by Gina Yashere
Helen and I became friends after this. Our friendship outlasted both her relationship with Richard Blackwood and her comedy career. Law had always been her passion.
I had an epiphany after this episode. I resolved to no longer give a damn what other comics thought of me. I obviously scared them! No longer would I sit staring out a window, almost in tears, wondering why these guys were so horrible to me. Fuck ’em all. I wasn’t here to make friends. I was going to be the best comedian I could possibly be, and they weren’t gonna be able to do shit but watch me succeed and hate me for it. And I would relish that hatred like a fine wine. I’d lick it, swirl it around in my mouth, then spit that shit into a little gross cup. Yup, my attitude changed overnight, and it made me so much happier.
I was going to give these comics something to be truly threatened by, and I never felt so free.
Slander by the stream will be heard by the frogs.
It was around this time that I knew that I’d have to come out to my mum. I had already come out to my brothers, who had shown absolutely no surprise when I’d told them I had a girlfriend. (In fact, Dele had told me he’d already known because a lesbian friend of his had kept teasing him, saying that she’d seen me at various gay clubs.) My biggest fear of coming out to my mum was not my fear of her homophobia, although that was a big concern, but more her anger at me ruining her standing within the Nigerian community. Although not telling her, and her finding out through the grapevine would be much worse. My mother is an important member of the London Nigerian high society and the belle of the ball wherever she goes, so the last thing I wanted to do was subject her to the malicious gossiping of aunties. “Look at her. She left Nigeria and refused to return with her husband, and now she has no idea one of her children is a muff muncher!”
There was no way I was going to sit down and do the “Mum, I have to tell you something” thing. That was for sitcoms and after-school specials. It wasn’t going to end in a hug and mutual declarations of love, so why put myself through that pain? At least I didn’t live under her roof anymore, so there was no chance of her throwing me out. My plan was to have no plan, and just drop it on her when the moment was right.
One day, while on my weekly phone check-in with her, Mum voiced her regular complaints about how she was falling behind her friends on the number-of-grandkids race, and how her two eldest daughters were of childbearing age but had so far failed her.
“When are you going to settle down?” she moaned. “You are a qualified engineer, you’ve had your fun with this clown business. When are you going to find a husband?”
“Never, Mum. I’m gay,” I blurted out. Just like that.
The phone went silent for a moment. “You are what?”
“Gay. Lesbian. Don’t like boys. I mean, you did tell me to stay away from them, and I suppose it stuck.”
More silence. Then: “What is this gay thing? It does not exist in Nigeria.”
“I assure you it does, Mum. It’s been a while since you went there.”
Another extended silence. Mum was genuinely taken aback by my confession, and speechless for probably the first time in both our lives. “My daughter is a gay clown.”
“You could say that, yeah.”
“Oh God. So you will never have children?” This was my mother’s biggest fear. Having a daughter unwilling or unable to fulfill her womanly duties reflected badly on her. I truly believed that Mum didn’t really care if I was a lesbian or a nun, as long as I procreated and increased her grandchild quota. She wouldn’t have cared if I’d mated with a goat. She would have proudly presented her half-goat grandchild to her friends: “Look at his little hoofs!”
“No, Mum. Just because I’m gay, doesn’t mean I won’t have children.”
“Hmm.” Mum seemed satisfied. “Well, don’t be running around telling people. I don’t want this to get back to Nigeria.”
And that was the end of the conversation. She made it clear that she did not want to discuss it any further, and would only refer to my girlfriends as “your friends.” No further acknowledgment. And you know what? I was more than happy with that. She knew who I was, and was still willing to be my mother. That was enough for me. I was not willing to try to force any more than that on her, and I didn’t feel I was missing out on anything at all. Even if I had been straight and had boyfriends, she wasn’t the kind of mum I could sit down and talk through my love problems with anyway. She wasn’t the mum you brought your boyfriends or girlfriends home to, unless it was the one you were going to marry. She wasn’t that mum you saw in the movies who hugged you, told you she loved you, and let you cry on her shoulder when you’d been dumped. As adults, my brothers and I kept our love lives completely separate. The whole point of leaving home was to live your lives in complete freedom, away from the judgment of your parents. We took that to heart.
From time to time Mum would grumble about my lesbianity, but I would shut her down easily. “But I’m Granny. I’m a reincarnation of your mother. Didn’t she say she’d come back doing what she wanted and not beholden to any man?”
Mum would just look at me. She couldn’t argue with that.
18
Be a Mountain or Lean on One
Being on Blouse and Skirt really helped cultivate a Black audience for me. I’d turn up for shows and people were coming to see me. I remember within my first year I was able to do my first hour set at a fancy arts center. It was a little room, a fifty-seat room, and it sold out. Oh my God! Fifty people have paid money to come and hear me do my jokes for an hour! I was so proud, as I’d been going for only eleven months.
The next several years I spent working as much as I could, traveling all over the UK and building my reputation brick by brick. I worked for a chain of comedy clubs called Jongleurs that had seventeen venues all over the country. There was lot of hatred for the Jongleurs brand, as they were seen as the McDonald’s of comedy, with their penchant for selling large carafes of cheap beer and welcoming hen and stag parties; but they gave me a lot of work when nobody else would, and as far as I saw it, people were people. I never believed in any comedy snobbery. I worked sporadically for other London clubs, such as The Comedy Store, the aforementioned Up the Creek, and The Balham Banana, a magnificent club that took over two rooms of a large South London pub. I did all this while demanding higher fees as a celebrity. It was a weird double life, but I was making a comfortable living.
Being recognized by Black people on the street from my TV work while still living in a one-bedroom flat in Tottenham and driving a Honda CRX (did I mention I loved that car?) was odd, though.
I took every small TV gig I could. I did many appearances as the token Black on TV panel shows and many talking-head shows, such as I Love the ’70s, I Love the ’80s, I love anything you can make a cheap TV documentary about, punctuated by rent-a-celebs. As a Black female comic, these were some of the very few TV opportunities available. It was great exposure, but TV execs then used my ubiquitous talking-head appearances as an excuse to not book me to host shows, even though white male comics appeared just as often on these and suffered no such typecasting. Judging by my conversations with other comics since leaving the UK, the situation doesn’t seem to have changed. Tokenism is still prevalent.
There used to be a variety show on TV called Big Break, hosted by Jim Davidson, in which he introduced stand-up comics to a larger audience. It was exactly the type of show on which I would have gotten mainstream exposure and paid well. My agent at the time told me they were booking and paying a thousand pounds. That was a shitload of money at the time—a thousand quid to go on and do a ten-minute set? This was at a time when I was earning twenty quid here, five quid there, a hundred quid here, so a thousand pounds was a lot of money.
But I had a problem with Jim Davidson. He’s a British comic who was hugely famous in the ’70s and ’80s in England, that super white-working-class-male era of British comedy that I mentioned earlier. A lot of the jokes were very racist, ableist, and homophobi
c. One of his most famous routines included a Caribbean character he named Chalky White, whom he portrayed with a bad West Indian accent, usually as lazy and abusing drugs. Although he vehemently denied that his act was racist, as time went on, the accusations continued to mount.
When I was a kid, Davidson had a massive audience for his stand-up on TV. But when I watched him, he always made me feel uncomfortable. Even though I was young, I thought it was obvious he was ridiculing this Black dude he was portraying in his Chalky White routine. Strangely, a lot of Black people laughed at those jokes—including my mum. This confused me as a kid, as I couldn’t understand why my mum would laugh at a guy for blatantly mocking a Black man. But again, at the time, there were many prejudices Black people held against one another, and it wasn’t unusual for someone, even a Black person, to buy into the stereotype of Caribbeans being inferior. I wasn’t personally offended by his jokes, as my mum had always told me I’m African, not Caribbean, so I didn’t think the jokes pertained to me. But this fact didn’t make his jokes any less offensive; they were still based on humor that was anti-Black. At that age I couldn’t articulate all of this, but I knew I didn’t like this comedian, I didn’t find him funny, and I didn’t understand why other people did.
Jim Davidson’s fame started to dwindle in the ’90s, as more folks realized how racist his material was. A few years ago, Piers Morgan challenged him on the accusation that some of his material was racist. His response? “I don’t know what Black people think. I have not met them all yet.”3 Although he no longer performs the Chalky White character—he claims it’s because he doesn’t hear the West Indian accent much anymore.
Accusations of his racism, homophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiment continue to follow him. In 2007, his appearance on Hell’s Kitchen left many accusing him of homophobia, as viewers had witnessed him bullying one of the contestants, who was openly gay. The Telegraph wrote of his 2014 Edinburgh Festival Fringe show, “the sight of a white person going for laughs by impersonating non-white ones is as depressingly retrograde as it is dull.”4 But at the beginning of my career, in the late ’90s, Davidson was still clinging to his fame. The BBC still gave him work and a platform. The same BBC that had begrudgingly given us the graveyard shift for The A Force.
When my agent brought up a possible booking on Big Break, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I had just started to build my name, and I was very pro-Black and pro-Pride. I really wanted to go on the show because it was a massively high-profile gig, and the money was fantastic, but as a Black person, I couldn’t stand on a stage with this guy because I knew it would be interpreted as me validating him. My agent was furious. He even threatened to dump me if I didn’t do the show. But I held my ground. At that point I had already been on Blouse and Skirt and I had already built up a really good following among the Black community. If I had gone on that show, my community would have looked at me as a sellout and a coconut. I knew that my childhood instinct had been correct, so I turned the show down.
There was a white male comic I was quite friendly with—a big, tall man with a shaved head. He looked like one of the East End skinheads who had chased me as a kid, but he always waxed lyrical about how left-wing he was, how progressive, that he was married to a Black woman, that he was working-class, an anti-racist, a human rights crusader. He always used to wear a badge of honor about how conscious he was. I believed him at the time. But then he did the show with Jim Davidson and I lost all respect for him.
About three months later, I bumped into this same comic in the green room of the Battersea Jongleurs club, and being young, dumb, and very open about my feelings, I blurted out, “You’re a fucking hypocrite.” I said it in front of other comics, so that obviously made him feel even worse.
“What do you mean?”
“You always go on about how principled you are, but you forgot those lofty ideals for a grand.”
He became very upset, and his wife tried to defend him. “No, he never even spoke to Jim Davidson. He stayed in his dressing room until it was time for him to come out and record his segment.”
“Yeah, he stayed in his dressing room, but we’re not seeing that. We’re seeing him shaking hands with this prick on TV, so I don’t wanna hear any more of his views on racism and social justice.”
This comedian has hated me ever since.
He wasn’t the only comic I felt had sold out. A couple of Black comics also did the show. I couldn’t hate on them as much, as I knew how difficult it was for a Black comedian to get a break, and for some, ambition trumped integrity.
Later in my career, I’d often get booked for a TV show called Mock the Week, which was similar to Blouse and Skirt except it was made for white people, and therefore had a much bigger budget and a better, regular time slot. I filled their token spot. I did about eight episodes, and at the time, I held the records for the most frequently booked female and Black guest. I felt like they kept using me when complaints were lodged that they didn’t have enough women or ethnic minorities. I remember a meeting I had once with an executive at Channel 4, one of the biggest British channels. The woman said to me, “We already have a Black comedian on the network. Yes, we already have Richard Blackwood.” She actually said that to my face, which confirmed to me that there was a quota. As time went on, I realized that I was never going to get to host the show, or anything like it, although I was consistently good. Other (white, male) comics, like Russell Howard, could go on and sell stadiums based on his TV work, but there just didn’t seem to be the same opportunities for Black comedians.
Basically, the TV industry in England is run by white, middle-class men. They tend to book people that look and sound like them, whom they can relate to. You switch on the TV and that’s all you see. Call it racism, call it nepotism. It all leads to the same thing: a dearth of Black faces in positions of decision-making and power, which in turn becomes a dearth in front of the screen. I didn’t complain, though. I just kept on doing what I was doing, cultivating an audience of people who wanted to see me and hoping that eventually that audience would become so huge the industry decision-makers couldn’t ignore me anymore.
For a while I tried to fit into what I thought they wanted. I tried to tone down my Blackness on TV shows. I tried to avoid controversy, present an “Oh look—happy, shiny Gina” vibe. I couldn’t keep it up, as it just wasn’t me. I couldn’t change my voice enough, or my mannerisms. I knew they wanted their Black comics to be safe and nonthreatening. I was often compared unfavorably to other Black female comics who presented more feminine and therefore were more palatable.
There is a vast gamut of white comedians, ranging from the super offensive to the surreal to the buffoonish, and everything in between. In the UK, one Black comedian on TV has to represent us all. Stephen K. Amos was on the scene a long, long time before he got his break on TV. He did one show that didn’t quite work out, and the failure was used as an excuse not to book other Black comics. The networks would never have said, “Oh, this white guy’s show didn’t work out—that’s it, we can’t use any more white guys.” But when it came to Black comedians, we were all tarnished with the same brush. Stephen K was perfect. He’s very middle class, well spoken, not too offensive, gay, and therefore nonthreatening. Basically, he ticked all the boxes. Yet they still treated him like a pariah when his one show didn’t work out.
When it came to my own career, there were those who said, “She has a chip on her shoulder. Maybe she’s not getting the opportunities because she’s not funny!” But it was not just me. It’s the way Black comedians are perceived. I worked my ass off, I was funny—consistently funny—and I went on all the shows that kept using me again and again. I knew I was doing something right. But I was not getting the opportunities comics like Michael McIntyre and Jimmy Carr were getting. I did shows with Michael McIntyre—I used to headline and he was the opening act. But I still couldn’t host my own show. Time and time again, I had to learn that in showbiz, it doesn’t really matter how hard yo
u work or how talented you are. If your face doesn’t fit, if you don’t have the right look or the right sound, then forget it.
I still nursed dreams of moving to America and making it big there. I knew racism was just as prevalent in the US, and there was probably also a glass ceiling there for Black talent, but I figured I’d at least be a millionaire by the time I hit it, and I could cry in my piles of money. If England was not going to recognize me, I could fulfill my childhood dream of living in California and making it big. But I decided I’d give everything I’ve got in the UK first before giving up.
My agent at the time encouraged me to take whatever little gigs I could get with the BBC, with the idea that the next opportunity would be for my own show. He kept telling me that I was next in line, that if I did this, did that, played the game, appeared in all the shows they wanted me to appear in, played second fiddle to whoever they wanted me to play second fiddle to, that when the time came I’d get my own show.
In 2001, the BBC launched their first digital channel, BBC Choice, which later became BBC3. To fill an eight-week gap in their schedule, they hired a bunch of comics and performers, giving each one a nightly talk show for one week, as a kind of audition, with a plan to award the best one a permanent slot. I was the only Black comedian picked for this talk-show experiment.
I’d been waiting for an opportunity like this my entire career, and I put everything into it. I worked around the clock. I made sure they employed Black writers, so we all could get a stab at some mainstream success (including my ex-nemesis, and now good friend, Curtis Walker). Whatever times the writers came in, I was right there with them. I took stuff home and wrote, I’d travel anywhere and everywhere to film skits, and I bent over backwards to be the easiest of easygoing.
