With her endearing, lopsided grin and large, quizzical blue eyes, she’s the comic actress you know by sight but whose name may escape you. Yet, during the alternative comedy boom at the beginning of the 1980s, Helen Lederer was a regular fixture in top television comedy. As a regular on The Young Ones, French and Saunders, Bottom and Absolutely Fabulous (in which she played the role of ditsy magazine journalist, Catriona), the stand-up comedian appeared on screen with the cream of British comedy talent royalty.
Helen Lederer admitted to once cheating on Harry Enfield in her memoir
But now, with the publication of her candid and rollickingly funny autobiography, Not That I’m Bitter (the title, she points out, is ironic), Lederer, 69, is reflecting on never quite hitting the big time in the way she craved.
She reckons this had a lot to do with timing. “I was always ahead of my time,” she asserts of the decade when one funny woman – or, at most, a tight double act – was generally more than enough funny women for most TV programmers.
“You look back and say: ‘Why didn’t I get to nirvana? What could I have done more of?’” she says. “But then you remember that the top slots were already taken – by Jennifer Saunders, for example – and there was no more room for others who offered up their own writing.
“People would actually ask me: ‘What is it like to be a woman and funny?’ One is held accountable for being a female comedian and I’ve often been asked to justify it as a life choice. And not just that; I was funny and ambitious, which definitely wasn’t seen as a comfortable mix.”
Lederer says being able to make people laugh is the one certainty she has in life. “I always wanted to do what my mother referred to as the ‘showing off’. I’ve written the book to prove that I was there, and not always as the bridesmaid. Partly, it’s showing off to myself.”
Lederer, who grew up Eltham, in South-east London, was friends with many of the stars she worked with, including Ben Elton and Rik Mayall, whom she first met when they were regulars at the Comedy Store club in London’s Soho. But she always knew where she stood in the pecking order once they made it to TV.
“Don’t crash my laughs,” Rik warned her once. And she says she never did. She would deliver what, in the industry, is known as the feed – the line that precedes the punchline – before waiting and ensuring she remained in character. “I was very earnest in the 80s,” she admits. “Like a comedy secretary.”
However, she was always happy to be with the “girls”, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, “because they were fun and jolly”.
There were also liaisons with fellow comedians, including a half-hearted encounter with Mayall at the 1983 Edinburgh Festival, which ended when “a bee decided to fly into the room”. They went for a walk instead.
“We reached the bit where all the big shops are when Rik asked me, ‘Shall I buy you a dress?’” she remembers. “I said ‘No, I think I’m OK, thanks’. It was clear that none of us were looking for an actual relationship.”
But it did lead to work on The Young Ones (as a building society cashier) and Bottom (as a Moldavian princess/prostitute).
In the mid-80s, Lederer dated Harry Enfield, who was seven years younger and hadn’t yet hit the big time.
“He had offered to be my boyfriend the summer before and, eventually, after being reluctant and a bit mean, I succumbed to being temporarily adored,” she says.
That was until she two-timed him and he found out.
“Harry was getting very famous with his ‘Loadsamoney’ character, which I was finding difficult. He arrived at my flat with a perfume named Poison. I felt sick, ashamed and horribly rumbled. I hate hurting people.”
A few years later, he generously cast her in The Harry Enfield Show… albeit as a sex worker.
Helen Lederer with Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson in Bottom
Despite her impeccable comic timing and extremely clever material (and Lederer is a deeply clever woman – her first husband and father of her daughter Hannah was editor of The Observer newspaper), she confesses that making her way as a young comedienne was a pathway of pitfalls. “I go towards danger, I’m attracted to it,” admits this Wales-born daughter of an English mother and Czech father.
One time, for example, she accidentally auditioned as a masseuse. She fled the massage parlour in her duffle coat when it was clear what she was really expected to do with the talcum powder and oil.
“Everyone has their limits,” she says with a smile. “Was it the oil, and then the powder, or the other way round? And how much of each? Too little and I’d be basting, too much and I’d be dealing with some kind of clay vase.”
Then there was the day she ended up in a strange session with a now-deceased drama tutor, who invited another student to join them for a “creative” afternoon at her flat.
“This mainly involved [the tutor] sitting on the sofa and watching to see if we might become lesbians. I obliged as far as I could, to prove my ‘creativity’. I placed myself in situations that today’s generation might question,” she adds with admirable understatement. “These are very different times.
“There is a boldness in young female comedians today – someone can jump on stage and talk about their bush, and nobody turns a hair…
“It was a different game with my early stand-up. I didn’t do it to shock. If I talked about things like that, it wasn’t to ‘out’ it; it was how I felt about it.”
She says it’s inevitable that voices would be heard in a different way today.
“That’s the exciting thing about society, it’s just evolving all the time. #MeToo is a patent reflection of people having voices who hadn’t voices in the past,” she says, approvingly.
“Moving to a place where there is a more egalitarian society, what’s not to like? You can’t stop that. In my mother’s day, it would have been unheard of.”
Sexual politics were slowly evolving when Lederer was in her prime.
She explains: “The difference between dodgy and kinky was not made apparent so much, which I’d like to think has paved the way for the conversations we are now able to have about consent.
“Women could initiate sex and, if you had someone in a powerful position, well in those days they wouldn’t lose their jobs, as they would now.
“There were a lot of ingredients going on; it explains the canvas. In those days, if we came across someone who seriously ‘leched’, the general idea was to maybe report them and then wait 20 years for something to be done about it.”
Before attending the Central School of Speech and Drama, using an inheritance from her grandmother, Lederer was accepted as a part-time social worker with Camden Council and a part-time researcher. She then enrolled on an MA course in criminology.
But she says she still needed to act. “I had to keep trying. Even when I was trapped in my social work job, I wanted to find a way to do it.”
This was 1981 when, she says, tutors could still put their hands up people’s skirts without any comeback, because they had positions of power.
“This style of behaviour was accepted as bohemian and almost characterful. It wasn’t particularly pleasant, but there it was.”
An early experience was being flashed on a train by a man who told her and her friend “in a smiley way” that they were “getting plump in all the right places”.
“He then flashed something which wasn’t a torch.”
She told her parents, they told the police, and she had to suffer the embarrassment of having to use the word “plump” in front of two police officers in her sitting room.
“My friend didn’t have to because she didn’t tell her parents,” she recalls. “After my flasher whistle-blowing, I felt it was easier to just go along with things.
“I don’t see myself as a victim: I wanted to be a better actress,” she insists. “I felt I could go far, and sometimes it was quicker to say ‘yes’ not ‘no’.
“Surely I could summon up the good manners to agree to a bit of sex if someone had the temerity to ask?
“What person hasn’t done that? It’s not that unusual, especially if you were single, not married.”
Harry Enfield, Stephen Fry, Helen Lederer and Tony Slattery
Lederer has been married to her second husband, Chris, a GP, since 1999. Behind her defensive candour, she admits, is a more fragile persona.
“My character is not assertive. I’m quite people-pleasing and I’m mystified how I got myself in certain situations.”
An example of this, she says, is her appearance on reality TV shows, including Splash!, the diving competition (“I said ‘yes’ before I found out about the dive bit.”).
Her autobiography is at times brutally honest. “If I was very, very famous, I wouldn’t have had to put in half the stuff I have,” she explains. “I have got grubby, and it isn’t pretty at times. I handed the manuscript to the publisher thinking they would take some things out.”
Fortunately they didn’t.
“What I really want when people read the book is for them to laugh,” she insists.
As she is genuinely hysterical, how could they not?
Not That I’m Bitter by Helen Lederer (Mirror Books, £20) is published on April 11. To pre-order, visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25