She thinks hard and tries to describe what makes them different from the besuited gag merchants who have dominated television and filled arenas in recent years: “We are slightly surreal, slightly politicised. We can be autobiographical but we have a warmer heart. It’s not just about set-ups and punchlines, there are ideas going on.”
Being asked to do Mock the Week was thrilling, she says, but filming was stressful and the three-hour recording tougher than any live stand-up show. “At a gig I’m nervous beforehand but once I get my first laugh I relax and it’s enjoyable. With Mock the Week I was at a high anxiety level for the entire show. I was so scared of not doing my preparation justice. And there was also a voice in my head going, ‘Come on, you’re doing this for the girls’. I wanted to hold my own.”
She did that all right but, as women on TV sometimes find, the response wasn’t 100 per cent positive. There was the odd troll who hurled abuse — one tweet read “I hope you are infertile” — but a lot of new fans went online to say they would buy tickets for her tour.
She shrugs off the insults and is more interested in discussing women’s place in society than women in comedy. She describes herself as “a feminist but not an activist”. Her show does not just look at historical female behaviour, she ties it into behaviour today. “I want to talk about how we get to a society where Miley Cyrus or Blurred Lines happens. We want to protect young women but I want to propose the idea that Cyrus might enjoy what she is doing. I don’t want to live in a culture where women’s two sexual options are consent or not. Female sexuality is its own thing.”
Pascoe, who was born in Dagenham, did not set out to be a comedian. After leaving the University of Sussex with a degree in English, she had hoped to act. “I wanted to do Chekhov and write plays like Sarah Kane. I wanted to win an Oscar.” But work was hard to come by. Times were so hard that she voluntarily declared herself bankrupt. She tried jokes and was hooked: “It’s addictive. People who do stand-up have this strange mix of compulsion and masochism — look at the way Eddie Izzard did all those marathons.”
It took a while for her to find her own voice. I remember seeing her in 2009 and thinking she owed too much to Russell Brand’s taboo-busting honesty. “I think I was more of a Noel Fielding tribute act,” she corrects me. Brand is a touchy subject. She admires his comedy but has misgivings about his sexual politics (“I think he is a despicable man”).
Shortly after that she hit her stride. She has always used autobiographical material and in Sara Pascoe vs History she touches on her relationship with her parents. Her father, Derek, was a musician in the band Flintlock, contemporaries of the Bay City Rollers in the Seventies, who briefly had their own ITV series but no big hits. Her parents separated when she was young and afterwards she had a very unconventional upbringing — “which is great for writing comedy. We had no rules. We were allowed to be adults from the start. I chose my own clothes from the age of 18 months.”
Pascoe used to live with comedian Cariad Lloyd but recently moved to a flat in Lewisham with her boyfriend, John Robins, who is also a stand-up making a name for himself. They could even become the first couple to be nominated for the prestigious Foster’s Edinburgh Comedy Award in the same year. Do they advise each other? “No. When we do a preview together he goes to have a drink when I’m on.” Would they ever do a double act? “I doubt it. We’ve still got lots to say separately,” she smiles. No one should doubt her on that.
