"I'm so confident that I am actually an idiot!" - Brighton comedy

2019 Best Newcomer nominee Helen is on the road around the UK this autumn with her first-ever tour, Madam Good Tit, with dates including Brighton’s Komedia on Friday, October 14.

She is promising a show about self-confidence, self-esteem and self-care. It’s the year of the self, and Helen is trying to be the change she wants you to see, she explains: “I'm just insanely confident. People think being confident is the best thing in the world but the problem is that I'm so confident that I am actually an idiot. When you are so confident, you believe that everything you do is correct and I am stupidly overly confident. It is probably my mother’s fault. It is actually humiliating. I just don't know when I'm wrong. My mum ran a drama school from Fleet in Hampshire and I went along from when I was four to 18 and I think it really did a number on me. And I reckon that's why I'm so confident. It means that I just think I can do anything I want to do which is not necessarily a bad thing but it means that I just assume I'm the queen of everything.”

Yes, some things do dent that confidence, though: “I've had my heart broken. I thought that if I moved to Germany he would realise how much he was missing me and come and get me. He didn't. He got another girlfriend and I stayed there for three years. But it was actually in Germany that I started doing stand-up. I spoke German but it was mainly on the English language scene though there is a good crossover. I entered a couple of newcomer competitions in London and I had a tiny bit of success but I managed to get an agent and I needed to move back to the UK after that, for my career. I moved back at the end of 2016. I had an agent but I still had to gig all over the country, getting paid £10 a night even though it was costing me £40 to get there but just before the pandemic I had actually become a proper stand-up and not having to work in a bakery. I was getting bigger and bigger gigs and I was able to pay my rent which is always nice.”

But then lockdown struck: “I hadn't been self-employed for long enough so it was difficult, so it was really bad timing but I did still manage to write stuff. I made a pilot for the BBC and I did manage to get other stuff done. I started doing podcasts and I did online gigs and during the pandemic I learned that my best friend in the entire world actually does have a limit to her patience. I also learned some philosophical things about the fact that there is always something you can do. But the main thing I learnt about the business was just how much I like performing, how much I love performing in fact. A lot of stand-ups during the pandemic said ‘Oh good, at least I don't have to do that bit of the job now’, but I just realised how much I love being on stage. You are there. You've got one job for 20 minutes or for an hour or whatever and it is just to make people laugh and be entertained. There are days when you really don't feel like it but really it's the best distraction in the world and there will always be someone else in the audience that has had a total shocker of a day.”