‘If I Can Have This Career, A Toad Could Do It’ – Meet Katherine Ryan, Queen Of Comedy

‘Are you ok with dogs?’ shouts Katherine Ryan from behind her ajar front door as I approach the house. Sure, I smile, hoping she doesn’t have a Rottweiler in there, before being greeted by three of the tiniest, friendliest little creatures I’ve ever met, bouncing and nuzzling all around her as if we’re in a Disney cartoon. If you’ve watched Katherine take no prisoners on one of many comedy panel shows, from 8 Out Of 10 Cats to Have I Got News For You, you might expect her to be intimidating. But she is quieter than her stage persona, so polite, and prettier than the vixenish glamour of her performance. In the hallway there is a life-size cardboard cut-out of herself in full stand-up mode. ‘That’s from my merch stand on the tour,’ she grins sheepishly. ‘We put it there as a joke, but I’ve realised you should never have a photoshopped version of yourself in your home, it’s a quick route to body dysmorphia.’ Dressed down in a pair of Matériel mustard trousers and an Amnesty International T-shirt, she pads through to a huge, stylish kitchen. Floor-to-ceiling windows look out on a seemingly endless garden. She offers me a freshly baked muffin, explaining, ‘These are great because they have courgette in them, so [11-year-old daughter] Violet eats veg without realising.’

It shouldn’t be a surprise that a comedian is not in character all the time, but she’s found that’s often the expectation. ‘I sometimes feel like a big disappointment because I’m not always glam and I’m not always roasting people,’ she sighs. Perhaps it’s because her work is a heightened version of her real self. After two successful Netflix stand-up specials, her latest project is The Duchess, a sitcom that she wrote and in which she stars as a single mum who proves that you can simultaneously be a bad person and a good mother. An extension of her stage persona, her character ‘stomps around in couture and tells everyone to fuck off ’. She is, basically, how you wish you could behave. ‘It’s a fantasy where I don’t have a filter, and say what I think to the mums on the school run,’ she explains. ‘I love that she’s a narcissist, but she loves being a mum. The assumption for single mothers is always that the man left us, and we can’t wait to snare another one. But truly the happiest I’ve been is when I was a single mum and Violet was three. Back then, when I had nothing, I knew I had everything.’

On cue, Violet mooches into the kitchen to get a drink. They moved to this leafy north London suburb a year ago, with Katherine’s husband Bobby, her high-school sweetheart. ‘It’s the cutest story,’ she begins, ‘or it’s really sad, because we couldn’t find anyone else in 20 years.’ Two years ago, she was back in her hometown in Canada to investigate her family history for an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? when she bumped into Bobby, whom she had dated when they were 16. ‘It started as a joke, like wouldn’t it be funny to hook up with him. But it backfired and now we’re married,’ she deadpans. Bobby is outside cutting the grass, and pops in to say hello. It’s funny that she had to go back to her roots to find someone worthy of infiltrating the us-against-the-world bond of a single mother and daughter. ‘I used to have relationships with men who were jealous of my daughter; they’d accuse us of being co-dependent,’ she shakes her head in disbelief. ‘They needed all of this attention, but I never wanted to be away from her.’ There is a date scene in The Duchess where Katherine bluntly tells her boyfriend: ‘I could be using this time to sleep.’ It feels revolutionary to see a single mother happy with her life, in which a new relationship has to earn a place. ‘If you find someone who enriches your life then that’s wonderful but, if you don’t, you’re not a failure,’ she says. ‘The Duchess is a celebration of whatever shape family you have.’

It’s also about wanting to expand your family. In the show, Katherine wants a sibling for her daughter, and I don’t need to ask if she has the same desire in real life because I’ve heard her talk about it on her podcast. Fittingly called Telling Everybody Everything, she has opened up about everything from being burgled last year (Bobby wrestled her laptop – filled with baby pictures of Violet and scripts for The Duchess – from a masked intruder), to pregnancy loss.

In February, Katherine had a miscarriage, and was hit by the realisation that so many women are going through the same brutal ordeal. ‘I know now, when I walk down the street or go into Morrisons, there are women everywhere dealing with this, and we are just expected to get on with it. It helps to hear the stories of other women,’ she says, explaining why it was important to talk about it on her podcast. ‘We are collectively as a gender so silent about so many things but, most of the time when you don’t talk about something difficult, it’s because you don’t want to make someone else uncomfortable. It should be normalised.’

If we weren’t social distancing, I’d hug her as she describes learning that she would lose the pregnancy after a scan showed no heartbeat, and she had to wait for the miscarriage to happen, which took nearly a month. ‘I was pregnant with a dead baby,’ she says, matter-of-factly. ‘That was traumatic. You are expected to carry on, and you walk around feeling like a tomb.’ Most of us in that situation are able to cancel plans and hibernate. But Katherine’s job is on stage and, shortly after hearing she would lose her pregnancy, she hosted the NME Awards. She says that throwing herself into work helped in some ways, thanks to that stage persona, which offers an element of distance: ‘It didn’t happen to her.’ She compares the emotions after pregnancy loss to the way she felt when she was new to London, and split from Violet’s dad when she was a baby. ‘That time when things were hard, I was so scared and vulnerable, and I felt like a bad person because I wasn’t able to save this relationship. In the same way that I felt like a failure when I lost the pregnancy, because I wasn’t able to do anything for that baby. As women we blame ourselves for a lot of things that we shouldn’t. It was the same feeling of not being in control. But I came out of it stronger.’

Out of that difficult time came some of the best things in Katherine’s life: her daughter, of course, but it was also with her ex that she’d go to open mic nights, which is where she met her comedy gang, including Sara Pascoe and Roisin Conaty. ‘Slowly, I started to get more confidence, but it was when I had my daughter that life got serious. I was like: I’ve messed up, I’m poor, I’m an immigrant single mother. So I had to make comedy work. I genuinely went from gigging as a hobby to having a baby and knowing I need to make her life amazing. She definitely made me more productive.’

The transition from stand-up to writing and starring in a comedy series was a challenge that she embraced with a little help from her talented friendship group. ‘Roisin said, “If you can do stand-up, then you know about storytelling and timing. There really isn’t a lot of difference in structure.” I was lucky to have her because then I wasn’t overwhelmed. Thanks to Roisin, I knew I could do it.’ She cites Michaela Coel and Aisling Bea as making unique dramatic comedy, and is frustrated by the tendency to lump together shows made by women. ‘I’m just making Fleabag again, that’s what we’re all making. It’s the new Fleabag, because we’re all exactly the same.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘It’s so important to have more than one female voice at the table, because our voices are so different.’

Next, she would love to do series two of The Duchess, and ‘I’d like to see a woman in Britain with a late-night chat show’. She smiles and shrugs. ‘It doesn’t have to be me, but there should be one.’ Come on, commissioners, you know what to do. Meanwhile, she’d like to write a book. An autobiographical manifesto, she says, that would be like a ‘how to’ of her life. ‘Because if I can have this career, genuinely, a toad could do it.’ She smiles, tickling one of her tiny dogs under its little chin. ‘All you need is reckless abandon.’

‘The Duchess’ is on Netflix from 11 September

READ MORE: 24 Celebrities Whose Kids Look Exactly Like Them

READ MORE: So, Why Has Kris Jenner Really Called Time On Keeping Up With The Kardashians?