Ariane Sherine was at Soho Theatre yesterday
Yesterday, the Guardian ran an online piece by Ariane Sherine, one of their regular writers. It was headlined:
I’D BEEN UNEMPLOYED FOR A YEAR… SO I FORMED A BAND, OF COURSE
and the subtitle was:
What’s a 34-year-old single mum on benefits meant to do when all else fails? Pursue the most unrealistic career path imaginable!
So, of course, yesterday I had a chat with Ariane.
“I did nine months on the comedy circuit in 2002/2003,” she told me.
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s just the most amazing thing to make a crowd of people laugh,” she told me. “I always think comedy is the truest art form because people can’t fake laughter. Anybody can clap after a performance out of politeness, but people don’t tend to laugh out of politeness. Not real, proper belly laughs. It feels wonderful and it feels like a validation of your own personality. If you think something’s funny and other people think it’s funny too, then they identify with you and it’s amazing, it’s wonderful and I loved it.”
“It’s like being hugged on stage?” I asked.
“I don’t know about a hug. It’s certainly warm.”
“But you stopped,” I said.
Ariane Sherine: worried by website
“I stopped comedy because I was so scared Steve Bennett might give me a terrible review on his Chortle website. I gave it up because I was scriptwriting and thought I don’t want producers to Google me, find this hypothetical Chortle review and think: Oh, she’s not funny.
“I still wanted that validation through my writing. I started writing for sitcoms. I wrote for Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and My Family and material for Countdown. But you don’t really get credit for that: it’s never really your own because, on sitcoms, you have script editors who may ask you to do eight re-writes based on their notes and, by the end of it, it’s not your script any more. I have no particular wish to go back into scriptwriting, but I do really miss comedy.”
“So why not go back to it again?”
“Because the circuit is a harsh, cruel place,” Ariane laughed.
“So you’ve been sitting around doing nothing…” I said.
Beautiful Filth by The Lovely Electric – smutty, maybe nutty
“I’m looking after my three-year-old daughter half the time,” replied Ariane, “and, the rest of the time, I’m always working on projects. I’ve been working on this album since January.
“Ah yes!” I said. “It’s you and a friend, you call yourself The Lovely Electric and the album is called Beautiful Filth. Out today.”
“And it’s available on iTunes and from Spotify,” said Ariane. “I wanted to do comedy songs because I missed doing stand-up.”
Tracks on her Beautiful Filth album include:
Don’t Have Sex With a Goat
Thank You For Not Smelling of Fish
I Think His Penis Died
The opening lyrics to the track Cum Face are:
You are so beautiful
I’d watch you at the IMAX
I love the way you look
Except for when you climax
You flare your nostrils out
And, for what it’s worth
You scrunch your cheeks up
Like a hamster giving birth
I don’t want to see your cum face
I don’t want to watch you come
I don’t want to see your cum face
So let’s do it up the bum
I don’t want to see your cum face
I’d rather watch my mum
I don’t want to see your cum face
So let’s do it up the bum
There is a video for the song Hitler Moustache on YouTube.
“My politics are very left-leaning,” Ariane told me, “and I think a lot of people I like might not like the album, because it’s very smutty.”
“So,” I said, “you decided to record a pop album whose lyrics are untransmittable on radio. Why? That’s no way to make money.”
“Well, you never know,” said Ariane. “Tim Minchin is pretty successful. But it is true Beautiful Filth is an album about sex. We don’t have any clean songs on it.”
“But why,” I asked,” write an album about sex in such a way that it can’t be widely disseminated?”
“Because it’s funny and the humour I enjoy is really rude. Think of Monty Python – The Penis Song. (There is a version on YouTube.)
Charlie Brooker reacts to the Hitler Moustache
“How come Charlie Brooker is in your Hitler Moustache music video?” I asked.
“I met him when I was working in telly,” explained Ariane, “He’s the loveliest bloke. He has just helped me so much. He gave me my start in journalism because the Guardian asked him: Do you know any good comedy writers who could add a bit of levity to the comment pages? and he suggested me. So he’s basically responsible for my whole journalistic career. Then he gave me a quote for my last book, he gave me a quote for this album, he wrote for The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas, which was a book I edited, got me a job on Big Brother – writing the website stuff.”
“So why do you want to be a singer-songwriter now?”
“Because it’s fun and because I did a music degree. It culminated in work experience at the NME.”
“And you started writing at the NME?”
“Yes. Then I was runner-up in the BBC New Sitcom Writers Award. I started writing for Children’s BBC and other places. I’ve always been a writer in one form or another. But then I had a nervous breakdown in 2010.”
The Guardian piece
“That,” I said, “was well before your daughter – who is now three – was born.”
“Yeah. I wrote a Guardian piece about it. Basically a load of really horrible things happened. I had had a very violent, disturbed childhood, so I got depressed in my teens – started cutting myself and became anorexic – and was put on a load of anti-depressants that didn’t help.
“I was pregnant when I was 24 and my boyfriend turned violent and hit me in the face and caused my ear to bleed and then he suffocated me and it was horrible. So that happened and then I kind of picked myself up from that after about a year but was still very depressed. I was 24.”
“You’re 34 now.”
Ariane at Atheist Bus Campaign launch with Richard Dawkins (Photograph by Zoe Margolis)
“Yes. I was 24 and carried on writing for telly and then the Atheist Bus Campaign came out of a piece I had written for the Guardian. I got lots of threats when I did that. Random strangers. Religious people who didn’t like the campaign. I really, genuinely felt a bit… and I couldn’t work for… I didn’t feel able to do anything in public for over three years. My Guardian pieces stopped in August 2010 and it was only in December 2013 that I started writing again. It was a big chunk of time to lose, but…”
“What made you start again?” I asked.
“I was put on some anti-depressants that were Tricyclics, so they were different from the SSRIs that I was taking before.”
“SSRIs?” I asked.
“Things like Prozac and Seroxat. But now I’m on this amazing one. It’s amazing and it has just made life worth living again.”
“There was,” I said, “an act I knew called the Amazing Mr Smith who was given Seroxat. Last year, he took it for two nights and then killed himself by jumping off a cliff.”
“Sometimes they can make you a lot worse before they make you better,” said Ariane. “When you read the leaflet and you read This medication might induce suicidal thoughts you think Well why am I taking it?”
“But you’re OK now?” I asked.
“Well, I’m on three different medications now: anti-psychotic ones, anti-convulsant and anti-depressant.”
“Anti-psychotic is different from anti-depressant,” I said.
“It’s a horrible thing,” said Ariane. “I was convinced people were trying to kill me. I was convinced the government and MI5 were out to kill me.”
“As you were working for the Guardian,” I said, “maybe they were.”
“I remember the caretaker in my block of flats,” said Ariane, “was scrubbing the walls outside and I was convinced he was doing it to spy on me. When you get to that state that you’re convinced everybody’s out to get you, you can’t walk down the road because you’re scared and I desperately needed help and I got put on these anti-psychotics, but they alone didn’t make everything better.
“Then I got pregnant and I couldn’t be put on anything else. So I spent my pregnancy planning my suicide.”
“How were you going to kill yourself?”
“Helium.”
“You were going to laugh yourself to death?” I asked.
“I’m glad I can laugh about it now,” said Ariane.
“I’m interested in comedians,” I said, “because they’re all mad as hatters.”
“Well,” said Ariane, “for years I was so terrified of letting people know I was struggling with mental illness but, as soon as I did, there were all these journalists and comedians who told me: I’ve had the same thing. It was amazing,
“I think these pills I’m on have actually given me courage I would not have had ordinarily. So I don’t see it as brave to come out as mentally ill – it’s just these pills I’m on. There’s no way I would ever have been able to do it without the pills.”
SO IT GOES - John Fleming's blog 