“Let me think,” says the comedian and actor London Hughes when asked what she misses about living in the UK. “I miss my friends and family. I miss pickled onion Monster Munch, and Malibu and pineapple in a can. I miss sea salt and chardonnay-flavoured crisps from the Co-op. Do I miss working in Britain? After the way I was treated?” She lets out a throaty laugh. “Not at all.”
It has been three and a half years since Hughes bit the bullet and moved to Los Angeles in search of opportunities denied to her back home. A fortnight after she arrived, Covid-19 sent the world into lockdown. “Yet I still managed to end that year with a new TV show and a comedy special,” Hughes says. “I made more money in that first year of moving to America than I’d made in my whole life in Britain. I’m, like: ‘England! What is wrong with you? How dare you make me feel like I wouldn’t make it when I had all this talent in me.’ To this day, I tell anyone who is not a white man who is trying to make it in comedy in Britain to leave.”
