. So I didn't let anyone get close enough to me that they could reject me. And so I wouldn't get invited to birthdays and things like that. But then I didn't, I had to pretend that I didn't care because I wasn't close enough to them. Were you pretending to be straight? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I was kissing boys. dating boys yeah all that stuff and how long did that take you to reconcile you said it was a period of years yeah yeah it wasn't until i was 21 that i sort of dealt with it and i i had a boyfriend i lived with for a bit and it was and he was really lovely and i sort of thought oh i could probably end up with you and you're really nice and you're catholic so you never push me for sex this is ideal you've got loads of guilt going on i'll really lean into that guilt and then and I thought oh maybe this will be fine maybe this will maybe this is enough and then I met a girl and was like oh this is what this is what it's supposed this is what the rest of the girls feel like when they're with boys when you fancy someone you know she worked in the bar that I worked in and I would like look forward to my bar shift all week so that I could spend a couple of herself, knew who she was, and I couldn't believe that people could be happy and gay.

17:21I didn't know that was a thing that people could be. I didn't know, because when you, I think it's so different now, and when I've spoken to sort of younger queer people about this, I think it can be hard to recognise, and I also think people that came before me, generations before me, it would have been much, much worse, so I know in many ways I was lucky, but when I was growing up, if there was anything that was gay on television or queer, it would be about AIDS, it would be, you know, this happens to men and if it was lesbians it would be like the butt of a joke it would be like a butch woman who should be laughed at and so I didn't know there were happy queer people I didn't know that there were people that were parents that were gay I didn't I remember when I decided to tell my mum I realised that I was sort of in two ways I was upsetting her in that she had to work out that I wasn't who she thought I was which she found very upsetting and it made her think that she'd never be a grandparent so it was yeah there was quite a lot going on and what was it like when you told your dad he was sort of fine with it because I think that there is something in and I've done market research on this not that I have many dads but asking friends I think there's something when you tell a dad that you're a gay woman there was part of him that went, I'm quite relieved that a man's never going to fuck her.

18:37Right. Is that weird? I don't know. I feel like there's some truth in that. They'd be like, oh, well, I'm always going to be like the man in her life. I'm not going to be... That's so interesting. Like, I think... And I think there's a relationship with gay men and their mums. And I don't think that's because they're thinking, oh, a woman's never going to do that to my son. But I do think there's an element of like, oh, well, I'm the woman in his life.

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20:05And when you told your parents, also spoiler alert, you do have a daughter. I do. So wonderfully, your parents do have a grandchild. When you told your parents and when you were in this relationship with this older, more confident gay woman, did you start to feel that you were fitting in? in a way but not massively because for a long time I was still I still sort of hated myself for it I still wished if I was really if there was a switch I would have I would have changed I would yeah 100 100 and it wasn't until probably until I met my wife Alice and then we've got a group of queer female friends that I felt like oh this is fine but it was probably 10 years of me feeling of me being gay and even when I started stand-up I would be sort of borderline homophobic about myself on stage because I thought I needed to say what they were thinking about me so I would say something really mean about myself or my first punch line would be detrimental to me about my sexuality so I could be like I'm gay but I don't mind if you hate that bit about me and it took me sort of years to unpack that and go oh I don't think there's anything wrong with it I think it's okay for me to just talk about my life and not make excuses for it but it was a it was it was a journey to go on what is it like being a gay woman stand-up because on one level we have this perception of stand-up comedy as edgy and inclusive and creative and innovative yeah but there's still a strand I imagine that still maybe exists where that's the easy gag.

21:45When I started stand-up it was quite homophobic. I received a lot of homophobic heckles and even occasionally now you'll get someone shout something out but I mean this is quite crude but but it happened. The most consistent heckle I got for a period was, I can fix you. So that's happened to me, I think maybe like five or six times I've been on stage and someone shouted, I can fix you, a man. And the first time it happened, I asked my friend how I dealt with it and she said, you look visibly hurt. And it's because I was. I remember crying on the way home from the gig. And then it happened again.

22:25And the last time it happened, I was in a comedy club and I hadn't even got to the mic. So I'm literally just walking out. And like the kind of comedy that I do is like, I just want to like, I want to make you laugh. Sometimes I want to make you think a little bit, but more than anything, you know, the world is kind of an awful place sometimes. I want people to come to my shows and just laugh for an hour and a half and just forget about stuff. And for me to tell you about the different ways that I've fucked up. And hopefully that all makes us feel a bit better about our own fuck ups. And that's the sort of brand of standup I do.

22:56I'm a storyteller. And so I hadn't even got to the mic to start telling my stories. I was only doing a 20-minute set, and a guy shouted out, I can fix you. And I asked him to put the lights up in the comedy club, and then I asked him to stand up. And I addressed all the reasons why he wouldn't be the man to fix me. Wow, Susie. Wow. Yeah.

23:21And do you know, in the moment, it kind of felt great, because I was like, yeah, fuck you, I'm being this stand-up comedian. But then at the same time, it felt upsetting that I just wanted to tell my stories. I didn't want to have to give a dressing down to a guy that was just shouting out horrible things because he had a few too many pints. And so that doesn't really happen now because when I go on tour, people come to see me because it's my show. But certainly for a long time, there would be that. And there's sort of a real history of gay men being funny. And there is a history of gay women doing that, but not so much on TV.

23:57yeah there was sort of an allowance of I remember I was at the comedy store and I was homophobically heckled and I dealt with it quite well and there were these older comics in the dressing room and the comedy store is a place where when you're first starting out in stand-up and this is the comedy store in London when you first start out in stand-up it's like the place that you want to play you want to do the store and your name gets put outside and it feels enormously exciting and so you do the five minute spot and then if that goes well you get to go back and do the ten minute spot and then if that goes well you get to go back and do the Thursday night spot and so you sort of build up and it was my first weekend of doing it and we'd get paid for the whole weekend and it was the Friday night and I got homophobically heckled and I dealt with it really well and the guy that I was on with, rather than when I came off being like, are you all right?

24:38He was like, you're going to have to get loads of those put downs because that's going to happen endlessly to you. And I was like, oh, I've just got through this door and now the other side of the door, it's full of pricks. Yeah, thank you so much for sharing that because I think there's so much. In justice, if you are a marginalised person in any way, that you are forced to be an activist, when actually you could be using that energy to create. Yeah. And it sort of keeps you preoccupied. Well, yeah, if you have to write material about, or be something to people, to be the spokesperson of a thing.

25:18Whereas I just want to tell my stories, and there were times when I first died out in stand-up, and I was, you know, playing working men's clubs and all over the place, people would say, I don't really know any lesbians, but I like you. And I thought, okay, I'm sort of fine with that. If that's been your, because now you probably do know lesbians, but they're people that just maybe in your work that haven't come out to you. And so I'm sort of fine with that. That's okay. Because, you know, by listening to someone do stand up, that's not, there's a little bit of politics in my show, but not loads, not in the show that I'm writing right now.

25:51There's not really much politics at all. And I just want people to sort of see the world from my perspective for a bit and realise that it's probably quite similar to their perspective, even if, you know, we're different. Well, stand-ups gain is very much musical theatre's loss. Yes. Because your second failure is your failure to be a musical theatre star. But I think it's too early to say, Susie. I don't know, Elizabeth. I don't know. I think if I've not made the chorus line by now, it's not going to happen. But you did think you were going to go into musical theatre, didn't you? drama school yeah well I was desperate to go into musical theatre so as we mentioned before I because I didn't have loads of mates at school and I found this sort of drama club where everyone was sort of allowed to be loud and allowed to be big and allowed to show off and I was doing tap dancing and singing and lots of different things like that and I really went I really got into it in a really obsessive way because um it was what I did outside of school and I had friends there and so I became really obsessed with musical theatre and then my mum, bless her, because I didn't have many friends and I wasn't invited to stuff at the weekends when I wasn't doing my drama clubs my mum would take me to see the shows that were on locally so I grew up in Portsmouth and Southampton has a really big theatre that touring productions would go to so mum would take me to the matinee of a show and I'd see all these people that did it for a job and then for a birthday present mum took me to London to see Grease and I was 14 and we went and watched the show.

27:19It was a matinee and then we went round to the stage door afterwards and we saw all the people leaving in their juicy couture tracksuits to just give it a moment for all of you with juicy and blazoned across the arse in diamantes. And they all had their hair up in scarves to keep it sort of nice for the evening show. And they were all laughing and joking and I remember thinking, this is your job. This is your job. And so on the way home, I sort of read the programme, fascinated by Kate. And I worked out all these people had been to something called drama school, which I hadn't really known about before.

27:51And so I became, I started getting prospectuses for drama schools that I couldn't audition for for another four years. And I started talking about acting at school as my craft, which of course would make me... And who knows why no one wanted to hang out with me. and I was doing like I was doing shows but you know shows not in like beautiful venues like this I was doing shows in like the theatre of the local boys school which was where they had their lunch the rest of the time you know just like a school hall but I was sort of like oh I'm on vocal rest this week because I'm doing a show and the teachers would be like you're not on vocal rest you can still answer the questions in the class but I I'm so sorry I'm not speaking this week because I'm in an amateur production of Annie Geeky Gunn.

28:40Sorry. I really wanted to do musical theatre but I'm just not quite good enough. So when did you come to that realisation? When I started auditioning for drama school and I realised I was auditioning for the acting courses rather than I've got a good voice for a stand-up and I'm a good tap dancer for a stand-up comedian. You can tap dance? Yeah, I did all the grades. Okay, so you were auditioning and you realised. I just knew that I didn't have the voice. I didn't have the voice for it. And so acting was, I thought, I'll go into acting. But yeah, I love musical theatre. I mean, I was just in my little dressing room upstairs and before a show I always listened to musical theatre and I just love it.

29:16What were you listening to before you came on stage tonight? I was listening to I Am What I Am from La Cage Afold. That's so weird. I was listening to that. That is so strange. I did say I think this theatre is haunted. Clearly by a musical spirit. I don't know that that makes it haunted. Anyway, I wanted to ask you a question because given that you studied acting and you are now a stand-up, which version of you is more you? Are you acting the part of a character when you do stand-up? Or do you think you're showing up as yourself? I think for a long time I pretended to be a stand-up because you fake it till you make it.

29:55And I'm not saying that I've made it, but you fake it until... You pretend to be confident until you feel confident. And I do that before most shows, you know when it starts like tonight I was quite nervous about tonight because it's I knew that we'd be talking about stuff that you know you've read the book and it's an exposing thing to talk about these things I've never spoken about before and I worry if there's not been a laugh for long enough so I have to sort of say something to Elizabeth to try and make you laugh so that I can relax because laughter means everyone likes you and and I was and I was nervous tonight and I had to think just just feel confident until you are confident and so for a long time I think as a stand-up I was doing that but with stand-up comedy it's actually almost the opposite of acting when you start off you're more you're pretending to be a comic and you learn how to take the mic out of the stand and then you have to put the stand there and then you we're in you know but actually the longer that you're doing stand-up the more you become who you really are on stage because the more comfortable the hours under the belt it's the 10 000 hours thing isn't it where you the longer that you do it the more you can just be you rather than trying to be what in my mind a comedian is yes do you think that your anxiety plays into your creativity yes probably I think it makes me work quite hard because I'm really worried about it going wrong and I'm really worried about fucking things up so I work really hard on my tour shows like you know I'm going out on tour in June but now I'm doing a work in progress tour so that I can make sure that the so I'm doing a tour now to make sure the tour is good enough for when people come yeah and so the tour at the moment is you know it's a cheaper price and I go on with notes and I'll say oh I don't know if that's really going to work and it's you know in little rooms so like you know 100 people and I'll try it out every night and I'm traveling around at the moment working out the show so that it's good enough when people come on tour so I and I think this is a working class thing I don't like the idea of people spending their money and something not being good enough yeah so I'm very aware that if I talk about sort of having working class heritage I can't then like outprice those people so it's really important to me that I keep my tickets as cheap as possible and then I also want it to be really good I could not agree more

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33:14Before we get onto your final failure, is it true that you once pretended to a London black cab driver that you were the stage manager for the Lion King? Yes. Okay, so why was that? Okay, I often don't tell people what I do for a living. so some occasionally people recognize me I'm not a super famous person you know if you're very into comedy you might know who I am or you might have seen me on I pop up on things but I'm not someone that's on telly every week and so sometimes people will be like oh you're that comic comedian you might not have your name or they might go oh you're you know so I was in the back of a black cab two things you never tell a taxi driver what you do for a living if you're a comic because two things will happen either they'll tell you a joke and they'll say you can have this and it'll be the say, I'll tell you who I don't like, and then they'll slag off a comedian that's definitely one of my friends.

34:06So I got into the back of the cab. It was after a show in London. Go into a cab. The guy said to me, have you been at work? I said, yes. He said, what do you do? And in that moment, I found myself saying, I'm the assistant stage manager at the Lion King. Now, I didn't know I had hidden dreams of being the assistant stage manager at the Lion King, but it was a 20-minute journey, so then I had to improvise. I have to get there before the actors, and they're so good. They work so hard. I've got kids in the show, so that's like an extra thing that I have to deal with. And the costumes, yeah. And obviously there's lots of props, so that's why I'm so late.