Comic appears on Graham Norton tonight

London Hughes has found huge career success since moving to the States – but her personal life has been less successful.

The comic tells Graham Norton on his chat show tonight: ‘Dating is terrible in LA.  I went out with a guy who said he was a director, and it was only after two weeks that I found out he was a funeral director!’

Appearing on the BBC show to promote her memoir Living My Best Life, Hun,  she said she felt she had to go to America ‘because I felt there was a glass ceiling in the UK for women, and women of colour in comedy.  I thought I would never reach my full potential unless I went and tried.

‘And, I killed it,’ she adds.

She appears on the show with  Hollywood star Laura Linney,  girl-band Sugababes and comedians Dawn French and Adrian Edmondson, both of whom have memoirs out too.

Talking about her new book The Twat Files, French says: ‘I suppose I’m trying to start up an anti-perfection league.  

‘We carry a lot of shame, humiliation, and guilt about our mistakes, and I thought, "These mistakes are where I have learnt the most and where the fun is."  So, if you can wrangle back some of that shame and shine a light on it, it dissipates.  If you own your mistakes, it’s very empowering.’

Sharing one particularly embarrassing moment, she says: ‘I received an invite to the James Bond premiere.  It was a big deal but red carpets are not my thing so I thought it would be funny to send my PA a response that would make her laugh, and then she could send a polite "no" on my behalf. 

‘I wrote, with lots of swearing, "This will be another wanky red carpet events be full of the usual twats and I would rather have my eyes pecked out by diseased pigeons and my breasts gnawed off by rabid wild dogs".

‘I was a bit surprised a couple of minutes later to get an email from the PR department that had sent the invite, saying, "Thank you for your speedy response – we totally understand’"  Oh dear, I was so embarrassed!"

Edmondson, talking about his autobiography Berserker!, reminisces about his double act with Rik Mayall.

He says: ‘Ours was a dangerous partnership – we called our stuff "absolute bollocks at 100 miles an hour".  It was about hysteria and that meant hitting each other.  There was an awful lot of stunt work.’

‘People thought they had seen nothing Ike it, but I just thought we, as a double act, were in a long line from Laurel and Hardy, Morecambe and Wise and Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore.  In our heads we were Wylie Coyote and Roadrunner, but now when I see it, I think we were insane!’ 

The Graham Norton Show is on BBC One at 10.40pm tonight.

Published: 13 Oct 2023