Some of Arabella Weir’s best friends are from Fife, but of all the places in Scotland she loves, Dunfermline isn’t high up the list.
“My granny who lived there just wasn’t as nice as the Melrose granny,” she says.
“I would say if you were to bury my heart, I would probably want it buried in Melrose, because that was where my very favourite granny lived, and I always had very happy times there.”
Properly approved Paisley accent
Fans of The Fast Show, which made Weir one of the most recognisable sketch comedy stars of the 1990s, might be surprised by her close association with Scotland, given she has a thoroughly English-sounding accent.
Viewers of the Glasgow-set suburban sitcom Two Doors Down might be a lot less surprised, on the other hand, as Weir’s David Tennant-approved Paisley accent holds its own alongside co-stars Elaine C. Smith and Alex Norton.
Talking family is important here, because we’re discussing Weir’s new stand-up show Does My Mum Loom Big in This?, a piece of comedy confessional about her – to put it mildly – fraught relationship with her mother, which has informed her own life and parenting.
It also inadvertently brought her perhaps her greatest success; the nationally-famous Fast Show catchphrase which partly inspired the show’s title.
Does my bum look big in this?
“Me being overweight was the particular thing she focused on all the time,” says Weir of her late mother Alison.
“It’s why I eventually came up with ‘does my bum look big in this?’, because my mum’s obsession with my weight got me to be obsessed with it, and that got me to come up with that catchphrase.”
Anyone who turned on a television between 1994 and 1997 will know the words “does my bum look big in this?”, a phrase which has passed into common conversation.
Weir originated it through her Fast Show character ‘Insecure Woman’, who would turn up and demandingly ask the question about her backside in the most inappropriate circumstances.
Perhaps the names most readily associated with the Fast Show are its creators Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, but as performers and writers, Weir and Caroline Aherne were new women’s voices in a British sketch comedy landscape which until then had only found room for Victoria Wood, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders.
Insecure Woman was her biggest Fast Show crossover hit.
However, Weir was also behind ‘Girl Men Can’t Hear’, whose useful suggestions would be ignored in meetings, until a man repeated it and got a braying round of applause, and ‘Different with Boys’, a tough and articulate woman who would transform into a pliable baby-talker when confronted with a man.
Her characters have created tropes about female communication which still exist to this day.
Shaped by her mother
“My relationship with my mother shaped who I am and why I became funny, as a way of protecting myself and deflecting,” says Weir.
“Funny when I was wee, I mean – a muck-abouter and all that.
“Mothering is uniquely difficult, and wonderful and rewarding, and it seemed rich territory for a comedy show.
“I don’t suppose I would have done it if my mother was alive, but of all the things that were wrong with her – which was a lot – she did have a very good sense of humour, so maybe I would.
“My entire career I wanted to do a solo show, but I never had the guts. Then finally I thought, ‘right, I’m going to do it’, and it was well met.”
She’s not really being unfair…
Without context, it might appear Weir is being unfair on her late mother, a schoolteacher who was from Easter Ross but raised in Selkirk (her father, the Dunfermline-born British diplomat and former Ambassador to Egypt Michael Weir, is also deceased).
She explains the roots of the show succinctly.
“I had a very turbulent, dysfunctional relationship with my mother,” says Weir.
“I was never estranged from her, but it was combative.
“She was not in any shape or form equipped to have children, either emotionally or logistically, although she’d been a pretty unloved and neglected only child herself.
“She was in a permanent state of rage, with me specifically, because she felt that everything I did was to annoy her.
Not an easy cross to bear
“When I was eight this became about me being fat, she would go on and on about me doing it to annoy her.
“She would say she loved me, but as they say, words are cheap. There’d be a lot of, ‘I love you so much’, and then – she swore a lot – ‘I can’t bear the ****ing sight of you’.
“One day she said, ‘do you know, of all my children, you’re the one I regret having’. Then when I got upset she said, ‘oh for god’s sake, you always take everything the wrong way!’
“She was very flamboyant and bohemian, incredibly bright, and she would have a row with a paper bag – probably because she liked the sound of her own voice and she had a brilliant mind. She was very witty, but she was cruel.”
A misery memoir it is not
If this sounds like misery memoir territory, let’s remind ourselves that Weir is one of the finest comedy actors and writers of her era.
Does My Mum… was a hit when it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019, Weir’s first appearance there since a student drama production 40 years before.
“There’s quite a lot of alarming stuff in the show, but there’s quite a lot of comedy in it,” she says.
Rich and varied career
Weir’s own career has been a rich blend of quality, quantity and diversity, including guest-starring in Skins, Doctor Who and another Glaswegian classic, Takin’ Over the Asylum, and appearing as herself on Celebrity MasterChef, Celebrity Mastermind and the BBC’s Food and Drink.
In 2003 she co-created and starred alongside Richard E. Grant in the BBC Two series Posh Nosh (her co-creator was Jon Canter, who’s also co-written Does My Mum Loom Big in This?), and for 20years she’s written novels – including the inevitably-titled bestseller Does My Bum Look Big in This? Diary of an Insecure Woman – and the 2011 non-fiction book The Real Me is Thin: or Why All Women Think They’re Fat.
So, what did her mum think?
What did Weir’s mother think of her fame?
“She wasn’t a great encourager,” she sighs. “I once said to her, ‘I think you’re jealous of me’, and she said, ‘I think you’re right’.
“She was capable of great insight, she’d be incredibly honest about herself at times, but not often. I think she was envious that I’d managed to make a career for herself, which she certainly would have loved… any career, I mean.
‘She was a sort of Miss Brodie’
“She was a very successful and popular teacher, a sort of Miss Brodie, but didn’t regard that as success. She’d have loved to be a novelist or an academic.
“But Mum really was incapable of liking anything about herself. What’s that saying, you can’t love somebody else if you don’t love yourself? That was probably true of her.”
Weir says none of her family – her two older brothers and younger sister, and her two twentysomething children – have seen the show “by design, mine and theirs.
“I don’t want my kids seeing it and I’d rather my siblings didn’t… it’s about my relationship with my mum, not theirs.”
Her own mothering skills
She does, however, discuss her own abilities as a mother in there.
“It would have been a bit shabby if I hadn’t done that,” she says.
“Of course, the irony is that you go, ‘here’s my mother, look how awful she was, guess what an amazingly brilliant mother I’m going to be… oh! Looks like I made some mistakes as well…’
“Not at the level of my mother’s, but I hope I make it clear that I understand it’s a uniquely hard job, that there are many pitfalls one can fall into and that you have to police yourself 24 hours a day not to.
“So I hope I am sympathetic about my mother – or understanding at least, of how hard it was for her.”
Single parents both
Mother and daughter were both single parents for the last decade of their children’s upbringing.
Weir says that perhaps she might write her next show about her father, who was “pretty remote”, but at least more agreeably fulfilled in his career and second marriage.
His job is why she was born in San Francisco, raised between Washington DC, Cairo, London and Bahrain, although she considers herself ‘culturally Scottish’.
And then there was Dad
“It would be the natural thing to do, to discuss my relationship with my dad and how that informed the many relationships I’ve had with men,” she says.
“You know, he was from Dunfermline, he kept his cards close to his chest. I found it easier to be around Dad, but he was not a great one for expressions or physical displays of love and adoration. He was a classic Fifer.”
Amid it all, Weir says this show is ultimately a celebration of motherhood in all its shapes and forms.
‘Don’t feel sorry for me’
“I want audiences to take away that mothering is hard, but it can still be filled with comedy and drama. As with all life, it’s about understanding other people’s journeys and motivations.
I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me, that’s not what it’s about.
“It’s ‘if you know me from being a funny person off the telly, here’s how I got here’. I mainly want people to have a fun night, but one they’d maybe think about a bit more than if I’d just told a bunch of jokes.’
- Arabella Weir: Does My Mum Loom Big in This? is at the Byre Theatre, St Andrews, tomorrow night, and then at Perth Theatre on Friday January 28. www.arabellaweir.co.uk
