My parents were religious and going to church was a really big part of growing up in Orpington. I used to sing in a choir and be paid with a Mars Bar – 400 calories of pure sugar – and also I’d sneak off, in the middle of service, to a newsagent for sweets and curry-flavoured chip sticks. Then, when I was 10, me and my sister started going just up the road to a Lutheran church where the American pastor did socials with pot-luck dinners and would tell everyone to bring along a dip or dish. It was my first experience of a really incredible buffet.
Mum was into convenience food so she’d do us microwavable doner kebabs, or pasta with a thick cheese sauce with her signature detail of loads of tomato ketchup stirred in. I got well fat and I remember, when starting at grammar school, a teacher taking me into a cupboard and saying: “We like to talk to pupils with weight problems.” It was really harsh; excruciating.
I think of my life up until 12, when my parents split up, as one thing and my life afterwards as another. Mum married someone else and it was really difficult and kind of catastrophic, including foodwise. My sister got kicked out but I lived with Mum and my stepdad and they’d buy food for themselves and cook for themselves and I ended up eating on my own. At 15 I was eating most of my meals at Orpington’s New World Noodle Bar or at boyfriends’ homes I’d stay over at.
Stage terrors didn’t affect my desire to eat but did affect my ability not to feel sick. At 17 I won the BBC New Comedy Award, although for five days before the final I’d not been able to keep any food down. But I was given a whole crate of Bacardi Breezers and thought: “They’re worth £15 so I must drink them all.” Seeing how drunk I was the presenter, Bob Monkhouse, kindly said: “In my dressing room is a fruit plate and you need to go and eat them.”
Most comediennes have polycystic ovary syndrome. Not all do, but a spookily large amount. I discovered I had it when I was 21-ish. POS can really mess with your hormones, menstruation and moods and makes it easy to put on a “middle” and hard to get it off. So I’d get freaked out about my body. I started going to WeightWatchers but the snacks were £7 each and it was too much like Scientology for me.
My attitude changed after I miraculously survived a car accident. A lorry carrying logs drove over the car and then we hit a tree and a log came through the windscreen and stopped right close to my face. I went to a Chinese restaurant that night and had the biggest meal – I’d never eaten so much in my life. I had a sort of epiphany: “From now on I’m going to be kinder to myself and stop beating myself up about weight and dieting.”
I’ve just been on Bear Grylls’ Island, for a Standup To Cancer charity thing, surviving for two weeks, with 13 others. I had to kill a crab by stabbing it behind the eyes with a knife and I couldn’t bear it. I thought: “I have to be more honest about how uncomfortable I am with eating meat, even though I’ve loved it for 30 years.”
I didn’t go thin on the island: I’m not someone who loses weight easily. So my body’s very much built for survival. When someone else was, like, “I’m in pain from having nothing to eat”, I’d say: “Mate, I’ve got gas in the tank.”
Recently some noisy lad threw an orange really hard and it splattered across the wall behind me, because he hated the show. I’d given it to him at the door of my monthly comedy club in Camden, where everyone gets the choice of being given an orange or cake. I think that gives them less right to be rude about the show. And it’s just nice. Food’s such an easy way to be generous.
Josie Long’s Something Better is at the Soho Theatre, 30 September-15 October
