To the great relief of comedy actress and novelist Arabella Weir, the über-chic Sanderson Hotel in Central London has not provided any nibbles on which we might graze while chatting. “I am constantly monitoring myself,” says Weir, 47. “I could not possibly have a plate of chocolate biscuits there,” she says, gesturing to the table, “without having one. And then, I’d think, shall I have another? And if I do, then I’d think, well, I won’t have a sandwich for lunch. And it would go on and on.”
Food, along with motherhood, divorce, men and promiscuity, is a big issue for Weir. Her TV catchphrase “Does my bum look big in this?” made her character “Insecure Woman” one of the most enduring of the award-winning Nineties comedy The Fast Show, and inspired her 1999 bestselling eponymous novel. Workmen still yell after her “Yes it does!” In fact, Weir at 5ft 6in is normally built, probably in the size 14 line, although she thinks of herself as being in the size 22, Dawn French-esque (her comparison), heavyweight league. And is she still insecure? “I think I am less neurotic and insecure than I used to be because I have been successful. But I tap into it because that’s where most of my comedy comes from.” Oh, so you make it up now? “No, no,” says Weir hurriedly. “I mean, who would stand up before strangers and say “Please like me” if you had internal confidence? You would do something a little more profound. What I have is chutzpah rather than genuine confidence.”
Indeed, although as one of the celebrity runners for Cancer Research UK’s 5km Race for Life on June 4, she is not someone who finds getting into shorts and a running bra a trouble-free event. She frets that she might manage only to walk around the route even though she has been training two to three times a week.
She also confesses that she has suffered from a disproportionate sense of her size since she was about ten. “When I was a child, the focus on my weight was a big feature. And it informed who I am, completely.” She has frequently spoken about how her mother, a teacher, would wave away the potatoes, loudly saying that her daughter didn’t need them because she was too fat. “My mother veers between saying: ‘I was the most terrible mother in the world’, and ‘Oh, for God’s sake, darling, are going to go on about this for the rest of your life?’ ”
Her mother’s comments came at a bad time for Weir, the third of four children and who, because she was the daughter of a diplomat, had a childhood already lacking in stability because the family moved country every two years. “My parents broke up. It was devastating, ugly and unpleasant, starting when I was 8 and continuing for five years. That was when my parents started going on about my size. But the other day, I saw a photo of me aged ten, and I said: ‘I was not fat! ’ and my mother said (she puts on an airy, distant voice): ‘Yes I know’.”
For all her public recriminations towards her mother, Weir claims not to go in for retrospective blame. She has had group therapy, which, she says, taught her that everyone is insecure. She also acknowledges that without all of this, professional success might never have happened. “My sister once asked what I would have done with my life if our parents hadn’t f***ed us up.”
It’s a riff on Philip Larkin but Weir seems stuck with the mould made for her by her parents and unable, or unwilling, to move on from it. “We all discuss the hideousness of our childhood with our parents. There is no sense of ‘We are over that now’. There is a lot of ‘Bloody Hell, why don’t I do to my kids what you did to us, and they will be as f***ed up as we were!’” Continually raking over events that were difficult but which happened when Wilson was Prime Minister (ie, a long time ago), might suggest that family meetings are hard-going, but Weir attests to warm family relationships. And she has made her name from fictionalising her neuroses in two novels. “Although my greatest achievement will be to give my own daughter a healthy attitude to food, and to her body,” she claims. “And ipso facto, towards boys and self-esteem. That would be my crowning glory.”
She had her two children, Isabella and Archie, now 7 and 6, rather late. Did she worry she was going to miss the boat? “I would have been sad if I had reached 42 and not met someone to have children with. But if I had one mature strand running through my thirties, it was that I must not have children with the wrong man. I never thought, ‘Oh I’ll just have kids anyway because it’s my last chance’.”
Weir clearly dotes on them. “Isabella asked me the other day whether I thought about her and Archie most of the time. And I said, ‘Yes, I probably do. If you had to add up all the hours in the day, I do.’ And she just smiled. My mother said it was like being in love but I think it is much better than being in love.”
She is married to Dr Jeremy Norton, a scientist 12 years her junior. “He is mature for his age and I am immature for my age,” is her take on it. Given that she had a long-running newspaper column called All The Men I’ve Never Slept With relating her numerous liaisons with men, it is probably to his benefit that he didn’t know much about Weir when they met. “Jeremy had never heard of me and never watches television. It’s not what he is interested in. He just liked me and I liked him.”
Weir generally sees her appeal as being to women. “If men find me funny, that’s great, but my mindset is on things that affect women. And if men don’t find it funny, it’s their problem.” Her former promiscuity is hardly a sign of contemporary female liberation, though. “I would argue that the column was not anti-feminist, it was about me trying to find myself,” she says.
“At school, the way to be popular was to be funny. And then tragically, when I was 15, I found the way to be popular was to sleep with loads of boys. Well into my twenties, I defined my level of success by how many men found me attractive. And that column came out of all the terrible dates I had been on. They would ask: ‘Can I have dinner with you?’ and I would think, well who am I to say no? He is quite successful and does seem to fancy me . . . I mean, I think he is repulsive and a right tosser, but maybe I should give him half a chance.” Then there were the “charity shags”. “He went on and on and I felt sorry for him, I mean, what was I doing?” she says, laughing. “The one thing I will instill in my daughter is do it as many times as you want, but only if you really want to.” And, presumably, if you can make a career out of it afterwards.
Weir’s career has been quieter of late, compared to the Nineties; one of her recent forays into television included co-writing and appearing in cookery show spoof Posh Nosh with Richard E. Grant, in 2003. However, her fourth book is out this autumn, Is It Just Me?, and she is planning another, the intriguingly titled Why Women Don’t Eat In Front of Men.
Is she is focusing on writing because she has truly found her seam or because television comedy has moved on from the rather quaint sketches honed by The Fast Show? “I get depressed by television, I don’t think any of it is good,” she says. “If women were controlling and commissioning television in equal numbers to men, we wouldn’t get shows like Little Britain — we are the only country in the world to think that men dressed as grotesque caricatures of women is hilarious, and the BBC’s new Titty Titty Bang Bang is possibly the most depressing thing that has ever been on television.
“It makes Smack The Pony look as if it was made by feminists. There is an old Jewish joke that I love: What is the only thing men and women have in common? They all hate women.”
Weir likes nothing as much as the company of her own sex. She goes on a women-only holiday every year with her mother, sister and some best friends and, of course, the Race for Life is women-only. “Although calling it a race is pushing it. For me, it’s rather a pant.”
Weir explains that she has personal reasons for doing it. “Just before Christmas, my mother and sister-in-law both had breast cancer diagnosed within 24 hours of each other, and had mastectomies within two days of each other. The timing was almost comedic.” Both are recovering, but slowly. “My mother is nearly 80, my sister-in-law is 52. They were operated and treated within three weeks of diagnosis.
“With serious things, the best is available on the NHS. I know it’s no joke if you are waiting for something non-dramatic — a hip replacement, say, but who among us would say ‘No! I’m first in the line for my new hip, before a child with leukaemia’. Not that I need a hip operation yet.” She pauses, “Although I might after the Race for Life.” For all her neuroses, Arabella Weir is a funny woman. And no, it doesn’t.
For more information about Cancer Research UK’s Race for Life or to register, visit www.raceforlife.org
