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

In this searingly funny and deeply affecting live conversation, Elizabeth speaks to stand-up comedian, author and Taskmaster favourite Fern Brady about her autism diagnosis, her working-class roots, and the failures that shaped her award-winning memoir Strong Female Character. Fern opens up about late diagnosis, social masking, and stripping to fund her education - all delivered with the brutal honesty and whip-smart humour that’s made her one of the most exciting voices in comedy today. A powerful exploration of identity, feminism, and finding your voice. What stood out for you in this episode? Leave us a comment. ✨ IN THIS EPISODE: 00:00 Intro 01:58 Autism Diagnosis and Masking 04:40 Experiences on Taskmaster 11:40 University Struggles and Stripping 17:33 Challenges of Writing a Memoir 20:03 Reflections on Edinburgh 21:49 Struggles with Mental Health and Misdiagnosis 22:35 University Challenges and Autistic Shutdowns 23:25 Extreme Stress and Physical Symptoms 24:34 Breaking into Comedy and Facing Limitations 26:05 Overcoming Self-Limiting Beliefs 27:55 Navigating the Comedy Industry 34:02 Rejecting Mainstream Entertainment 37:21 Celebrity Bakeoff Experience 💬 QUOTES TO REMEMBER: “Even when people don’t know you’re autistic, they know you’re autistic. They pick up on something different about you.”“Comedy radicalised me as a feminist. And so did working in a strip club.”“I was told I had the wrong energy for QI. I think that was a coded way to say I was too common.”“Autistic people are always learning to speak neurotypical. All we’re asking is for a bit of that in return.” 🔗 LINKS + MENTIONS: Fern’s memoir Strong Female Character is out now! @fernfrombathgate Fern is a the Edinburgh Fringe: fernbrady.co.uk/gigs Elizabeth’s upcoming one-off show at Cadogan Hall on 21 Sep for her new novel One of Us: ⁠https://www.fane.co.uk/elizabeth-day Elizabeth’s Substack: https://theelizabethday.substack.com/ Join the How To Fail community: https://howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content 📚 WANT MORE? Christine McGuinness on autism, calm and self-acceptance Caitlin Moran on feminism, girls and mental health Miriam Margolyes on difference, defiance and not caring what people think 💌 LOVE THIS EPISODE? Subscribe on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts Leave a 5⭐ review – it helps more people discover these stories Share with someone exploring neurodiversity or recovering their voice 👋 Follow How To Fail & Elizabeth: Instagram: @elizabday TikTok: Podcast Instagram: @howtofailpod Website: www.elizabethday.org Substack: https://theelizabethday.substack.com/ Elizabeth and Fern answer YOUR questions live in Edinburgh in our subscriber series, Failing with Friends. Join our community of subscribers here: Have a failure you’re trying to work through for Elizabeth to discuss? Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com Production & Post Production Coordinator: Eric Ryan Live Show Engineer: Will Kontargyris Sound Engineer: Matias Torres Assistant Producer: Suhaar Ali Senior Producer: Hannah Talbot Executive Producer: Carly Maile How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Elizabeth Day?

  Hello wonderful listeners and viewers. Don't forget about my subscriber show Failing With Friends, where my brilliant guests get to be agony aunts, uncles, or non-binary advice givers. You can learn how to cope with a friendship breakup with Cynthia Nixon, feeling calm with Christine McGuinness, and how to recover from a broken heart with Danny Minogue. Join the family. Just follow the link in the show notes.

• 0:28Elizabeth Day?

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

• 0:40Elizabeth Day?

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• 1:23Elizabeth Day?

  Shopify.co.uk/fail to start your free trial. That's Shopify.co.uk/fail. Go to Shopify.co.uk/fail today to hear your first...

• 1:37Elizabeth Day?

  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 mum worked at Tesco. And Brady was raised in a household with two brothers. She went to Edinburgh University...

• 2:00Elizabeth Day?

  Where she was editor of the student newspaper and won a scholarship to train as a reporter in England. For one assignment, Brady was sent to try out stand-up comedy. After performing her first show, she experienced a feeling, as she puts it, akin to the early bit of falling in love. Since then, her career has seen her tour internationally, reached the finals of So You Think You're Funny, appear on multiple panel shows, including Eight Out of Ten 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.

• 2:42Elizabeth Day?

  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. The diagnosis made sense of much of her life, experiences she wrote about with candor and humour 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."

• 3:27Elizabeth Day?

  Edinburgh, please welcome the one and only Fern Brady!

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Sounds mad when you read it out like that.

• 3:41Elizabeth Day?

  How are you feeling? How's the squirm level?

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was more embarrassing than I thought it would be.

• 3:48Elizabeth Day?

  I wanted to end on that quote, that idea of being told that your comedy is uncompromising, but you having to compromise a lot. Because I think it really speaks to something that you write about so brilliantly in Strong Female Character, about the way that girls and young women often mask autism and therefore don't get diagnosed in time. Could you just speak a bit about masking and how that manifested for you?

• 4:14Speaker 01

  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, you, I mean, especially in high school, you look at what other people are doing and try and find ways to fit in. And by the time I got diagnosed, I'd had a few years of people telling me they thought I was autistic. I thought I was autistic,

• 4:55Speaker 01

  but I got into my head that I could try and fix it and just learn the right things to say to people and almost learn social skills as if I was learning a foreign language. And that's called social perfectionism and a lot of autistics have that. And it's really damaging for you. It's much better to be able to be your true self than try and mask. If I was to give an example of masking, it would be things like, like I find hugging strangers difficult, or people touching me lightly on the arm feels like bugs on my skin. Or I would have difficulty with studio lights at TV jobs. And I kind of quickly learned that you have to not mention that or you're going to be seen as difficult.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  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 at a lot of things, right? 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.

• 6:13Elizabeth Day?

  There were also a lot of messages from people who recognised themselves seeing you on screen, weren't there?

• 6:20Speaker 01

  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 recognises himself in you. Because you know the phrase real recognise real, I feel like autistics recognise autistics.

• 6:39Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  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 stripper."

• 7:20Elizabeth Day?

  The level of specificity I really appreciated in your memoir, which is just a brilliant book. If you haven't read it, you must, because we were talking about this backstage. I had never come across the word holistic to describe a neurotypical person. And I really valued that you used that. Why did you choose to use it?

• 7:43Speaker 01

  In the book, I talk about autistics and holistic because I, more and more these days, I see people using really vague terms in an effort to be polite when talking about autism. I think people are still quite squeamish when it comes to talking about autism. So people will often call me neurodivergent. And I understand the reasoning behind that, but it's such an umbrella term that covers everything from dyslexia to ADHD 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

• 8:28Speaker 01

  non-autistic people in the book.

• 8:31Elizabeth Day?

  And you also talk about how

• 8:35Elizabeth Day?

  Living with autism is a bit like having an Android phone and trying to communicate with an iPhone.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  So people talk about autistic people as if we're terrible at communicating, but there was some study that showed that when autistic people work together as a group, we get on fine. It's when we try and work with non-autistic people, there's a bit of a communication difference. So we're always making the effort to speak in neurotypical. And all the autism advocacy movement is asking for is for a bit of that in return. But when I read 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

• 9:24Speaker 01

  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 an author called Steve Silberman that wrote a book called Neurotribes. It's very good, if you haven't read it.

• 9:54Elizabeth Day?

  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.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 10:06Elizabeth Day?

  It's, don't worry, it's about you working in Boots.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Oh, right.

• 10:10Elizabeth Day?

  And the badge. Will you tell us that story?

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Oh, listen, I've done about 50 jobs, and I worked in every strip club in this area, R.I.P. Liquor Club in Bottoms Up.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  And yeah, to this day, working in Boots Bathgate was one of the most harrowing jobs I've ever done. It was awful. Because when you don't know you're autistic, you just, I used to think, oh, it'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. But even when people don't know you're autistic, they know you're autistic, if that makes sense, they pick up on something different about you, just something, just slightly off about you, whether it's the way you move or talk or you blurt out these unacceptable things at weird times. And the women in Boots picked up on that. It's like an animal instinct and I just had such a miserable time there.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  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 angels' wings. I genuinely turned up with these wings that spanned my back, these enormous wings, just trying to restock the pile of 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."

• 11:55Speaker 01

  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'Oréal one instead, it's much better." And my boss took me aside and was like, "What are you doing? There's a promo on the number 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.

• 12:22Elizabeth Day?

  What mascara are you wearing tonight, Fern?

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Oh, Benefit, they are real. Very loyal to that brand.

• 12:35Elizabeth Day?

  One of the things I hear a lot from listeners is how tiring it can be when your mind just doesn't settle. And I can only imagine this feels even heavier with intrusive thoughts. It's that quiet sense of being worn down by something you never asked for and never wanted, but just can't seem to switch off. If you struggle with this, I want to tell you about NoCD, because it's a resource that genuinely helps people. NoCD provides specialised treatment for OCD. And what I appreciate about their approach is how human it feels. You're matched with a licensed therapist trained in ERP therapy. That's Exposure and Response Prevention. And over time, you learn skills that help your OCD symptoms become manageable, so you can live more of the life you want to

• 13:20Elizabeth Day?

  live. If you're struggling with OCD or unrelenting intrusive thoughts, NoCD can help. Book a free 15-minute call to get started at learn.nocd.com/fail.

• 13:36Elizabeth Day?

  Your first failure is your first year at university, and you say that you did it three times.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, wet type.

• 13:44Elizabeth Day?

  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.

• 14:03Speaker 01

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

• 14:43Speaker 01

  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, not all of them, but some of them being horrible as 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

• 15:27Speaker 01

  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 realised that was a mistake because it's very hard.

• 16:08Elizabeth Day?

  Although you can still say one phrase in Persian, can't you?

• 16:11Speaker 01

  "Ho haram, anor tarat." That means my sister-

• 16:16Elizabeth Day?

  I'm so attracted to you right now. That was so beautiful. That was like ASMR.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:29Elizabeth Day?

  So you taught there about some of the challenges being at university and one of the very real challenges was there not being enough money.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:40Elizabeth Day?

  So the stripping. Tell us about that.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  So, after I failed first year and second year, first year I got in trouble with the police for stuff I'd done when I was 17. Second year, I had a bad boyfriend, to put it lightly, it's in the book. 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 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

• 17:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  And that's why you need to be like nineteen or twenty 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, 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.

• 18:35Elizabeth Day?

  You say it radicalised you as a feminist and it...

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because I remember reading feminist theory, you've, I switched, I dropped out of Arabic and switched to English Lit. Um, so you do all the feminist theory and I remember reading it and being like, well, I don't know how this applies to me. And then, um, started working in, um, 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.

• 19:08Elizabeth Day?

  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.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, this was the worst bit of writing the book, easily.

• 19:22Elizabeth Day?

  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. It was a very violent assault.

• 19:33Elizabeth Day?

  And I wonder whether you feel like there was any part of your autism that made you more exploitable by someone like that?

• 19:47Speaker 01

  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, a story about this, 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,

• 20:31Speaker 01

  and then something triggered on 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 not get sued. But it felt like it was happening all over again, like I started having these physical feelings that I hadn't had for years. But it was important to put it in, because I read this book called Asper Girls, that someone from my audience told me to read.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  It'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, that was by far like the hardest bit of the book coming out, by far.

• 21:40Elizabeth Day?

  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...

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Like, I still feel uneasy talking about it in Edinburgh, because it all happened in Edinburgh.

• 22:02Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  I've never said this before, but the first, one of the first times I was ever on TV was, I got on it quite early. I was on Eight Out of Ten Cats or something. And I was so, I'm so awkward on panel shows. It does just seem like, how have they put this person on? And on the Eight Out of Ten Cats Facebook page, this guy that I went out with, one of his relatives commented, "Why is she on it? Has she won a competition? Is it April Fools' Day?" And I just had this, such a strong reaction of wanting to be like, "Please leave me alone." And yeah, like Edinburgh's such a beautiful place.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 23:07Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah, of course you do. And I really hope that tonight, we can create a completely different memory.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Cheers.

• 23:14Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah. Honestly. Thank you for talking about that. And I want you to know that you're safe here.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's such a strange feeling.

• 23:22Elizabeth Day?

  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.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a different time.

• 23:41Elizabeth Day?

  Is it still a university, though?

• 23:42Speaker 01

  It's starting to sound like Dickensian.

• 23:46Elizabeth Day?

  And then you went to the workhouse. But what did the doctor say to you when he saw your skin?

• 23:52Speaker 01

  That was a bad week in the strip club with my weeping sores.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  So before uni, I'd done my hires in a CAMHS 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 CAMHS not knowing they're autistic is 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'd told me in the unit, you're depressed, you've got OCD, which was a misdiagnosis. So when I went to uni, I kept having these, I would work really hard and then I would have these times where I would just take to my bed and I couldn't leave the flat and I couldn't get up and I couldn't really seem to function and I had to get signed off of

• 24:43Speaker 01

  uni. And I now think of these as autistic shutdowns, but I just didn't know it at the time. I just thought, oh, well, I guess this is just always going to be my life. And I don't have things like since, I don't want to say getting the diagnosis fixed stuff overnight because it didn't, it's taken years and years. Like all the stuff I talk about in the book, it's taken so, so many trial and error things to try and reduce it. But I think if I'd had that help earlier, it would have been second nature and I would have been able to prevent a lot of that.

• 25:16Elizabeth Day?

  These weeping sores that I'm fixated with. The doctor said this is normally a symptom of extreme grief.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Oh, that was my boyfriend, when I was in my final year, cheated on me with a Tory.

• 25:30Elizabeth Day?

  Okay, fine, we don't need any further explanation. You're done. Draw a line under that.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  And I was so shocked. I was so, so shocked. Because he was Scottish as well. 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. Empitigo. And I wasn't, I wasn't clardy or anything.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  It wasn't from, the doctor was like, we've seen people get this from extreme stress. And I was like, yes, that's the thing.

• 26:26Elizabeth Day?

  Correct.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:28Elizabeth Day?

  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.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, back time.

• 26:46Elizabeth Day?

  And you go on that you've got pointlessly annoyed or bitter about this in the past. And that wastes time when you could be creating stuff. So after university, you get 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?

• 27:14Speaker 01

  It's not one person that told me. But when I started in comedy, there were so few women doing it. Because I started up here just as I'd finished uni. And then I was only here for a couple of months and I moved down to England. But I was in the north of England. And there were so few women on lineups that we would often say that we'd never met each other unless we were doing all female gigs. And I remember there being gigs that I thought, oh, it's just the male comedians get to do them. Like, there's gigs that you can do in Dubai and different gigs in the Middle East. And I thought, oh, those are just for the men. And I mean, I've since done those gigs. It's not that exciting. I've since done the gigs in Dubai. Anyone can do them.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  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? But there was a few years into comedy, I just, I wasn't getting booked for most stuff. I was only really getting booked to do stand-up on things. And I, I got told I had the, the wrong energy for QI, right? My agent said, you've got the wrong energy for QI.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  And I thought, is that West Lovian energy? And this, I think this is a coded way to say you're too common. Yeah. And, 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? Like, I love Lemmy, but one of the only times I saw him on British TV was he was on the IT crowd. And he was this inarticulate window cleaner that no, 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. And I sort of thought, I should maybe try and gig in other countries and see how that goes.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  And then I started gigging in more countries and it really boosted my confidence massively. And it, 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. Yeah.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Me neither. Right. I, I basically realised one day, I should, I should try and be... I should try and be in the stuff that I enjoy consuming because I know I like working in the arts, but I've I never watched panel shows and I don't watch most mainstream entertainment. So I thought, well, what do I like? I love listening to podcasts. I listen to tons of podcasts and I love reading books and I love watching comedy dramas. So I'm just gonna put my energy into doing scripts. I'll have a go at doing a book. And then I had a podcast with my best friend during lockdown that went better than expected. And since, well, once I started

• 30:28Speaker 01

  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 programme. It unintentionally caters to ADHD and autistic people really well. And there's never gonna be a show like that. I'm never gonna have a job like that again. So 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

• 31:11Speaker 01

  the first week of it coming out, people telling their own stories. I thought, oh, maybe I am good at writing. This is gonna 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. And I think that was why it took me so long to get going again.

• 31:30Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah. Does comedy still have a problem with sexism and elitism?

• 31:36Speaker 01

  I think elitism, yes. But it's tricky to criticise because I've got so many posh friends in comedy.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  And I have so many friends who are ex-Footlights people now. And I genuinely don't think they realise they're doing it. But something that inspires me is that people now can get big outside of legacy media by making little videos online or having their own podcasts. So I find it really inspiring, seeing people get ahead in that way. Because fundamentally, people want to listen to and watch comedians who sound like them and talk about the things they relate to. You asked about sexism. So the other night, I went out with a bunch of female comedians in Glasgow.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  I did look around and think, God, things have changed so much. And they were all talking about helping each other out at the fringe. They were like, oh, I'm going to share this email of PR advice for the fringe. Whereas when I started, there were so few women that we had this thing called, I think it's called Highlander Syndrome, where it's like, there can only be one. There can only be one female comedian, and it's going to be me. So I'm going to hate every other woman that gets in my way. Yeah, so it was really lovely.

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• 34:08Elizabeth Day?

  Can you explain to me why there is such a stranglehold for panel shows in comedy? Why are we so obsessed with panel shows?

• 34:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 34:53Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah, there's this bit in the book where you talk about how being autistic, it helps you go against some of the fairly overwhelming messages that you shouldn't speak up as a woman and as a working class woman. But also that you struggled to pick up social cues when people kept wanting to have meetings and what meetings were. Can you tell us about that?

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I literally used to go in. You have to have a lot of pointless meetings with TV producers in comedy. And I used to go into meetings and say, so why are we having this meeting? And you're not meant to say that. Or I'd say, what's the point of this meeting? Because I just wanted to know if I was getting money and you can't say that. You have to play a game of social niceties. And I did try it. 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

• 36:00Speaker 01

  because I was like, why would I have a book party for a book about autism? Why would autistic people want to come to that? We should have it online as a Zoom conference call.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  But also, 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 a working-class woman 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 a lot of very funny, very, very blunt women in my family who never went into stand-up. And I feel bad for them because it was seen as bad to not speak up.

• 36:55Elizabeth Day?

  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. For example, entertainment programmes.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:08Elizabeth Day?

  So you haven't done Strictly Fern Brady.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:12Elizabeth Day?

  Tell us why you haven't done Strictly.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Because I don't want to do a poignant dance about being autistic.

• 37:18Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, my gosh, don't you?

• 37:23Speaker 01

  An interpretive, interpretive pas de deux 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 fantasized about breaking my own legs during the making of Strictly." And I sent it to my agent.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Also because all the building work was going on when I had a call with them. I kinda 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.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  It's actually very hard, very intense dance training.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  I felt like, oh, I don't care, just shutting the laptop. Going back to making tea for the builders.

• 38:48Elizabeth Day?

  But the fact that you were on that Zoom call. I'm finding it very funny that there's a sort of pre-preparation Zoom call even to get the offer to be on Strictly. But the fact that you were on that Zoom call, was that part of you second guessing your natural instinct?

• 39:03Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:14Elizabeth Day?

  Will you tell us the story of Celebrity Bake Off, which is one of the light entertainment shows that you did do?

• 40:20Speaker 01

  That ruined bacon for me.

• 40:22Elizabeth Day?

  Did it? You can't watch it anymore?

• 40:25Speaker 01

  Oh, I never watched it before I did it.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  That was one of the bits where I went wrong was not watching Bake Off before I did it.

• 40:33Elizabeth Day?

  But one of the funny things about that is because obviously it was raising funds for Stand Up to Cancer.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:39Elizabeth Day?

  And you kept being asked if you knew anyone with cancer.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Oh God, yeah, do you know about this? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

• 40:47Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah. Tell us that story, Fern.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is another thing where it'd be good to just have made something up. Yeah, my mate Phil did the latest series of it and I went, oh, did they keep asking you if anyone's 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. Oh, come on, for 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.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  So I thought, all I have to do is make friends with him between finishing filming and the programme coming out. This is gonna 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 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 out.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  So I started shooing them 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 to have 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?

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Get back to your own baking? Because she couldn't do anything. She couldn't even, she could, well, obviously, because she's been like a multi-millionaire since her twenties, she couldn't cook anything. Yeah.

• 43:18Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, my gosh, you won't be doing that again. But I do have one question for you. Are you friends with Rod Gilbert now?

• 43:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I don't think he would mind. I mean, I messaged his partner on Twitter, so it's probably okay.

• 43:31Elizabeth Day?

  But have you met him? But you haven't met him again?

• 43:34Speaker 01

  No.

• 43:38Elizabeth Day?

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

• 44:13Elizabeth Day?

  Please do follow How To Fail to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please tell all your friends. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.