海伦·莱德勒：“当我年轻的时候，我迷恋过罗温·艾金森和查尔斯王子。”

Helen Lederer was the first stand-up comedian in the country to show the funny side of being a single mother,with chaotic anecdotes about coping with a squally baby,nightmare nannies and nappy bags.As she explains in her blisteringly honest new memoir,Not That I’m Bitter, ‘the awkwardness of the whole thing was funny-and I knew I had to be authentic with audiences to make them laugh’.

That was back in1991,when her husband of two years,the journalist Roger Alton,walked out on her when she was 36 and their daughter was a year old.Although she says that Alton ‘has always been very present in Hannah’s life’,that was the end of what she calls ‘the domestie set-up’.

So she wrote about what she knew,as writers are always advised to do,when she returned to the comedy coal face to restart a performing career that had begun nearly ten years previously,when she was one of the few female comedians on the scene.Lederer’s speciality was a brand of nervous middle-class comedy,at a time when women’s insecurities were not a fashionable subject in the gladiatorial arena of mostly male stand-ups,so sharing the tribulations of single motherhood was an obvious niche.’Nowadays women comedians do talk about children and stuff,but back then nobody did,’she says.

The book could be said to be her bravest step of all,revealing her struggles with weight,low self-csteem,addiction to diet pills and steroid injections,as well as her now 34-year-old daughter’s short-lived anorexia.’Hannah gave me her blessing to include it since it’s in the past-and I hope that will be of help to others.I couldn’t omit anything because you can’t cherry-pick if you’re doing a memoir.Doing something this personal has been quite a huge thing-but it was so important for me.

Although the autobiography briefly mentions the flings she had in the early days with fellow comics Ben Elton,the late Rik Mayall and Harry Enfield (who dumped her,the churl),this is not an indiscreet  kis-and-tell.’Comedians at that time weren’t married with children,so [our  flings]weren’t serious stuff,like breaking up a marriage’,she says.’It was connecting physically and psychologically at a really exciting time.’

Instead,the only thing she bares in the memoir is her soul,as she explores how ‘a short,asthmatic show-off’became hooked on the adrenaline of counting the audience’s laughs,night after night,in one of the most dangerously addictive areas of showbusiness.

The child of an immigrant Czech-Jewish father and an English mother Lederer has mixed with the most and least privileged in the land.Before studying acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama she spent 18 months as a panicky young social worker for needy,problem-plagued families in North London’s Kentish Town.She was ‘let go’by Camden Council-‘Helen,you can either leave or you can leave immediately,’her team leader memorably put it.

‘I would go to bed worrying and wake up worrying,’she says.’I was just trying to be helpful.I was very naive and well-intentioned but I couldn’t sustain it,doing a job where you have to be near a panic button.’Yet 30 years later she came good as a successful ambassador for The Prince’s Trust,helping vulnerable young people to get their lives back on track.

‘When I was young,my crushes were Rowan Atkinson and Prince Charles,’she confides.’Charles is funny-and I like men who have irony,because that to me is heaven.He sent me off once to do a programme about his favourite bad poet,William McGonagall.And Camilla has always,always been friendly-just amazing,one of those warm people.’

Lederer’s story is very much about being ahead of her time,but unfortunately pioneers don’t always get the credit they deserve.As Ben Elton pointed out,she is’one of the early-and not sufficiently recognised-heroes of alternative comedy’.

Her expressive baby face,clectric-blue eyes and gift for observational comedy have since made her one of the industry’s most recognisable and versatile character actresses.She is best known for TV shows such as The Young Ones,Girls on Top,Bottom,Happy Families and Absolutely Fabulous,as well as radio shows such as her self-penned Life With Lederer on Radio 4 in 1990.Yet despite her decades of work,Lederer,now 69,tells me she still considers herself ‘no high status and not that easily categorised. But I can work a room…’

Dawn Frenchand Jennifer Saunders followed hot on ederer’s heels at London’s star-making Comedy Store back in the early 1980s,and she can’t help comparing herself with the dynamic duo.The entertainment industry ruthlessly divided people into’top-of-the-bill and the rest’,and there was an unofficial quota system for funny women on television,lest allowing in too many of these weird creatures at once might upset the male-dominated apple cart.

It’s not an equal playing field at all for older women’

Sexism ruled. Lederer’s book recalls a former BBC executive saying when he arrived at one event: ‘Don’t laugh,this is the wife.’ He was taking his cue from the kind of dinosaur comedians who made crass gags about mothers-in-law. A reporter colleague of mine once told me she was groped with impunity by another former BBC top dog at a media lunch during the 1980s,which doesn’t surprise Lederer.’People in positions of power assumed they could do that and not lose their jobs,’she says.

Although funny women are everywhere in broadcasting now, she believes that ‘it’s not an equal playing field at all for older women’. Yet she should feel proud of a consistently wide-ranging career that has encompassed everything from fiction-her 2015 debut novel Losing It was nominated for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize-to being herself in 2017’s Celebrity Big Brother.

She does full justice to serious subjects too. In 2012 she made a documentary, War Hero in My Family, about her Czech ancestors.Her Jewish immigrant grandfather Arnost Lederer had eavesdropped on German prisoners at Trent Park during the Second World War after being recruited by British Intelligence because he spoke their language.

Five years after War Hero in My Family the BBC reality series Home Front Hero uncovered another family secret, about her mother Anne’s work for the code-breakers at Bletchley Park. ‘I was thinking this might have been where my mother’s passion for crosswords began,’ she writes, wishing she had been able to ask her about that vital war work.

Her father died of a heart attack aged 52, when she was 21, and her mother just weeks before Lederer’s second marriage to GP Chris Browne in 1999. She admits that she has suffered from depression in the past, triggered by bereavement and from inheriting her usually ebullient father’s occasional dark moods, but then what comedian has not? It’s a gruelling game, although she maintains she still loves it.

In entertainment, timing is everything, and it’s a shame that by the time the career-changing film role that could have been made for Lederer was being cast she was the wrong age for it.

The journalist Helen Fielding’s 1996 comic novel Bridget Jones’s Diary, based on her newspaper column about the daily trials and chaotic life of a fictional thirtysomething, was the global best-seller that gave birth to so-called ‘chick-lit’.

Lederer, however,could be said to have got there first in the 1980s with her chaotic prototype-Bridgets, of whom the best known was the ditzy, hard-drinking Girl at the Bar in BBC2’s Naked Video sketch show series from 1986 to1991. When the film version of Bridget Jones’s Diary came out in 2001 Lederer was on the cusp of her 50s.

This is why American A-lister Renée Zellweger is once again on location in London for the fourth Bridget film, to be released next year, while Lederer is busy promoting her memoir about the snakes-and-ladders nature of showbusiness. The irony is not lost upon her, though she doesn’t dwell on it. ‘Renée really nailed her English accent, ‘ she concedes, ‘but yes, I would have liked to play Bridget…’

In her memoir she’s ahead of her time again in the unflinching way she depicts her experiences with theatrical agents – one of whom stole her and other performers’money. It should be required reading at drama schools. To paraphrase Noel Coward: don’t put your daughter into stand-up, Mrs Worthington, until you’ve read Lederer’s cautionary tales.

She also shines a light on the way many women felt they had to behave in the pre-#MeToodays,when ‘we were living like the men were-and I was never good at saying no’. She does confess, however, that when a producer insisted she come back to his room she got out of it by bursting into tears.

Her book has won her celebrity admirers already for telling it like it is (and was). Ben Elton called her ‘funny, wise, brilliant and brave’, while Stephen Fry pays tribute to her ‘very, very smart brain and warm and kindly heart’. Joanna Lumley considers her ‘funny,adorable and dazzling’, while Jo Brand hails her progress ‘through the comedy swamp of the 1980s’ as ‘fascinating, poignant and laugh-out-loudy’ .

For years after her first marriage collapsed her personal life was just herself, her career and her beloved Hannah, until a chance encounter gave her a second act. She met Dr Chris Browne when she was 44 at a Freemasons’ Ball. It was a very Sliding Doors moment that might never have happened, since both of them nearly didn’t go to the event. They have been very happy ever since, with the supportive, semi-retired Browne driving her to many of her gigs. ‘I’m a stepmother to three, ‘ says Lederer. ‘Chris’s children were young adules when heand I met. It’s not a chocolate-boxy kind of blended family, we just all respect each other. I see myself, maybe arrogantly, as an individual, not as a role [in her stepchildren’s lives]. It would be so false – “and now let’s make some brownies together!”- although I am getting excited about Chris’s 17-year-old grandson studying film.But I’m not a matriarch at Christmas – no way, I would be on the booze!’

One of her legacies will be the literary prize she launched in 2018 for comic fiction written by women, the Comedy Women in Print Award, after having served on the judging panel of the Women’s Prize For Fiction. ‘It became a way of addressing my anger from the 1980s at the lack of parity compared to men, while giving something back, ‘she writes.

Next year she plans to tour when the paperback of Not That I’m Bitter is out. ‘I love the adrenaline of festivals. ‘I enjoy that thing of someone welcoming guests and asking them about themselves.

It sounds like she’s found a new, much kinder comedy arena that she has made her own.