In 2018, Fern Brady’s comedy career was taking off. Fresh from supporting Frankie Boyle on tour, she filmed Live at the Apollo in London, then took a last-minute gig in Manchester the following day. On the way back to the capital, she was offered a last-minute audition for Have I Got News for You. Her brain screamed no, but she said yes. When she got to the audition, she couldn’t function, freezing into silence.
Now, she knows this was an autistic shutdown. Brady was diagnosed early last year. When lockdown brought live comedy to a crashing halt, disrupting her routine, she’d been plunged into frequent “crippling” crises. These can manifest as destructive outbursts (meltdowns) or silent withdrawal (shutdowns) and she discovered they can be exacerbated by “masking” – changing your instinctive behaviours to appear “normal”. It’s taken her all year to “start to unlearn these bad habits”, she says as we sit at either end of a velvet sofa in a cafe in Catford, London.
