#helen lederer

[a-a-a-anon]

MEN IN THE 1980s HARASSING FEMALE COMICS WHEN I GET MY HANDS ON YOU!! (below cut: anecdotes from female comedians i adore that made me want to travel back in time and strangle men <3)

The other scary one was the Comedy Store. The boys had played there a lot, but we had never had the nerve... We went onstage to the inevitable shouts of ‘Show us yer tits!’, which we ignored, and proceeded at speed with our sketch. But the shouts got worse and were coming mainly from a large group of men in the corner. ‘Get yer tits out!’ We tried to keep going, but just when I was happy to leave the stage, Dawn marched to the front and looked hard at these men. ‘Will you just shut up! Do you realize how rude you are being? There are people in this audience who actually like to listen. Stop it! Just shut up!'

jennifer saunders, bonkers: my life in laughs

From the minute Fatty and I went onstage at the Comedy Store the very first time, oafish drunkards started shouting, ‘Show us your tits!’ I just couldn't abide the rudeness, Dad. I switched into teacher mode, stepped completely out of the sketch we were attempting, and ordered them to sit down and be quiet. Oddly enough, it worked and we finished our sketch with no further interruptions. However, we did perform it at eight times the usual speed! Maybe it was genuinely better that way.

dawn french, dear fatty

One time, I turned up for a gig at The Comedy Store with my woollen singlet and the sensible, loose trousers. I’d not been on very long when I heard someone in the audience shout “Let’s see your clit!” in a confident sort of way. I wasn’t familiar with the word “clit” at that time, even though by then, I’d lived in a squat and been down the Dordogne in a canoe. I had to say, “I’m so sorry you want to see my… what?” In the end I just said I hadn’t brought it with me that night and hoped I was off the hook. In those days, there was a strip club in the same building, and the clit-seeker may have taken the lift to the wrong floor.

helen lederer, not that i'm bitter: a truly, madly, funny memoir

[About her first stand up set:] Almost the second I set foot on stage someone at the back started to heckle me with the words, ‘Fuck off, you fat cow!’ As it was my first time, I’d assumed that at a benefit people would be nice and I had not considered having to deal with hecklers, so I had no idea what to do. I started to struggle very badly through my prepared material. Quite a lot of people obviously didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about, and my heckler didn’t just stop at one ‘Fuck off, you fat cow!’ He repeated it over and over and over again, until after a couple of minutes I couldn’t take any more and I did fuck off...

... I found myself parrying the normal ‘Fat slag’ and 'Get your tits out’ type heckles. And then one of them got on the table, unzipped his trousers and lobbed out his flaccid penis with the words, “Suck my cock, you fucking bitch!’ Well, I felt this was beyond the call of duty. So at that point, having done my best, I departed the stage and left them to get on with it. I foolishly expected the club owner to sympathise with me a tiny bit, but instead he looked at his watch and ticked me off because I had come off stage three minutes early.

jo brand, look back in hunger: the autobiography

in conclusion: female comics are my heroes and they had to and still have to go through way too much shit. shout out to the ones who paved the way.

[bodybybane]

Our Book Reviews Online: Helen Lederer - Losing It - Blog Tour!

[neil-neil-orange-peel]

I love reading your asks, so I wanted to ask you if you had any favorite female characters from Rik and Ade projects?

Helloooo! Thank you, that's so sweet. ❤️ Let's see... I'm going to single out some TYO characters specifically and then talk more generally. This post is absolutely going to become a big, incoherent mess. 😂

Sue from Sociology is my favourite minor TYO character. Don't get me wrong, I love Helen the Murderess too, but there's something that draws me to Sue. To be fair, I'm just seriously weak for Jennifer Saunders in general, and she's basically done up as a female Rick here, if Rick was actually cool. I like inserting her into fanfic sometimes (okay, once... but I have plans). She's very much a background character for the majority of Interesting, but Interesting itself is one of the first (and only, possibly the only?) time there are lots of women in a TYO scene at once, even if they're not getting to do much. Shout out to Dawn's Christian who gets crushed by the gigantic sandwich too, of course! (As an aside, I find it funny that both Jennifer and Dawn got to strangle/smother Mike on the sofa on different occasions.)

Vyvyan's mum. Pauline Melville pops up a couple of other times in TYO as well, and she's just very good whenever she does. I believe she gave French & Saunders a bit of guidance when they were all on the standup circuit. Vyv's mum is a great character because she's just SO awful. Let female characters be awful! She's so spiky and sharp in every way, and she's probably the only semi-developed female character who appears on the show. I think letting the audience meet her gives Vyvyan a bit of texture and depth - sure, we could imagine any family background for any of them, but we're being told THIS HERE is Vyvyan's. Poor Vyv. Pauline Melville herself, of course, is a prize-winning writer now! The dream.

The devil and her condemned soul is one of my favourite TYO cutaway segments. The condemned soul is Helen Atkinson-Wood, who is most well-known for playing Mrs Miggins in Blackadder the Third. She also has a small role in the Comic Strip episode Consuela (and possibly others, but I looked up the cast list to that one yonks ago because it's my favourite). I wonder if Lise wrote this sketch, considering the subject matter. Either way, Dawn and Helen's delivery is great, especially the faux discrete way Dawn says "period pains". I hope it put stuffy men's heckles up.

Aside from TYO, Jen and Dawn were often the only female presence in the Comic Strip episodes, particularly the earlier ones. Of the first two series, Dawn wrote Summer School and Jen wrote Slags - neither were standout episodes of their series, the kind often recalled today, but with Slags especially, the female characters within them were given more agency and stake in the plot than usual. Jen played five different characters in Happy Families in 1985 - a little gem written by Ben and also starring Ade.

I'd like to give a little shout out to Helen Lederer, who popped up a lot in Rik and Ade's - and French & Saunders' - comic output, while never really being given her own opportunity to shine on TV. Oh, and I'd also like to give a shout out to Marsha Fitzalan, who played Sarah B'Stard in The New Statesman - she did such a good job of playing an intensely flawed, funny female character. There are countless male characters who are basically terrible people - I mean, Alan B'Stard for one - and it's vital women are also allowed to be that awful in comedy.

Comedy has always been a pretty male sphere. Even these days, there are definitely still men Ricky Gervais who believe women can't be funny. Misogyny is still massively prevalent in society. Male comics attract female attention; female comics attract male abuse. That's a simplification and generalisation, of course, but it's broadly true. And I don't see younger generations of men getting better with this, to be honest. Actually, I see them getting worse (thanks, Andrew Tate). Sorry to be all doom and gloom!

When Rik and Ade started out in comedy, women getting to play characters other than wives or the like - that is, straight characters and caricatures there largely for the male characters to bounce off of for their laughs - was still uncommon. Despite the existence of successful female comics across the pond like Lucille Ball, and beloved 1970s sitcom The Good Life having a main cast split evenly gender-wise (I know Richard Briers technically had first credit, but Penelope Keith as Margo Leadbetter was absolutely the funniest of the four of them), there was a genuine belief that women couldn't (and maybe shouldn't) be doing comedy.

Women like Victoria Wood were pushing boundaries in important ways around the time of the alternative comedy boom by writing specifically about women (and, quite often, northern women - which I personally think is important, since Last of the Summer Wine had such a chokehold on portraying almost all of its female characters as ostensibly the same). Her sitcom dinnerladies was both melancholic and hilarious. Her sketch shows and other comic output, quite often featuring Julie Walters (her friend and muse), Celia Imrie, and many others, were all written entirely by her. She was also a gifted pianist and wrote several comic songs.

All of this is to say, Victoria Wood definitely helped pave the way for French & Saunders. She even referred to herself as an alternative comedian in her material. But honestly, I don't think it was until much later that women stopped being regularly restricted to straight roles in comedies created by men (which, of course, most comedies were). This was part of why Absolutely Fabulous, written by Jen, was such a breath of fresh air in the 1990s. For once, every single major character was a woman - men were the scarcity! And Jen has mentioned before that producers would constantly pressure her to write more roles for men. Meanwhile, we can observe that Girls on Top (dubbed the female TYO, which is... sort of true and sort of not), which Dawn and Jen starred in with Ruby Wax and Tracey Ullman in the 1980s, isn't very well-known today. I'm not 100% sure how well it was received at the time, but clearly it wasn't as popular as TYO had been before it. Ruby Wax and Tracey Ullman have both also had successful careers in comedy, but I'd argue that's mainly thanks (particularly in Tracy's case) to opportunities in America.

So I'm not saying women never got to be the funny (also I'm just talking about the UK), but the fact is: if your comedy has a completely/majority male cast, with women only popping up in supporting roles or in guest appearances, it's obvious which characters are going to be better developed, more beloved, and just funnier. I mean, even the Vicar of Dibley, which was obviously written for Dawn and showcases her comic prowess, features a supporting cast of funny men (there was also Emma Chambers as Alice and Liz Smith as Leticia - before she was killed off - but the women were outnumbered by the men). I get that this perhaps fits with the idea of a tiny, slightly backwards village in Oxfordshire - and the fact Geraldine was a female vicar shocking these men was very important to the premise - but still.

We know certain men just REALLY struggle at writing women, too, so they've either done a really bad job or just avoided trying altogether. I do have an example for this, but I don't want to name them since I do love the show they created - it's just, y'know, writing women is definitely not their strong suit! And I'm really not trying to poo poo any shows here by pointing this out. I'm just making observations. All of these comedies I'm referencing here are very old now.

So! To get back to where I started with this!

I love that Lise Mayer was one of the writers of The Young Ones. In some ways, the fact one of the writers was a woman feels pretty incredible for 1982. At the same time, though, it's not surprising that she's often the forgotten one when people talk about who wrote TYO.

Rik and Ade were/are feminists, and it obviously wasn't their fault as individuals that comedy was so male - comedy was also restrictive in other ways before them. In terms of social class and political attitudes, they were definitely something refreshing and new. That said, it wouldn't be until later, with people like Caroline Aherne (who really changed the fundamentals of the sitcom genre with The Royle Family), that working class voices who weren't fucking Bernard Manning actually got some notice in comedy. And I've not even mentioned race in this ramble. If comedy was male, it was even more pale. There were comedies starring black and Asian comics in the 1980s and 1990s that started to break through - The Lenny Henry Show, Chef!, Desmond's, The Real McCoy, Goodness Gracious Me - but there's no denying BAME people, BAME women especially, have had to struggle a lot for a voice in comedy. Comedy is more diverse today than it was 40 years ago. There has been progress. But it's absolutely still male dominated, and still very white, at the top.

Rik was pegged as the golden boy of the alternative comedy movement, and he was and is undoubtedly remembered for so many different comedies. But in terms of pure success and fame? Actually, I think Dawn and Jen have been the standouts of their cohort. I don't think anyone would've predicted this 40 odd years ago - I mean, Christ, Rik had to speak up just to ensure they got equal pay at The Comic Strip. The boys were given their chance to shine first, there's no doubt about that. But it was Dawn and Jen who were the subjects of a BBC documentary last Christmas.

...Maybe there is hope for funny women, after all.

[panelshowsource]

sure i added helen lederer's not that i'm bitter audiobook to the drive! please lmk what you think because i'm also interested to give that a listen!

@oxymoronish 👋◠‿◠

[byneddiedingo]

Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)

Cast: Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy, Gene Lockhart, Porter Hall, Ernest Truex, Cliff Edwards, Clarence Kolb, Roscoe Karns, John Qualen, Helen Mack, Billy Gilbert. Screenplay: Charles Lederer, based on a play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Art direction: Lionel Banks. Film editing: Gene Havlick. Music: Sidney Cutner, Felix Mills.

I can never make a list of my ten favorite movies because once I get started I keep remembering the ones that absolutely have to be on the list. But His Girl Friday always claims a place somewhere, higher or lower. It's a movie without which life would be just a little poorer. The play on which it's based, The Front Page, was no slouch to start with. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur crafted the single best portrait of what it might have been like -- according to the accounts of others -- to be a newspaper reporter in the first half of the twentieth century, when there was neither television nor the internet to make one's profession obsolescent. We don't have to believe that it was always like that, but just that occasionally reporters in the big cities had moments like the ones shown in the movie. And then Charles Lederer, with uncredited help from Hecht, Howard Hawks, Morrie Ryskind, and a cast skilled at ad libbing, turned it into a romantic screwball comedy by changing the sex of one of the leads, Hildy Johnson, from male to female. And after lots of actresses who would have been just fine in the part (Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur) turned it down, Hawks cast Rosalind Russell in probably her greatest role. Is there a better matched team than Russell's Hildy and Cary Grant's Walter Burns? We can see both why they got divorced and why they could never be separated. And adding Ralph Bellamy as the patsy was a masterstroke, even though it's essentially the same role he had played three years earlier in The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937): the stuffy guy who loses out to Grant, perhaps because, as Burns observes, "He looks like that guy in the movies, you know ... Ralph Bellamy." The whole thing moves so brilliantly fast that you don't have time to reflect on the film's flaws, which include a racist gag about "pickaninnies" and a deep confusion about whether it's satirizing or valorizing its characters' callous indifference to other human beings -- notably the moment when Hildy sardonically refers to her fellow reporters as "Gentlemen of the press" after their harassment of Mollie Malloy (Helen Mack), but then immediately reverts to get-the-story-at-any-price behavior. What keeps it all skimming swiftly above reality is the astonishing skill of the leads (notice how long some of the takes are to realize how great their timing and command of dialogue was) and a gallery of great character players: Gene Lockhart, Roscoe Karns, John Qualen, and especially the hilarious Billy Gilbert as Joe Pettibone: If you can tear your eyes away from him long enough, watch how hard Grant and Russell are working to keep from cracking up at his performance. Oh, hell, stop whatever you're doing and just go watch it.  

[bodoposten]

Satser på landbruket i nord

Satser på landbruket i nord

– 25 millioner kroner årlig fra stat og fylkeskommunene til bærekraftig matproduksjon i Nord-Norge er et kjempeløft for landbruksnæringen, sier en begeistret fylkesråd Linda Helen Haukland. Haukland markerte starten for den nye ordningen i Tromsø sammen med Landbruks- og matminister Sandra Borch og fylkesråd Karin Eriksen fra Troms og Finnmark fylkeskommune. Hun leder Partnerskap Landbruk i…

[filmniller]

1883 (miniserie i 10 dele)

5 ud af 5 ulyksalige prærie-odysseer.

Dette er forhistorien til tv-serien "Yellowstone", men den kan sagtens ses uden kendskab til efterfølgeren. Det er efter min mening Taylor Sheridans fineste værk til dato, og det siger ikke så lidt.

Elsa Dutton (Isabel May) og hendes familie er brudt op fra Tennessee og nu på langfart mod det frugtbare Oregon. Elsas far, James (Tim McGraw) aftaler i Texas at følges med Shea Brennan (Sam Elliott) og Thomas (LaMonica Garrett), der leder en gruppe tyske pionerer, som også søger et bedre liv, men er naivt uvidende om de ufattelige farer, der venter dem i vildmarken.

Jeg kender kun Tim McGraw som sanger, men han viser sig også at være en fremragende skuespiller, og det samme er hans kone, sangeren Faith Hill, som også spiller hans hustru i serien. Den ubestridte stjerne er dog Isabel May, gennem hvis øjne historien fortælles. Sam Elliott med den dybe stemme og det kraftige overskæg portrætterer igen den arketypiske cowboy, og der er cameos fra Rita Wilson og Billy Bob Thornton (samt Tom Hanks, som godt nok kun er på skærmen i et par minutter).

Det er en historie med slanger, uvejr, dysenteri, indianere og fredløse banditter, og den har vi set mange gange før, men kun sjældent i denne kvalitet. Serien er efter min mening den bedste tv-western siden "Lonesome Dove". Den vil snart blive efterfulgt af "1923" med Harrison Ford og Helen Mirren, og den ser vi frem til.

[sammalaaa]

Just watched The Full Monty Ladies Night and honestly I have never felt so empowered and inspired! You can do whatever you set your mind to, never let anyone tell you any different!!!

[helenledererblog]

It’s a Funny Old World

Life is too short to allow oneself to be mentally derailed at the sight of an evening dress with one shoulder strap clinging on, and one hanging down like a sulky teenager.

Read the article here

[filmpalette]

Pay It Forward (2000) dir. Mimi Leder

[a-a-a-anon]

appreciation post for Lise Mayer!! she co-wrote The Young Ones (and The Bachelor Boys book, additional material like when they did Comic Relief, etc), which is well known. but she also wrote for other things in the alternative comedy scene like Rik Mayall and Ben Elton's comedy tour (source: BBC Breakfast Time interview)! and, something I didn't know until recently: she co-wrote/wrote for Kevin Turvey! she's not credited in his television appearances, but see below for sources.

i really loved the podcast episode she did with Alexei Sayle about TYO, you gain a lot of insight into her perspective! she also mentions misogynistic treatment like being asked to go make tea when they were doing script readings, not getting invited to a big BBC party because it was presumed she'd be Rik's plus-one, and getting groped at the BBC bar. it pissed me off on her behalf and partly prompted this post.

some specific accolades/accreditation/fun facts:

Rik crediting her with writing/conceiving the Kevin Turvey non-joke "All right, biting political satire: What do Lech Walesea and Menachem Begin have in common? They’ve both got foreign names! What do you mean it’s not funny?" (x)

Alexei Sayle in Thatcher Stole My Trousers crediting Lise with co-writing Turvey: "Lise was, like Linda for mine, a vital part of Rik’s career, co-writing both The Young Ones and Rik’s character Kevin Turvey..."

a 1987 source for Lise co-writing Turvey: "The assumption that women do not write comedy scripts was one with which Lise Mayer, co-writer of The Young Ones television series, has also had to contend. She started writing for Rik Mayall’s Kevin Turvey in the television series A Kick Up the Eighties..." (x)

Rowland Rivron (comedian who toured with The Comic Strip gang and lived with Rik and Lise) in What the f*** did I do last night?: "[Lise] also had the unenviable job of standing at the side of the stage when Rik was performing, and jotting down anything he said that was unscripted. If it got a laugh, it would be woven into the next night’s routine."

the only time i've ever seen a Rik Mayall/Ade Edmondson/Lise Mayer writing credit: for a poem called Distance which was collected in this anthology! Rik and Ade seem to have acted it out (or at least a version of it) in this 20th Century Coyote performance

Rik on Lise writing TYO: "‘She discovers different things: the comedy of embarrassment and awkwardness – she draws out the cheating and stealing that goes on in the house.’" (x) (Lise also says her "favorite comedy was always the comedy of embarrassment" in the Alexei Sayle podcast)

Rik: "... Lise Mayer wrote this great scene where I find a tampon in a handbag and it's my birthday party and I think it's a present because my character is Rick, who is such a git, he didn't know." (x)

Helen Lederer in Not That I'm Bitter, writing about being on The Young Ones: "[Lise] was known to be the brains behind it all, particularly the more surreal elements…"

she and Rik chose the bands (x)

Lise: “We’d have a table read at which point we’d discover that the script ran over an hour long, and then I’d have a sleepless night editing it.” Alexei: “You did that?” Lise: “Usually me, yeah…” (she later explains they'd present the script Monday and rehearsals were Tuesday, Wednesday-so she literally had one night to edit!) (x)

facts from the blu-ray commentary tracks:

Rick's yellow dungarees in Interesting were based off a picture of Lise in a similar pair

Lise wrote an essay about the tampon joke in Interesting so that the BBC didn't cut the scene (though they still edited it)

Paul Jackson (producer) credits Lise with arguing "you are seriously telling me that we cannot refer on television to something that happens to 50% of the population for about 30 years of their life? and we're not allowed to even refer to it" to make an executive back off about the tampon joke in a meeting

Lise came up with Neil's flowerpot covering in Nasty

Vyvyan/Vivian's name comes from Lise having lived in Vyvyan Terrace, Bristol

Lise thought of the cast switching costumes in Bambi (one of my favorite moments!!) (/end of commentary track facts)

this is guesswork, but i've seen Ben Elton and Rik Mayall's handwriting and i'm pretty sure the editing/handwriting on the bottom left on this script must be Lise's, which gives insight into what/how she wrote: (x)

i feel like it's easy for people to overlook or minimize Lise's impact, something that happens to female creators far too often. i hate when women's identities are framed around their association to a man-girlfriend to Rik in this case-which was the norm whenever i saw Lise discussed in articles/books/online discussions about TYO. it's important to know she was a writer and co-creator with her own identity and (underappreciated) contributions. The Young Ones (and Kevin Turvey, and things we don't even know she goes uncredited for) would not have been the same—or wouldn't have even existed—without her!

[misslacito]

Writers' Guild Awards 2020

Writers’ Guild Awards 2020

Seguimos con premios porque esto es un no parar. Esta vez hablamos de los Writers’ Guild Awards. Son premios para escritores. Nos vamos a Londres así que cambiamos de tercio, otra vez. Esto es ir y venir continuamente de un lado y otro del charco. Esta entrega tuvo lugar en el Royal College of Physiciansde Londres. Así que como veis no tiene nada que ver con el cine. Como es habitual en el blog,…

[peter-ash]

[oscarwetnwilde]

Young Comedians (Nick Hancock; Neil Mullarky; Stephen Fry; Helen Lederer; Jeremy Hardy) 1987

by Trevor Leighton

[cbarriefans]

Our beloved Carol Harriet Thorpe will be singing and dancing for Comic Relief tonight with the lovely Helen Lederer ( @helenledererblog ) -Support them from 18.45 on BBC 1!! #votehelenandharriet