Comic's awful confession

Sara Pascoe has confessed that once faked cancer to get out of work.

The comedian revealed that she pretended to have leukaemia to avoid work experience when she was a teenager.

Speaking to Mel Giedroyc on her Dave show Unforgivable, Pascoe recalled hating the idea of the placement while at school so she ‘picked the job with the shortest amount of hours which was in a children’s nursery because you finished at lunchtime’.

‘Then on my first day I already didn’t want to be there and I had horrendous period pain – really, really seriously bad,’ she recalled.

‘I asked them if I could go home early at 10am and they said no, the whole point of work is that you stay until the end of the day… which was lunchtime

‘I was really furious with them, so what I did the next morning is I called them pretending to be my mother, and I said that I had leukaemia and that I was in hospital.’

To gasps of shock from the audience she confessed that in the guise of her mum she also told her boss: ‘I wished they’d sent me home as we might have caught it sooner.’

She added: ’They sent flowers to my house which I had to destroy unless my mum found them.’

When Giedroyc suggested that she could have come up with a less serious illness, a defiant Pascoe insisted: ‘They had to feel bad. I wanted to punish them for letting me leave. ‘

She also revealed that she once got caught shoplifting from Body Shop after school, but to stop the security guards calling police she made up a fake story about coming from an abusive home, based on a storyline she’d seen on police drama The Bill

• Mel Giedroyc: Unforgivable is on Dave at 10pm tonight.

Published: 16 Mar 2021