In one very important sense, motherhood is an exercise in mitigating risk: you are the cautious and dutiful protector of society’s most vulnerable. But what if you’re also a natural-born thrill-seeker who lives for transgressive fun? What then?
In Jackpot, her new standup show, Isy Suttie explores precisley this contradiction. As a teenager growing up in the picturesque spa town of Matlock in Derbyshire, her life revolved around the pursuit of excitement: some of her weirder escapades included touring multiple house parties in a single evening with her Ouija board, and jumping off a 30ft bridge for a £1 bet. Now, her life has all the hallmarks of measured domesticity – she has a seven-year-old daughter and three-year-old son with her partner, fellow comic Elis James – and yet “the element of me that does want to take risks” remains, she explains over a flat white in a south London coffee shop that is full of mothers conscientiously attending to babes in buggies.
It is something the 43-year-old still finds herself drawn to. In Jackpot, she recounts the time she encouraged her kids to explore a disturbingly spooky campsite in the woods near her house (they were terrified), and how, with them gone, she engaged in some light trespassing at a nuclear power station with a couple of friends from mum yoga (the police became involved).
Jackpot is Suttie’s return to standup after a very long break: she has not toured for a decade. Instead, she has been busy writing books (in 2016 she published a memoir, The Actual One, and last year, a novel called Jane Is Trying), podcasting and acting; her CV includes recurring roles in Shameless, Man Down and Jo Brand’s social work sitcom Damned. But it’s as Dobby, the on-off girlfriend of Peep Show’s uber-relatable loser-geek Mark Corrigan, that she remains best loved. Nerdy, vivacious, kind and sharp-witted, Dobby is one of the most distinctive female roles in British TV comedy history. In her teens, Suttie says, she used to “dream” of playing Sally Phillips’s giggling receptionist in I’m Alan Partridge; in sitcom character terms, I’d say she ended up going one better.
Yet as great as Dobby was, the role did end up derailing Suttie’s standup career. At drama school she had harboured ambitions to become a serious actor and/or musician. “Me and my college boyfriend Tom used to sit up all night going: ‘I’m going to be in a Mike Leigh film, then I’m going to be in a Ken Loach film, then I’ll tour with Théâtre de Complicité.’ There was no talk of: ‘I’ll do theatre in education for a year then I’ll get turned down for an advert,’” she recalls, with an enthusiastic appreciation of her own ridiculousness.
Yet after graduating to zero work, she discovered London’s standup scene, and soon found herself performing musical comedy on the gay club circuit. Her material included a song about Geri Halliwell’s dog, a lullaby for Katie Price, and one about a man putting his penis into a chip fryer. “The chorus was: ‘Eh, come on love, what’s the matter / Have you never seen sausage in batter?’ In a northern accent,” recounts Suttie, trying and failing to keep a straight face.
As much as her camp, celebrity-centric material chimed with the gay scene, it was also a “real baptism of fire”. She struggled to win over audiences, and soon migrated to the mainstream standup circuit. There, she thrived. In 2007, a Chortle review of her first solo Edinburgh show, a one-woman romcom musical set in a Matlock supermarket titled Love Lost in the British Retail Industry, hailed her as a “modern-day Victoria Wood”. The following year she made her Peep Show debut; she knew she had nailed the audition thanks to the “tingly” ASMR-related sensation she experienced afterwards.
On the set of her first series on the show, she was “really scared all the time. I was aware of how good it was and I was very quiet and shy.” Off set, she found that Dobby had supercharged her standup career – not always for the better. She was promoted to the top of bills, and gigs were advertised on her Peep Show credentials. “I got a bit inside my own head and was like: ‘Why are people here? Are they here to see Dobby? What do they expect?’” She worried that audiences would presume it was her first foray into standup. The stress was exacerbated by the fact she believed her Edinburgh show that year wasn’t up to scratch, having felt pressure to do the fringe regardless as a rising comedian. “It can feel like a really long Edinburgh where you have to do a show every day and you’re not happy with it,” she says.
Her new work is clearly not born of the same sense of Fomo: Suttie wasn’t planning on returning to standup when Jackpot’s concept came to her. It taps into a very different cultural zeitgeist than the irreverent, Heat magazine-adjacent spirit of the late 00s. Jackpot is part of a wave of comedy that muses, very amusingly, on the ways motherhood and identity intersect (see also: the work of standups Ali Wong and Jessica Fostekew, books by comedians Lucy Beaumont and Ellie Taylor and sitcoms Motherland and Better Things). It’s a theme that also runs through Suttie’s next TV project, The Baby, which tackles the topic of motherhood in a marginally more disturbing fashion. The horror-comedy follows Natasha (Michelle de Swarte), a contentedly childfree thirtysomething gradually losing all her friends to parenthood who is targeted by a homicidal infant: the child latches on to a new “mother” each time he kills his previous caregiver (and plenty of others along the way).
Suttie plays Natasha’s newly pregnant best friend Rita – another deserter – and filming the show took her back to her pre-kids days. “I really, really related to Michelle’s character feeling bereft of friends when everyone around you starts having kids,” she says. “My first book was about that, really. In a way you do lose your friends when they have kids if you don’t have them, because it’s boring as hell to hear someone talk about their baby and be preoccupied, and not have a proper conversation with you.”
The Baby is laugh-out-loud funny but also genuinely disturbing; one field-based scene literally gave me nightmares. Best of all, it’s packed with subtle, blisteringly evocative allegories for the specific hell – the boredom, the sleep-deprivation, the mania, the crushing sense of responsibility – that is caring for a very small child. One of the cleverest elements of the early episodes is the way Natasha turns into a martyr: she won’t let anyone else look after the baby lest it murders them, a neat parallel for the exhausting instinct many new mothers have to control everything.
It’s something Suttie can relate to. “I remember not letting anyone else wash [her daughter] Beti’s bottles,” she says. “You’re so out of control of so many elements of it, like when they sleep, that you’re scrabbling to control what you can.”
In fact, Suttie’s attempts to do it all after the birth of her daughter in 2014 took its toll in a dramatic way: she developed a condition called migraine-associated vertigo, partly because of the stress she was under. “I did the book tour, I was filming a lot, I was away the whole time – and I was spending a lot of time with her. I wasn’t sleeping much. Both Elis and I would be filming and we’d meet at a service station and swap Beti over into a different car. In the end it was like, ‘One of us has to pull back a little bit.’” Suttie ended up taking three months off work, even though, being “a perfectionist and a workaholic”, she didn’t particularly want to. During those months she realised not working wasn’t “right for me, but I shouldn’t be working as much. So it was a case of: what do I really want to do?”
The answer seems to be a bit of everything. After our interview, I leave Suttie behind in the baby-garlanded coffee shop; she is staying to catch up on her reading in preparation for the new series of the Penguin books podcast she presents. It’s just one component of a life that takes in writing, acting, parenting, standup, podcasting and, of course, the odd foray into a haunted campsite or nuclear power plant. It may not be everyone’s idea of a good time, but Suttie has clearly worked out how to hit her own personal jackpot.
Jackpot tours from 22 August, starting at London’s Soho theatre; The Baby airs on Sky Atlantic in July.
