Perkins is famous for her comedy, honed on a spectacularly wide gamut of television shows and comedy stages across four decades. Photo / Supplied
Perkins is famous for her comedy, honed on a spectacularly wide gamut of television shows and comedy stages across four decades. Photo / Supplied
British comedian Sue Perkins tells Greg Bruce about what brought her to Auckland and why her life’s sometimes no joke.
In the third episode of her new adventure travel series Perfectly Legal, now screening on Netflix, British comedian Sue Perkins takes the psychedelic drug mescaline while on a hike in Bolivia.
As the drug begins to take effect, she hunches over and chunders aggressively into some shrubbery.
In a voiceover, recorded later, she says, “Sorry about that. Just so you know, I went on to puke for five hours straight.”
Perkins is famous for her comedy, honed on a spectacularly wide gamut of television shows and comedy stages across four decades, but parts of her life have been the opposite of funny.
That’s an insight you get during the mescaline-taking scene in Perfectly Legal.
“It changed my interiority completely,” she says now.
“It was amazing, but it was a heck of a cost. And I think if you’re going to do something like that, fine, but just do it with some sincerity. It hurts me to think that people just go off and do this for shits and giggles, because I have seen first-hand how much it means to the communities that are able to produce, harvest and take that drug.
“I did feel really lucky that I was able to get that window into that life and that experience and it was extraordinary, but God it’s hardcore. I mean, it rinses you on a level I can’t even describe. You are just taken to pieces and then put back together in a way that you didn’t expect. And it is utterly exhausting physically and it’s utterly stupefying mentally.”
After the intense emotional ride of Perfectly Legal, when she got a phone call asking her to come to Auckland to host the second season of TVNZ’s light comedy quiz show Patriot Brains, she couldn’t get on the plane fast enough.
Patriot Brains is a comedy quiz show featuring two teams of three, one from Australia and one from New Zealand, in which each team nominally tries to answer a series of questions about their respective countries, but in which the real aim of the game is to make jokes, often at the host’s expense.
Or, as Perkins puts it: “This started out as Australia versus New Zealand, but happily what it became was, ‘Let’s laugh at the idiot Brit’.”
Patriot Brains is a comedy quiz show featuring two teams, one from Australia and one from New Zealand. Photo / Supplied
Sue Perkins is famously not an idiot.
Although she grew up in a lower-middle-class home in South London – her dad worked at a second-hand car dealership and her mother was a secretary and then a stay-at-home parent – Perkins did well at school and ended up at Cambridge University.
The culture shock there was real: She was 18 and had never been in a taxi, never eaten an avocado or Chinese food, had hardly ever been on holiday.
“I met really smart, worryingly smart people, and that raised my game quite substantially and it was quite intimidating,” she says, “But we were all just kids. I look back now and laugh at these people, who seemed like intellectual giants, but they were actually children.”
She left university with what she describes as no transferable skills and no real idea of what she was going to do. She taught for a while but what she really wanted was to write.
She and a friend, Mel Giedroyc, started doing sketch performances, twice took their show to the Edinburgh fringe, attracted some attention there and began to get work in television.
Comedy legends Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders asked them to write for their hugely popular television sketch comedy show and that led to Perkins working on one of the biggest sitcoms of the 90s, Absolutely Fabulous.
Comedy became her life, which was something she never expected.
She has now worked across radio, stage, and screen, achieving perhaps her greatest fame as host of the first seven seasons of The Great British Bake Off. She has written two books and is in the midst of writing her third.
The career fluidity is important, she says, because it keeps her fresh and engaged.
“I don’t ever want to get to the stage where I’m just phoning something in. I can’t imagine having the gift of this job and then feeling like that trapped within it. That would be hell, genuinely, because I do choose quite different, random, diverse things to do. I always approach each day with wonderment: ‘What’s it going to be like? Who are these people going to be?’ It’s like the New Zealand job. I didn’t know anybody, and it was just great. Wow. I’m in the heart of Auckland and I’m in the main TV studios and I’m like, ‘What a thing. What a time to be alive’.”
Comedy has changed over the course of her career, she says, and it’s changed for the better. There is now more space for diverse voices, and for people to be their authentic selves on stage.
“I think the days of the generic, “My mother in law…”, or “Isn’t it funny when you put socks in a wash, and they all come out whatever” are gone. Now, you can find common areas of humanity by somebody being very specific. I don’t know what it’s like, for example, growing up in foster care, but I want to hear comedy and jokes that are cited from that person’s real authentic experience, and it will make me learn, it will make me laugh, it will make me feel huge fellowship. And, to me, that’s what comedy is about.
“I want to know what individuals are like. That’s how we grow as human beings, listening to individual stories. And certainly, a lot of the really successful comedy shows that I watch are born out of a narrative that’s incredibly personal. They’re not always laugh-out-loud funny, but bittersweet. And I think if you go to Edinburgh or Melbourne or any of these places and you watch a comedy hour, they’ll be inflected with sometimes as much sadness as sweetness. Look at [Hannah Gadsby’s landmark show] Nanette, for example. I think that’s real progression because it’s not just jokes that you can roll out at any venue at any time. It’s not just an identical kind of soulless perfunctory performance. It’s, ‘Here’s a piece of me and like it or lump it, that’s who I am.”
Comedy has changed over the course of her career, says Perkins, and it’s changed for the better. Photo / Supplied
Part of who Sue Perkins is, is someone who has struggled with mental health issues.
After being diagnosed with a benign brain tumour in 2015, she suffered extreme anxiety, which she describes as, “a prison that I never thought I’d get out of”. She has, she says, huge sympathy for anyone undergoing mental health struggles, which she says is “a kind of interminable hell” in which you’re locked inside your own malfunctioning brain.
“I think the culture of celebrity means that people sometimes think that it insulates you from certain things, from certain feelings. And I think it’s important to say that it doesn’t and that I’m not always very good at prioritising my mental health, and at times I’ve allowed myself to get drained, I’ve allowed myself to get unwell, and it’s important to just keep a check on it all the time and to not feel that it’s indulgence.”
She has learned to take better care of her mental health, and by doing that, she says she’s now a better person to those around her.
“I’m less reactive, I’m less stressed, I’m less miserable, I’m less paranoid.”
She says she doesn’t like having her mental health written about in the media – it makes her anxious – but she’s not ashamed to admit she’s struggled.
“I’m not going to be made to feel sad about that because it’s the truth. And the truth is important, very important. So, yeah, as awkward as it makes me feel, it’s okay to say it, that people can have struggles and problems, and it’s alright to put your hand up and go, ‘Actually, I am not in a good way, and I need some help’.”
She still experiences anxiety but is good at noticing when her thinking is starting to spiral and knowing what to do about it: walk the dog, meditate, do crafts, play the piano, and, ultimately, work.
“I’m lucky. My job brings endless joy to me. I can’t say that it brings endless joy to anyone else, but it brings endless joy to me, and that’s important.”
