I started writing it a few years back and sent it, under a pseudonym, to Comedy Unit. Once an arm of the BBC, making Rab C Nesbitt and Chewin’ the Fat, it’s now an independent production company. To my amazement, they liked it and asked me to come in. My arrival caused some consternation, with everybody looking in their diaries to see if Jackie Bird was due in for a meeting. After they’d stopped laughing, my real comedy career began.
Why the cloak-and-dagger stuff? First, I didn’t want anybody to have preconceived ideas. I needed to start with a clean slate. And I didn’t want anybody to think: “Well, she got that because she’s in the public eye and she’s a name already.”
Now my secret is out, all the publicity has been a huge surprise. It is also a little embarrassing, because I’m a beginner. I love writing comedy and I want to get better, but there was one article that put me in the same paragraph as Ronnie Barker. I look more like Ronnie Barker than I write like him.
Having It All is about two women. One went down the domestic route and is trying to get back into work; the other didn’t have children and is now hitting 40, with her body-clock booming. It’s not directly biographical, but I think if you do try to have it all, something usually gives.
I worry that my own family might have suffered because of my career. Sometimes I’m working at an event, pretending that I’m doing it to pay for our summer holiday, when really I’m doing it for me. But it cuts both ways. A few years ago I was offered a job on ITN doing the nightshift — four nights a week away from home. But my children were very young and I thought I couldn’t possibly do it, so I turned it down. When I told my daughter, who is now 12, she was appalled. “We would be rich and you would be really famous. How could you have done that?” I’m nobody’s idea of superwoman. When the pressure is on, I look like I’ve been dug up and I’m not nice to live with. It’s not like I’m doing all this and then baking cakes. When I was working on the script, I’d get up at 5am and do a couple of hours before the school run, go to work and do more writing at night after the homework shift.
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Jacob, my 10-year-old, got the brunt of it one day when I was really melting. I was sitting at the computer, trying to get a gag to work. He came up going: “Mum, mum!” I turned to him and growled in my Exorcist voice: “Jacob! Mummy’s trying to be funny!” He laughed — and I realised that sometimes you have to switch the computer off and look after your children.
Despite the pressure, I loved writing the sitcom. It was all-consuming and I could not leave my characters alone. We’d be in an editorial meeting, deciding whether to lead on the fish quotas, and I’d think: “I wonder if she’s going into Topshop . . . would she want to wear a tulip skirt or a wool shrug?” It’s a joy and a drug.
It has also turned me into a swot. I love American comedies, such as Frasier, with their slick, clever one-liners, brilliant characterisation and acting. If I could write something that tied Frasier’s shoelaces, I would be very happy. Until then, I go to bed with piles of comedy scripts. If you look at what goes on in one episode of Fawlty Towers, how tight the narrative is, the phenomenal joke rate — it’s just amazing.
I feel very lucky to have been able to do this. Journalism itself is so diverse: one minute it’s the beast of Balbirnie and the next you’re at the Oscars. It allows me to put on a news hat for Reporting Scotland, to present a special on the Asian earthquakes, to do Scottish Questions at Westminster once a month and to put on my sparkly frock at Hogmanay. All this and they let me put pen to paper. Are they mad?
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Having It All will be broadcast on Radio Scotland in the spring as part of the Comedy Playhouse series at 12.30pm on Saturdays. Jackie Bird was talking to Mark Fisher