Award-winning and beloved British actor, comedian and writer Doon Mackichan joined Kika Mirylees at Farnham Literary Festival 2025 to discuss her memoir, My Lady Parts: A Life Fighting Stereotypes as well as the roles she's played on TV, in the theatre and in life. She reflected on 40 years in showbusiness, her stand-up career in the city, misogyny in the profession, and her work on ground-breaking shows including The Day Today, Brass Eye, Smack the Pony and Toast of London.
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00:00Well, I think clowns were notoriously either, if you think of Barbara Windsor, if you think
00:10of all the women that we grew up with, they were either kind of sexy clowns or, yeah,
00:14larger clowns or, you know, nympho clowns. Women were just put in these boxes. But if
00:20you were funny and attractive, it was a bit scary. It was a bit like, oh, she's intelligent
00:25and she looks quite good, or she's not really a comic, is she? So I think there was, especially
00:29when we did Smack the Pony, and we're all, you know, fairly attractive women, and I think
00:34people just found it overwhelming. We weren't put up for any awards, any comedy awards,
00:39any BAFTAs, anything like that. We had to go to America where we got two Emmys because
00:45it was just too overwhelming for us to be funny and looking good. So I think you're
00:50right. I think, and actually I mentioned that to a certain famous artist who wears a dress.
00:57Pointy, isn't it? And we're having this conversation and he said, why do you think
01:03Smack the Pony hasn't been recommissioned? And I said, well, I think it's quite, I think
01:07it's hard for, it's too much to be funny and attractive. And he went, oh, boo-hoo,
01:14I'm funny and attractive. And I went, no, no, no, that's not what I'm saying. It was
01:20a really awkward conversation because I don't think he understood what I was trying to say.
01:24Do you understand what I'm trying to say?
01:25Yeah.
01:26Yeah. It's just, it's one of those things that you can be all sorts of clowns, but you
01:32can't be that kind of clown.
01:34On the Air, which was the radio version of the Day to Day, and we had to all just sit
01:38around and I'd never met Steve Coogan, Patrick Marlborough, Joe Schneider. It was very, very
01:43scary and I thought, well, I'm going to be sacked after this. I don't know what I'm talking
01:46about, just improvising characters. But we did the radio show and then it got made into
01:51a TV show. And I remember it was delivered to my house in six VHSs and I had a little
01:58yelling telly where you put the video into the telly. And I remember sitting and watching
02:02the whole series thinking, yeah, this is absolutely brilliant. And there was only one series.
02:07So it shows you good things, you know, you don't have to have like eight series or something
02:11for it to be a hit. And then it went on and became the Alan Partridge, I'm Alan Partridge
02:15and no me, no you, because he was the original sports presenter on the Day to Day.
02:21So when did Smack the Pony come about?
02:23After that, yeah.
02:25And tell us about how that happened.
02:28So I was doing a reading of Jane Austen's Emma, of which we have two actresses who are
02:34standing in the back trying to hide. I adapted Jane Austen's Emma for the stage and one of
02:43the actresses couldn't come to rehearsals because she was swinging the channel. So I
02:48decided to do it with her to raise money to pay the actors to go up there. But the thing
02:54with that is I'd done a reading of Emma and the next day Andy said, oh, there's this pilot.
03:00One of the actresses has dropped out, would you like to look at it? And I watched it on
03:04my little VHS after the reading of Emma and I thought it was the pilot of Smack the Pony
03:10and I thought it was really brilliant. I'd pitched an all-female sketch show about three
03:15months earlier and the video dates were actually my idea, so I feel karmically it came back
03:21to me. Someone had nicked the idea, cast someone else, that person had dropped out and I got
03:25back in it. So there we are. Maybe there is a God.