Mum's the word
Comedian Laura Smyth was hard on her mum until she had kids herself — now she’s celebrating motherhood, whether it’s good, bad or funny
Aemen @ Jiksaw
- Anna Jones
Your Mum is on Radio 4 on Wednesday at 6.30pm. Add it to your collection.
Ad
One of celebrated paediatrician Dr Benjamin Spock’s top tips to parents was, “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” Comedian and broadcaster Laura Smyth feels the same and in Your Mum, the series where she invites celebrities to discuss their relationships with their mothers, she aims to shake up our views on parenting.
If you haven’t come across Smyth before, this is a gentle introduction to her comedy. It’s worth checking out her adults-only podcast Bang On It and her 2023 late-night stand-up special I Don’t Know What to Say on BBC Sounds, for which she won gold in the comedy category at last year’s Arias. The latter is a fierce, frank yet very funny account of her breast cancer diagnosis in 2021 at the age of 37, just after she’d left her career as an English teacher to become a comedian.
She has three children, aged 22, nine and seven, and lives in London with her husband, musician Alastair Smyth. Her own mum, who was widowed at a young age with multiple children to raise, is not far away. And she gets the complexities of family dynamics. “We’re so hard on ourselves as mums, and we’re so hard on our own mums. They did their best. They were just humans; they were not gods.” Throw in social media and headline-grabbing TV shows, and it’s harder than ever to feel as if you are doing a “good job” as a parent.
Generations of women were brought up with such shame
“I’m a bit sick of the navel-gazing culture we’re in at the minute,” says Smyth. “If you’re doom-scrolling, it’s all, ‘When were you last sad? Are you sad?’ And it’s full of people crying. I think if this is what we’re consuming, I really want my show to be the opposite of that. You can’t help but worry about your kids – and then you watch Adolescence! But as long as your house feels safe, emotionally, you can’t go far wrong.”
Like most of us, her teenage years involved conflicts with her own mum, but now she’s a parent herself they rub along very well. “I think there were generations of women brought up with such shame: the things that were buried; the things they were trying to keep us safe from – even if that came out as them being hyper-critical, or not being open, or not being honest, or feeling like you couldn’t approach them. Have some compassion – we are all fallible.”
A young Laura with her mum. Courtesy of Laura Smyth
This may sound rather heavy, but Your Mum is loaded with laughter. The focus is on why it’s OK to say, “I’m not a great mum. Aren’t kids difficult? Didn’t our mums go through it?” Smyth believes that “Comedy’s a kindness. I want anybody who listens to it to feel seen, to think, ‘Thank God, I am not alone,’ or ‘Cor, my mum wasn’t as bad as that!’”
Each episode has Smyth joined by two guests to explore the multiple facets of motherhood and to share stories about their own mums. These whistle-blowing offspring include Russell Kane, Thanyia Moore, Arlene Phillips and Iain Stirling. At the end of each show, Smyth asks them to share something about their mums that they are thankful for, to emphasise that this is a celebration as much as a mickey-take.
This all went to plan until she asked her comedy hero, Jo Brand. Smyth confesses that she was akin to a “teenage Tigger” just having Brand in the studio and added her own personal thanks to Brand’s mum, pointing out that if she hadn’t raised her the way she did then Smyth would never have had a career in comedy. Brand’s response to this high praise? A noise not dissimilar to someone being sick. But as Smyth notes, “Her mum was rebellious and stood up for what was right. This explains Jo Brand. It gave her all the confirmation she needed.”
Ad
And what do her own children make of having a mum who’s a comic? Not a lot, it turns out. Her son was quick to point out recently the reason why other parents on the school run make a beeline for his dad: “He writes good songs, and you write bad jokes.”
Authors
Anna Jones
Ad
Ad
Get the Christmas double issue
Too much to watch at Christmas? Let Radio Times do the choosing to find something the whole family will enjoy.
Loading...
Ad
Loading...