HOW TO BE A FUNNY WOMAN: IN THE BEGINNING

As a ‘thank you’ for being a loyal member of Patreon, I am sharing the ‘taster’ first chapter of my book, HOW TO BE A FUNNY WOMAN. It’s a ‘work in progress’ and my aim is to release a new chapter here every four to six weeks, or even more frequently if I can find the time! Enjoy and look out for the next instalment.

PROLOGUE: WHERE’S THE TOILET?

I can see her making a beeline for me out of the corner of my eye. The awards ceremony has just finished – flowers, photos and speeches, winners basking in the glory of newly established recognition, me looking on like a proud mother. Maybe she’s a television producer. Or a big-shot agent ready to whip out a contract for one of the winning acts.

She looks purposeful now, gently pushing aside the well-wishers and relatives surrounding the excited performers. She’s smartly dressed, mid-30s, not too drunk given the celebratory nature of the evening. All the signs signal a good outcome here – a gentle smile, nice eyes, eye contact. She opens her mouth to speak…

‘Where’s the toilet?’ she asks me.

Not even ‘please’ or a little dance-on-the-spot jig that might have been a clue to her request. She needed the toilet and I was clearly the person who would know exactly where it is, because I’d been on stage in front of 400 people just 15 minutes previously, giving out prizes and making a speech. But no ‘Great evening, Lynne!’ or ‘Well done on another fine show’, she’s straight in there with ‘Where’s the fucking toilet?’. For God’s bloody sake!

Being in charge is all about this sort of thing. The price of authority is dealing with a lot of mediocrity and people’s bodily requirements. The toilet is the top of the list. Not surprising if you spend your life putting on shows that last for an hour or more with the sole purpose of making people laugh. Plus, if you look like you know what you’re doing and where everything is, this question is inevitable.

In fact, ‘Where’s the toilet?’ is the most frequently asked question of my 20-year career as a comedy producer – along with ‘Are you a comedian yourself?’, ‘Can you tell me a joke?’ and ‘So what IS Funny Women?’ – and it’s long overdue for redress in the light of so many achievements.

I trust that this book will explain why I’ve spent the last 20 years of my life pursuing my passion for equality and giving women a voice in what may appear to be a very circuitous and painful way, as well as what I’ve learned by being a comedy producer and why my great friend Caroline laughs hysterically when I tell people what I do for a living. And, if you’re really lucky, I’ll even tell you where the bloody toilet is!

I’m not sure how many wees I have either facilitated or presided over during my comedy career. The irony is that I often forget to go myself and, despite giving birth to two children and carrying an unwelcome extra stone in weight that bears down on my long-suffering bladder, I can hold a wee for an entire comedy show if necessary.

No need for incontinence pants (thank you Billy Connolly) or Tena Ladies (thanks Suzy Bennett) just yet – even though Facebook spent a long time trying to convince me that these were essential purchases once you’re over 50 – just great pelvic floor muscles. This presupposes that I don’t laugh that much either, as a bit of wee would be sure to find its way out due to my advanced years. Eat your heart out Facebook! I’ve taken my age off my timeline now and will have fun keeping them guessing.

Actually, I am living proof that comedy is a cure for incontinence. My bladder is a highly trained lean machine that waits for blessed release only when its owner is good and ready.

It’s ironic that ‘Where’s the toilet?’ could become my epitaph, when my preference is for something more pithy and meaningful, like ‘Lynne made things happen’. Who knows, by the end of this book I might even be asking you where the toilet is.

So let me explore my early years and influences with you first and later on I’ll tell you about some of the other stuff that goes on behind the scenes in the comedy world, and how I came to create Funny Women.

IN THE BEGINNING

I think it all began when I was a child. My father, Ronald Samuel Parker, was naturally funny, as was his father, Sam. There’s a family rumour that a distant relative had been ‘on the stage’, but she had suffered from delusions and depression and had died mysteriously and alone when her shawl had accidentally caught fire. Whether real or imagined, it’s a good piece of family folklore.

When I say ‘funny’, my father never really got a chance to perform, other than taking part in fancy dress competitions and twirling round the dance floor with my mother and me during our annual family holidays at Butlins, later to be upgraded to Pontins and, drumroll… much later, Pontinental!

We were enthusiastic adopters of the holiday camp, but I’ve never understood why the Bluecoats were supposed to have more class than the Redcoats and why self-catering in oddly temporary structures called ‘chalets’ was more desirable than dining communally three times a day in large halls full of jolly campers. Although, when we made it to Majorca for our first ever family holiday aboard under the safe auspices of Pontinental, the experience hit a whole new dimension. Sun, sand and good-looking Bluecoats which, at the age of 16 gave me a taste for the high life!

Meanwhile, my father pursued his own personal ‘entertainment’ career by ensuring that my brother and I had the best birthday parties in the neighbourhood, a tradition that he continued with all of his grandchildren, and that no Christmas was complete without his car being converted into a Santa-style sleigh, complete with ‘surround sound’ by way of a strapped-on stereo system, so that we could accompany him as carol singers and raise money for his beloved Dr Barnado’s charity. I’ll gloss over the later festive incident when he decided to create a Chucky-esque grotto-come-nativity installation in the front garden with our old dolls, teddies and a tatty piece of tarpaulin. My mother has never recovered from the horror or forgiven him, even posthumously.

The point of telling you this is that there was always a project or a ‘production’ in progress in our house. If my father was not building an extension to the house upwards, backwards, sideways and forwards (yes, he did all four) then we were planning a themed birthday party or a holiday. A lot of this was captured on his interminable slide shows to music (a concept he adopted and copied from a friend of his who put these awful things together and toured the nation’s photographic clubs) or, later, on video. Not only did my father make things happen in our family, he filmed them too.

The other early influencers were all four of my grandparents, who had key roles in our various family productions. On my father’s side, the aforementioned Sam was, by the time I came long, working at the BBC in White City as a lighting technician, having spent his early life as a merchant seaman and then in service at Buckingham Palace.

Being a lighting technician meant that my grandfather spent long shifts sitting behind enormous stage lights in various BBC studios, working on some very famous shows – Dixon of Dock Green, Ready Steady Go, Top of the Pops and, most impressively, Doctor Who! In those days, camera operating was a completely separate skill and the cameramen relied on the lighting technicians to work closely with them to achieve a good result.

I was taken by my grandfather to the set of Doctor Who (first aired in 1963) and stood on a sound stage with strange tapes flowing down from the rooftop, clearly designed to give the set an eerie feel. I was horrified when I spied a Dalek’s plunger pointing out at me from behind the tape screen, but greatly relieved when my grandfather revealed that it was inert and needed a human being inside for it to be mobilised. After that I was never scared of a Dalek again, but always had the terrors when I saw a Cyberman.

Another odd and early memory is of being taken to the BBC Radio Theatre on Shepherd’s Bush Green to see recordings of Round the Horne (Series 1 ran for 16 episodes from 7 March 1965, Series 2 for 13 episodes from 13 March 1966, and Series 3 for 20 episodes from 12 February 1967) and The Navy Lark (long running, 1959 to 1977 for Queen’s Silver Jubilee). There must have been others, but these two series stick out in my memory.

I’m guessing that my father being such a fan of radio comedy, his own father facilitated these treats and somehow managed to include me in on them. They’ve left an indelible impression and at the time inspired me to produce my own amateurish radio plays, writing and recording them on an old reel-to-reel tape machine with the help of my younger brother and friends as unwitting cast members. These recordings are long-since lost, but the memory of the ‘Raid on the Cake Factory’ lives on.

My only subsequent brush with the BBC in my formative years was representing my school on a radio programme. I think I might have been selected because I’d told them my grandfather had worked for the BBC, although they probably thought it was in a grander, more influential, white-collar role. We were escorted to Broadcasting House to take part in a discussion for a schools’ programme, the topic long since faded in my memory. The only thing I remember is being allowed in the BBC bar which, at age 14 or 15, was quite racy.

My grandfather retired from his BBC role in the mid-1960s, but the legacy continued and may have even run concurrently, because my grandmother, Mary Ann, had cleaned house for the then-Director-General of the BBC, Lord Jacob (Sir Ian Jacob, DG from 1952 to 1959) and I was constantly regaled with stories of their domestic grandeur. I envisaged her dusting amongst the gold plate and staring up at family portraits in the long gallery of some huge mansion. ‘Lord Jacobs has this…’ ‘Lady Jacobs has that…’. Yet she was never jealous of their wealth, indeed she revelled in it, as if she was part of the Jacob family, like the staff in Downton Abbey.

How proud my grandmother would have been to see me attending a reception in the boardroom of Broadcasting House a few years ago, looked down on by the watchful portraits of former Director-Generals. I’m sure Lord Jacob winked at me…

Her brush with the upper echelons of society continued into her personal life and way past her term with the Jacobs. She lovingly furnished and adorned the council flat she lived in with Sam, with bric-à-brac and ‘treasures’ that she sourced from her beloved jumble sales! Works of art produced by her grandchildren and photographic portraits were framed and given pride of place amongst the chipped vases and tarnished silver.

My mother and her parents, Connie and Bert, provided me with a more grounded upbringing. I often think that Grandpa Bert is my guardian angel, because he presided over my early creative life. He sharpened colouring pencils and cut up pieces of scrap paper to facilitate the endless hours of drawing and ‘make believe’ that filled my childhood hours.

Both he and my grandmother were hugely talented at making things. He was a craftsman and had been a leatherworker making fine-quality goods like handbags, purses and gloves. Upon retirement he put these skills to work making in one particularly memorable incident, a whole cast of woodland animal masks, fairy wings, headdresses and wands for my infant school production of The Fairy Who Lost Her Star – the one and only occasion in my life where I took the lead! To this day, I think I only got the part because my grandparents agreed to make all the costumes! I remember their cellar full of costumes, with crepe-paper tutus covered in silver paper stars and trimmed in tinsel, and wonderful woodland animal headdresses with pipe-cleaner whiskers and button noses.

We lived in my grandparents’ house in Hammersmith until they decided to sell up and buy a bungalow in Bracklesham Bay on the Sussex coast where they had owned a static caravan for several years – a decision they made to ease Bert’s chesty condition as a result of being gassed in the First World War. This gave way to endless school summer holidays spent away from my parents with my grandparents and brother at the ‘seaside’. Our fantasies were regularly indulged with dressing up costumes, dens, tents, games and outings while my grandparents were still fit and able enough to keep up with us.

Meanwhile, my parents bought their first and only house in the wasteland beyond Heathrow Airport, otherwise known as Ashford, Middlesex. Not to be confused with Ashford, Kent, which is an altogether different proposition. Ashford’s only distinguishing feature from those early days was the opening of a flashy new supermarket called Fine Fare, and I remember the excitement it caused amongst the newly migrated Londoners who had exchanged their built-up city lives for bland new housing estates in suburbia. This was living the 1960s dream and all I needed to make it complete was for my father to replicate the ‘American teenage bedroom’ as seen in my Diana annual circa 1966.

Even though I was young when we first moved to Ashford, about six I believe, as it involved a traumatic move of schools, I thought it seemed a very long way from London and ever since longed to go back! My solace and friend was the old radiogram that I inherited when my parents bought a stereo.

Along with the bedroom refurbishment, as modelled on the American Teenage bedroom template, my father built in the dark-wood, radiogram which, for the uninitiated (and young) is a combination of radio and record-player. It was a truly magical thing, as the turntable was revealed by pulling out a panel and slid forward in all its cream Bakelite glory. The radio navigation panel lit up reassuringly and was ideal for night-time listening, as long as you could tune in successfully. My father also built in a nifty little storage cupboard behind my bed head where I kept all my LPs (vinyl ruled in those days!), so the nocturnal listening could be extended to Simon & Garfunkel, Bread and the Carpenters.

All this may not at first seem life-affirming, but having your own space, well planned out, with plenty of storage, was to set the bar for future years! My bedroom, once the central heating also arrived, became the birthplace of many creative ideas and projects. I owned an ancient typewriter, upon which I pretty much taught myself to type, and my grandmother’s old Singer sewing machine. Both were upgraded during my teens to better models, but my interest in handicrafts waned with technology and my efforts at making and designing my own clothes weren’t successful. Instead, I indulged my interests in fashion by attending the London College of Fashion to study Fashion Writing. Commentating and writing about clothes was a much easier option.

Now, if you’re thinking that my mother is surprisingly absent from this early snapshot of my life, then brace yourself. Audrey Eleanor Parker (nee Tyler) is very much a pivotal figure, although it’s taken me years of reflection and counselling to fully recognise this. My mother married my father when she was 21 and I came along when she was 23. She barely had time to think about what she wanted and, indeed, was very much a player in my father’s productions. This is not unusual for her generation, but, given her upbringing, it must have been a bit of a disappointment.

My mother was the much-doted-upon second daughter. Her sister Gladys was eight years older and their childhood was disrupted by the Second World War and evacuation. Despite this, my mother’s talent for performing had been indulged and she danced her way through her formative years at the Wendy Wisbey School of Dance – ballet and tap – and I have a huge box of old photos of her in costumes ranging from the ethereal to militarial. There is even a record of her brief fling with the accordion, but, like my choice between writing and sewing, the dancing clearly won out.

As I have already mentioned, my maternal grandparents were very talented in a practical way, so before I came along with my cast of fairies and woodland animals, they had already had plenty of practice on the costumes and props for my mother. My grandmother had also been a dab hand with hairdressing skills, transforming my mother into a Shirley Temple lookalike through the medium of ‘rags’, which were put into wet hair overnight to create the desired ringlet effect. My mother got her revenge by trying something similar out on me with those horrid foam rollers to give my hair ‘some height’. It must have been a 1960s thing, but I have never got over it or had ‘height’ in my hair.

So, you may be getting the picture here. Pretty, blond, ringletted child grows up to have bald (at birth), plain, introverted daughter with imaginary friend (who can blame me?) and no apparent talent for dancing. There was no cruelty involved, more a lack of interest, and indulgence of my talents was left mainly to my grandparents, in particular my grandfather, who encouraged my left-handedness and obsessive drawing.

The hair was cut short (until my mother discovered rollers that she believed I could sleep in) and I was often called ‘sonny’ at the local shops. One shop in particular must have thought I was a little boy as every few weeks my grandfather would, as a special treat, buy me a much-coveted Matchbox car. They were displayed in the window of the shop on little steps and I could peer through and choose which one I wanted. I still love cars to this day and this growing collection of miniatures was my pride and joy.

Nobody ever said anything about the perceived masculinity of this activity or the short hair until the real deal (my brother) came along and I was fully acknowledged as female and a ‘big sister’. Attention was deflected as the four adults I lived with became obsessed with the chubby, pretty, blond boy baby who took centre stage. God knows what messing was done with my head at this time, but the pinnacle for me was when they made me give all my lovingly collected Matchbox cars to my baby brother as he was a ‘boy’ and girls don’t play with cars – I have never recovered.

I don’t blame my mother for this or subsequent sexist decisions that were made on my behalf. I have trudged my way through life relatively successfully despite being called ‘sonny’, having flat hair and not being able to dance properly. You come to rest where it suits you and I have found my niche through comedy, which is the perfect place to air your frustrations and ‘out’ your relatives for fucking you up!

I have through comedy come to realise that the relationship we have with our mothers, more than with any other close relatives and whether we are brought up by them or not, define us. That goes for men as well as women, although the effects are different. Rather than dwell on that now, let me come back to it.

In the case of my mother, all you need to know at this stage is that she became a supporting cast member to the life of my father – largely out of necessity, because what was expected of her was to run a home and bring up two kids. All of this my mother did very successfully and I had a very happy, secure and stable childhood. She is now 91, having outlived my father who died prematurely aged 69 in 1998. I am very proud of her as she went on to have another very happy relationship and continues to live independently.

So, now that I’ve shared a few details about my upbringing with you, this may inform why I’ve ended up working in comedy with some of the most incredible and complex people I’ve ever met. The industry is a bit like a large dysfunctional family where people say what they think, love and hate in equal measure and often perform in public what has acted out in real life.

This is why I’m distilling some of my personal observations, experiences and advice for pursuing a career in comedy and how you can use humour to ‘up your game’ both personally and professionally. Everybody remembers the funny kid in class don’t they?

I work on the basis that if you can perform five minutes of stand up, then you really can do anything. That may sound extreme, but this book will cover some tips and tricks that I’ve learnt from more than 20 years of working with comedians, comedy writers and creators, producers and promoters in this mad, bad comedy industry. Like everything, I have learnt just as much from the bad experiences as I have the good ones so hopefully, I can spare you some of the pain.

Women are far more exposed to the frailties of the workplace than men and we face the daily battle of misogyny, abuse and being rendered invisible on a daily basis. Culture is always a reflection of society and nowhere is it more exposing or prevalent than on the comedy circuit. All of life passes through here. I have seen positive changes since I created Funny Women in 2002 but there’s still progress to be made.

Finally, as somebody who facilitates comedy rather than performing it, this book will take the form of an anthology, a collection of my own experiences combined with those of some of the funniest and most brilliant women I have had the privilege to work with. I’ve watched them take the comedy world by storm and some of my observations may help you to continue their legacy.