Nine things we learned from Sara Pascoe’s Desert Island Discs
Comedian and writer Sara Pascoe has built a career on turning the awkward, the intellectual, and the deeply personal into comedy gold.
From fantastical stories about Mariah Carey, to a first gig where no one laughed, to performing on many of the biggest stages in the country, Sara shares the soundtrack of her life with Lauren Laverne.
Here are nine things we learned from her Desert Island Discs…
1. Her worst heckler is her own brain
“People who haven’t done stand-up always think the worst thing must be a heckle,” Sara explains to Lauren. “They think that would be the nightmare, and you’d burst into tears, go home and be sad.”
In fact, it’s the internal critic that is much scarier. “The way you heckle yourself in your own brain when you are trying to write something is so much worse, and it's so loud, because every single sentence it’s going, ‘who cares? This is so bad’. And you have to go, ‘yes, but I'm still going to finish it and then I'm going to edit it and make it better.’”
2. Her parents met in an unusual way
Sara’s mum, Gail, is a woman who makes things happen. After seeing Sara's father, Derek, performing on Top of the Pops with his band Flintlock in 1976, “she absolutely knew in that moment she was going to marry him and have his children.”
That didn’t happen by fate or accident, Sara laughs. “She made it happen. She found out where he lived. Before manifesting was invented, you had to get on a bus to just sit on his lawn.” Eventually they started dating and not long afterwards, Sara was born.
3. Sara is full of admiration for her ‘astonishing’ mum
After her parents separated, that same determination saw Gail raise three young children as a single parent while working and educating herself. “My mum has a PhD, which is astonishing, not because she’s not a very intelligent woman,” Sara explains, but because she “left school early with few qualifications, she did everything the hard way, with kids.” She took evening courses while working in administration in the NHS and “clawed her way to financial stability”.
Sometimes we’d get home and wake her up because we'd have to fall into the bath from this high window.Sara on sneaking home after nights out as a teenager.
4. Sara was an early adopter of Romford’s nightlife
Growing up in Romford, Sara describes herself and her sister Cheryl as ‘feral’ teenagers who started clubbing at 14 and 12 respectively. Their mum tried to stop it, locking the windows to prevent them from going out. “We broke a window really high in the bathroom that she didn't know about, and there was a ladder in the back garden behind the shed.”
They would lean the ladder against the house to get back inside after a night out. “Sometimes we’d get home and wake her up because we'd have to fall into the bath from this high window.”
5. Her father used to lock himself in a cupboard to play jazz
Even though her father is a professional saxophone player, Sara is adamant: “I hate the sound of the saxophone. I hate jazz. Someone practising the alto saxophone is probably the worst sound in the world.” This aversion stems from her childhood, where her father soundproofed a coat cupboard with carpet underlay to practice. “He would lock himself in there playing the saxophone for hours and hours and hours.”
Despite those strong feelings, what does she choose as her third choice of disc to take to the mythical desert island? “Last year my dad released an 18-CD collection, 40-hours long, of improvised jazz, with him on saxophone.” She picks a track called Telemachus from this album by Derek Pascoe and his friend Chris Martin (not that one!). She calls her choice a form of exposure therapy: “Like if you’re scared of spiders, they throw hundreds of spiders at you.”
6. Being a ‘dweeb’ at school led her to make up strange stories
Sara describes her younger self as a ‘dweeb’ who wasn't part of the popular crowd. “I hated school. I knew I wasn’t liked and I didn’t know how to make people like me. I didn’t know how to be an extrovert.”
She would make up stories to try to fit in with other students, but they often made things worse. “I told them that Mariah Carey was my babysitter and that she was coming over from Miami to look after me and give me singing lessons. I told them there was a jacuzzi bath in my house and Take That’s limo had broken down on my road, and they had to come in and borrow the bath.”
The problem is, she explains, when you lie obviously and repeatedly, “people don’t say, ‘I don’t believe you.’ They just don't want to be your friend.”
7. Her career began as a punishment for a house party
As a way of trying to make friends, Sara threw a house party one night when she was 14. “My house got really trashed and the police got called... my mum comes home; the house is full of smoke and there’s bin bags full of bottles and cans and furniture’s broken.” She was expecting to be punished by her mum. But instead, “she made me join a drama club in a church hall”. It was life-changing for Sara. She knew then that she wanted to be a performer.
I had two large glasses of wine, which is too many, but I was so nervous. I performed it to 12 people who smiled at me so politely. No one laughed. But I did have that feeling of ‘this is where I belong.'Sara on her first time doing stand-up.
8. Her first stand-up gig was a bit of a disaster
Sara started doing stand-up comedy as a stepping stone to becoming an actor. But she quickly became intoxicated by it. “I loved that you could just text a man [who booked comics for pub nights] and go, ‘can I have five minutes tonight?’ And the answer was always ‘yes’, especially if you were a woman.”
Her first gig was about the unrealistic standards of the teen film High School Musical. “I had two large glasses of wine, which is too many, but I was so nervous. I performed it to 12 people who smiled at me so politely. No one laughed. But I did have that feeling of ‘this is where I belong.’”
She describes it as a ‘neurochemical reward’. “What I was high on was that I was scared and I did it. And now that I've done it, now I know what that feels like, I want to do it more and I want to do it better.”
9. She is an over-sharer – within limits
Sara is known for her personal material and has shared stories about all parts of her life in her stand-up comedy and her writing. “The sharing always feels so much more important than any privacy,” she explains. “I'm not embarrassed.”
But she has become careful about the impact on her children and her husband, Steen. “His parents stayed with us for a month recently, which was wonderful. But there were a couple of times where one of his parents would say a thing, and he would see the look in my eyes and he’d just go ‘no!’ And that means, ‘absolutely don't write that in the notes on your phone, I don't want to see that regurgitated,’” she laughs. “It’s good to have boundaries.”
