Doon Mackichan is best known for her comedy characters in the hugely popular Brass Eye, Smack the Pony and Toast of London – but throughout her career there are parts she’s refused to take and stereotypes she’s challenged to find more empowered characters. In My Lady Parts, Doon shares her experience on stage, screen and in real life, examining how our culture still expects women to adhere to certain stereotypes – and punishes those who don’t.

Extract taken from My Lady Parts: A Life Fighting Stereotypes
By Doon Mackichan
Published by Canongate

Two

The Clown

Casting Call

Young girl aged twelve, fish out of water, hides in toilets at school and is bullied. Uses comedy and powers of mimicry to overcome her bullies and is finally accepted. Skinny, with lank hair and knobbly knees.

Darkness in Scotland was swift in winter, falling each day around 3 p.m., then sudden stars. I would travel to and from school on the bus in the starlight in those brutal early months, learning how to navigate a pitch-black road by slowly making out the silhouette of our house. My sister attended the local village primary school in Upper Largo, and my brother was dispatched to the private Dundee High (boys needed the better education as future breadwinners; girls were likely to become secretaries or homemakers so state school would do).

I found myself on the first day at Kilrymont School, on the outskirts of St Andrews, crushed by a thousand children outside the closed doors where, to my deep embarrassment, my mother had driven me in our old Jaguar in a fur coat, not looking unlike Grace Kelly. We were like zoo specimens, the object of much hilarity. It wasn’t an auspicious start.

The glass doors were finally opened and we were borne along a semi-stampede into the school. I could barely understand what anyone was saying, and was given a maths test to assess my academic ability (I failed, and was consequently relegated to the bottom stream). My memories of the first few weeks are of sheer panic, fear and self-consciousness. I had a piping English accent, I was tall and gangly with long greasy hair, and I was freezing. No one talked to me, so I hid in the toilets in breaktime. I even hid between the coats in the cloakrooms, as my mother had insisted that I wear a pair of ‘bloomers’ – a sort of thermal, purple knickerbocker – as we weren’t allowed tights (legs were pinched by some teachers to check for fleshcoloured tights). Once, one of the scary girls who taunted me in the corridors yanked me around to the side of a playground wall, and my skirt was repeatedly pulled up to the delight of a horseshoe of girls, with much hilarity and yells of ‘Let’s get a look at yer bloomers’. Much shoving, pushing and disgrace ensued, but I realised to my joy and a deep-seated need to survive that my powers of mimicry could swerve a good kicking, and I launched into Basil Fawlty. ‘No, no, stop it! Stop it at once!’ A silence fell, then explosive laughter, before an ominous instruction to ‘Dae that again’. So, I then became Sybil, and, of course, the icing on the cake, Manuel. The girls loved it. I had gone from victim to entertainer in a few brave sentences.

‘Who else can ye dae?’ Racking my brain, I tried anything to divert and make them laugh: Stanley Baxter, Freddie Starr, Dick Emery, the Queen. It was a glorious revelation that laughter averted a good battering, and slowly as my accent changed to drop the English tones, like a worn-out chrysalis, I became accepted in my role as ‘the clown’, and more people were brought in to listen. I suppose it was my first stand-up comedy routine.

My English teacher at the time, Mr McKay, smoked at his lectern and brought Macbeth to life. He persuaded me to join the drama group – my first role being the bitchy upper-class queen in Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, followed by a whole host of nasty villains that primarily required an English accent and a vicious skewering of the upper lasses. Comedically it was win–win; I muscled into every play going as we had a thriving and inspiring drama club. I loved it, but I still didn’t have a burning desire or knowledge that this was my path in life or even a career. It was fun. I made friends. I had found my tribe.

I left Scotland to attend Strode’s College in Egham to do my A-levels (English, history and French – I’m not sure a drama course was even invented then). After Scotland, and the long distances, the isolation, I reconnected with old friends and went sort of wild. I could speak in an accent I was familiar with, I could wear what I wanted. I was euphoric. I rarely walked anywhere, just danced and leapt and spun, and I fell in love.

I was a flaky student. I wasted time and was full of bluster and mischief in class, always doing impressions of the teachers, walking perilously close behind them in corridors. I drew silly cartoons of imagined love affairs between members of the class and passed them around. I terrorised my French teacher, and even though I was proficient in the language, I did precisely no work. I liked my English teacher but played stupid tricks on him, for instance making the whole class go into the Portakabin next door pretending we’d got the wrong class, snickering and watching while he waited for us all. We thought it was hilarious.

The head of the English department took me aside one day and told me I should do AS-level English; the consensus was I could get into Cambridge. I just wasn’t interested. I was in love with a beautiful guitarist who had a car. I tried reading Chaucer and gave up, and politely declined their encouragement. From playground clown in Scotland to class clown in England, I gave my A-levels very little attention, apart from English. I was an avid reader of plays: Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Chekhov. A seed must have been sprouting because I applied to do drama at uni.

I decided Manchester University was the one for me, loving the course, the town and the tutors. But my grades weren’t good enough. I had turned down other universities – I knew it had to be Manchester – so the next day I travelled up there on a train and demanded another interview. I interrupted a rehearsal trying to find a tutor whom I had liked on my first visit, and was told ‘this isn’t how things are done’. I was told to wait, that no one was available, to go home, but I refused, got interviewed eventually and went back to London on the train a very happy teenager. In my interview, I gave a brave and utterly flawed description of Brecht’s Galileo, the last play I had seen at the National Theatre. I hadn’t understood a word of it. But I was very good at pretending that I did.

My Lady Parts: A Life Fighting Stereotypes by Doon Mackichan is published by Canongate, priced £16.99.