Book review: My Lady Parts: A Life Fighting Stereotypes, by Doon Mackichan

This inspiring memoir charts Doon Mackichan’s comedy career from old-fashioned variety shows through the rise of alternative comedy, and details her ongoing battle for equality. Review by Kirsty McLuckie

This is a timely memoir from comedian and actor Doon Mackichan. In a week that has seen allegations surface surrounding the behaviour of one high profile male comedian, her book tells something of the other side of the story.

Her career, as a funny, risque and very physical performer charts the journey of the entertainment industry from old-fashioned variety shows through the rise of alternative comedy. But she has not been just an observer of change, but a driver of it.

Her start in the industry was as the token woman on stand-up bills, subject to the misogyny of audience catcalls and a general attitude of “birds aren’t funny”. It was no more welcoming offstage in “fetid backstage areas of pubs or the Comedy Store where men would piss in the sink.”

Doon Mackichan PIC: Matt Crockett

She started appearing on television in the 80s, going from radical feminist comic to bit parts in light entertainment programmes with luminaries such as Hale and Pace and Jim Davidson.

She describes the experience as "bright, shiny and grim” and juxtaposes the backdrop of sexist tinnitus at her day job with her increasing activism – spray-painting graffiti on posters under cover of night, attending marches and speaking out even if her career was harmed by being branded difficult.

The advent of alternative comedy might have been a turning point, but she notes that all the sketch shows being commissioned at the time were exclusively led by men – Harry Enfield, Paul Whitehouse, Armstrong and Miller, Sean Hughes and Frank Skinner. Female comedians were pitching programme ideas at the time, but the prevailing thought was French and Saunders had filled the need for funny women to be seen on screen.

In this new, progressive comedy the female parts were marginally less stereotyped – fewer roles demanded that she play half-dressed bimbos, secretaries or sexually voracious cougars, but still the men got all the funny lines, while the women were mostly just there to supply the set-up to the jokes.

At the same time, the lucrative comedy panel show era started to feature one woman per show, but faced with often uninterested or even hostile co-panellists, you can understand the rage of the talented, funny Mackickan.

What is amazing is that she didn’t stop pushing for equality – particularly when you learn of her precarious financial position as a divorced mother, and the turmoil going on in her private life. Her description of her son’s serious illness and the need to keep working in between spending time with him in hospital is heartbreaking. But then, this is a woman who, faced with the challenge of raising money for her Edinburgh show, decided to do it by swimming the English Channel.

Hopefully times are changing for female comedians, but only because of the efforts of Mackichan and her generation. You can’t keep a good woman doon.

My Lady Parts, by Doon Mackichan, Canongate, £16.95.