Comedian Sara Pascoe is re-evaluating her understanding of ‘success’ after IVF treatment and miscarriage-Metro News Reporter-Entertainment – Metro

Sara Pascoe tells Metro about how her infertility journey has caused her to think about the word ‘success’ (Picture: Rachel Sherlock)

Sara Pascoe’s first brush with fame was marked by tears and the kindness of strangers. When she was 14, she auditioned to be on My Kind Of People, the mid-1990s ITV talent show fronted by Michael Barrymore and partly filmed in shopping centres across the country.

‘I really had visualised that it was going to take me straight to superstardom,’ recalls the comedian, author and presenter of The Great British Sewing Bee, who’s just about to do the biggest tour of her life with her new live show, Success Story.

‘I thought it would change my life because I was very unhappy at school and the idea was that if people saw me on television they would see the true me, which I considered to be very special.

‘Everyone on TV seemed so happy, magical and beautiful. I thought that if you were on TV, when you walked into rooms people would turn around and notice it’s you, their faces would change and they would smile.

‘People would maybe come towards you, hold out a hand to touch you or give you a snack. And I realised I confused fame with being a dog; a lovely, cute dog in a café.’

Sara talks about the My Kind Of People experience in her new show, in which she contemplates definitions of success, covering what she believed it meant when she was a teenager, and all the ways in which she’s thought about it since.

The idea started brewing when she and her husband, fellow comedian Steen Raskopoulos, were doing IVF. ‘We were having all these appointments about infertility and the word “success” kept getting used,’ she says. ‘It’s a word we’re really familiar with.

Sara has always tried to bring her true personality across when performing stand-up (Picture: Rex)

‘In any kind of career, we judge people’s success, compare our own success levels to other people’s, and all of a sudden our “success” was all about conception rates. And when I had a miscarriage, it was referred to as an unsuccessful pregnancy. So, I’ve been thinking a lot about success in general.’

The show, which she insists is a lot funnier and lighter than it might sound, also includes some celebrity gossip – something that comes from being what she describes as ‘fame adjacent’, thanks to her frequent television appearances.

Sara has always mined the rich seam of her own life for material, referring to something her father said, early on in her career, about her making ‘being herself’ her job.

For example, she’s always talked about her relationships (and their aftermaths, as was the case with the acclaimed LadsLadsLads, about her response to her break-up with fellow comedian John Robins; and her BBC Two sitcom Out Of Her Mind, in which she played herself as a character) and aspects of her upbringing. She’s going to stop talking about her family for a while, though.

Sara mistook fame with being a dog (Picture: Rachel Sherlock)

‘I do think they deserve a break,’ she laughs. ‘I’m still telling everything, just not about them.’

Given that she’s already achieved so much across so many forms, it’s natural to wonder what Sara’s ultimate creative ambitions are.

Her thoughts on the subject weave nicely into the theme of Success Story.

‘For a while I was really worried about how ambition worked, and whether it would always move the goalposts: that you would never feel particularly proud of what you’d done and you’d always have a hunger for what’s next or what’s more, but I feel very satisfied,’ she says.

She continues: ‘It’s because stand-up is constantly new: you have to write new jokes, new stories, and update where you are in your life, and that in itself is always going to be creatively satisfying. I came to a point when I realised I don’t need anything else.’

She notes that while other comics might have their hearts set on Hollywood, say, or writing a musical, she feels happy enough that her career has allowed her to get a mortgage and a dog.

‘I read something Steve Martin had said about himself, which was: “I’ve done pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.”

Sara’s initial aim for fame was to prove people wrong, but that has changed (Picture:Nick Pickles/WireImage)

‘And I thought, “God, that’s what it is.” That’s why it feels so incredibly ridiculous that it’s happened. It’s all just conjured up out of nothing.’

If you’re wondering how that first audition went, she got up to sing More Than Words by Extreme but, having only really sung along to it on the radio, didn’t know when to come in when accompanied by a pianist.

‘I had a little cry in the shopping centre, and the people there sang the song and I joined in,’ she recalls. ‘People are very kind. I now realise it’s incredibly uncomfortable watching a 14-year-old girl crying on stage.’

What Sara was trying to achieve then is very different from what she’s aiming for now.

‘The starting point was to prove people wrong,’ she says. ‘That’s what I wanted. Once I started stand-up it stopped being about trying to prove something and it became about trying to share something.’

Sara is on tour from Nov 10-Apr 22, 2023 – You can buy tickets here

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