As Waynetta Slob, with Harry Enfield as her screen husband, Wayne, in Harry Enfield & Chums
To have an audience with Kathy Burke — in her cosy Victorian terrace in north London; walls covered with art — is a small honour. Her last interview was an eccentric one — with National Prison Radio, to publicise its rehabilitation work.
It’s not that she isn’t in demand — every comedy panel show would consider her a catch. It’s just that Burke is very … picky.
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“I don’t really ‘do’ publicity,” she explains later. “It’s in all my contracts. You get paid less, but …” She shrugs. “I hate it. I pick and choose what I want to do.”
This has been going on a long while. When Burke won best actress at Cannes in 1997 for her astonishing turn in Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth, the whole world clamoured to talk to her. Instead, Burke did only two interviews: the Islington Gazette, her local paper, and “the lovely Richard and Judy”.
As we will find out later, Burke has good reasons for wanting to opt out of aspects of her industry. For someone with national treasure status — the first person Stephen Fry wanted to put in “Room Lovely”, the putative opposite of Room 101; the “working-class Judi Dench” — she has also often been treated as carelessly as the moment in Annie where the philistine Daddy Warbucks blithely hangs the Mona Lisa in his bathroom because, “There’s something interesting in that woman’s smile. I might learn to like her.”
But, for now — as she lights her second cigarette in ten minutes — Burke is open for business. Because we’re here to talk about her autobiography, A Mind of My Own — and there is a lot to discuss.
The two primary facts of Kathy Burke’s life are that her mother, Bridget, died when Burke was 18 months old, and that her father, Patrick, was an alcoholic. In the book, Burke describes how Patrick, after one of his regular, epic binges, would become truly ill.
“Shakes, hallucinations, vomiting and the shits could go on for days,” she explains matter-of-factly.
Until she was ten, Burke shared a bedroom with him: “It stank. If it was really bad, I’d take my blankets into the living room to sleep on the sofa — but he’d often cry out in the night: ‘Please, Kathy, come back into the room. I’m dying here. I might not last the night.’ ”
Burke would lie next to him “while he cried, farted and belched. He was good enough to keep the sick bucket on his side of the bed.”
Patrick could be “handy” with his fists. After one infraction in the book, where the police turn up at their house, she relays, stoically, “Needless to say, he battered me. Then I crawled back into bed, sobbing until I slept.”
Patrick’s drinking led to other outcomes — he frequently brought back “girlfriends” from the pub. “I spied one particular lady sitting on the edge of his bed, injecting herself,” Burke writes. “She was gone by the morning.”
Hunger was also a factor. Burke was regularly on the scrounge for food. From the age of four, she started slipping out of the window of her father’s council flat and roaming the estate — looking for people to feed her. Like a stray kitten. “I’d pilfer whatever I would come across,” she says.
Fifty years later, she remembers every meal that people gave her: Auntie Nellie’s “buttery swede”; Mrs Riley’s cereal with hot milk; the old man who had only two hard-boiled eggs in his house, but gave her one of them. “He mashed it up in a bowl with some butter,” and put it on something novel for Burke: “French stick. Ooh là là! His hands were dirty … but it was delicious.”
And then there were the boys who gave her Black Jack and Fruit Salad sweets in exchange for Burke doing “an impromptu strip, down to my knickers”.
“With a departed mum and a drinkie dad, there was no one to check,” Burke writes of her days spent looking both for food and anyone who might pay her some attention, however dark.
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This constant hunt for food ends for two reasons. The first is realising that the people she is “borrowing” food from are, often, as poor as her own family.
“I can’t keep giving you your dinner,” one mother cries in despair. “I’ve only got enough in my budget for me and my son.”
There isn’t a hint of self-pity in Burke — not now, as we’re chatting, or in the book. Children, I often observe, are incapable of self-pity — they don’t have the perspective to know what they’re missing out on.
“But I knew I could be self-pitying,” Burke says, cheerfully. “I didn’t remember my mother at all. I didn’t miss her — because I didn’t know her. But I knew I was supposed to. I knew that if I turned on the waterworks — started crying, ‘I miss my mummy! My mummy’s dead!’ — I’d get some sweets or some chocolate just to calm down the tears.”
This lack of a mother became painfully apparent in the second incident that stopped Burke’s constant hunt for food: when an ice-cream van parked up on the estate and “a Cockney woman I’d never seen before suddenly appeared and shouted, ‘I’ve had a win on the bingo! Who wants an ice cream?’ ”
Considering this the best day ever, Burke and her friends ran over to the van, all screaming, “Me, please!” Burke was so delighted at the prospect of an ice cream “that I beamed at her with all my might”.
The bingo winner looked at Burke, then said, “Oooooh! Ain’t you ugly?”
Around the van, all the children started laughing hysterically — at Burke.
“My world stopped,” Burke writes.
It’s a truly awful anecdote to read. It’s on page 51 of the book — by which point, Burke has already been told she has “thin hair”, that she’s “fat”, that she “talks too much”. She is, at the time, eight. As a reader, you feel a desperate desire to travel through time, pick up that little girl and take her somewhere better.
“I can still remember that prickly feeling,” Burke says now. “It was a stand-out moment of, well … cruelty. But I can remember dealing with it quickly — and not crying. I just thought, ‘I’ve got to make everyone laugh more than they laughed at me.’ ”
And she does. The eight-year-old Kathy Burke counters being told she’s ugly by pulling a silly face, chirping, “But I’m the best dancer at the Ugly Bug Ball, though,” and starting a ridiculous “jiggling” dance.
“And that made her, and the kids, laugh [with me].”
Wow. I mean, that’s the classic origin story for why people go into showbiz, right? A child is psychologically destroyed for being who they are, but comes back quipping and dancing. If you are not loved for who you are, you will become … something else. An entertainer.
“Well,” Burke says. “I was not able to run home to a mum, who would inevitably say, ‘You’re not — you’re beautiful.’ Looking back, I’m proud of how I managed myself. I didn’t end up sniffing glue, or running away. I just got on with things.”
A Mind of My Own reminds me of Bob Mortimer’s recent bestselling memoir. He also lost a parent when he was young (in his case, his father) and there’s clearly a particular kind of vulnerable charm — both a charismatic dazzle and an undercurrent of helplessness — that distressed children develop. Something that says to the world, “I won’t bore you with my sadness. I will amuse you! But there is something in my demeanour that also quietly reminds you: I am wounded.”
“It was Bob who told me to write the book,” Burke says. “He kept on at me.”
A Mind of My Own is incredibly vivid. Burke’s childhood comes off the page and fills your world with hers: Islington, north London, in the Seventies and Eighties, where Burke’s future looks perilous, small and unhappy, until two things happen.
The first is punk — “My saviour,” she writes. “I didn’t want to be a girlie girl … I went to the barber shop and had my straggly locks cropped close to the bone.”
The second is that Burke had the incredible good fortune to live near the Anna Scher Theatre — which, from 1968, had been taking in local working-class kids with performing talent. Over 50 years, Scher discovered Phil Daniels, Linda Robson, Pauline Quirke, Natalie Cassidy, James Alexandrou, Susan Tully, Martin Kemp, Gillian Taylforth, Patsy Palmer, Sid Owen, Joe Swash, Jake Wood, Daniel Kaluuya, Reggie Yates, Zawe Ashton — and, in 1980, Kathy Burke.
Burke was studying car maintenance at a further education college when she was offered a place with Scher.
Her description of her first class with Scher is written with all the wonderment of a child discovering Narnia. It was an improvisation class — “and I felt terrified. I felt like a big fat giant.”
Burke found it impossible to speak — “My words were stuck in my throat” — but, in a moment of instinct, turned it to her advantage. “I gave a small pause, then actually acted that I couldn’t speak. It got a good snigger.”
A minute later, Burke was giving a full-blown comedy performance of someone who can’t get a word in edgeways in a conversation — despite the important fact that, in this exercise, she was on her own. She was imagining a scene partner.
At the end of the scene, “[Scher] was beaming, and stood up from her chair. ‘That, boys and girls, is a masterclass. Well done, Kathy Burke.’ ”
In that moment, Burke’s life changed.
“Everyone clapped again. That night, I could not sleep at all.”
Really. Scrubbers, in 1982, was seen as the female answer to Scum, the Seventies borstal drama. Burke — in her first role — is quite dazzling. Only 17, she looks about 12 and she is, frankly, a charisma bomb — those hooded, milky-blue eyes seemingly zoned out and excluded from the conversations until she suddenly bursts into life with an anecdote, curse or joke; like the borstal’s Artful Dodger. You cannot take your eyes off this chain-smoking scrap who swears like a navvy — but also has an odd, otherworldly charm. She’s an entrancing, repeating explosion.
After Scrubbers, the next 20 years of Burke’s career have such a rollercoaster range, you can see why people have struggled to fit her into any category. In 1990, she’s the chain-smoking Waynetta Slob in Harry Enfield’s Television Programme. In 1997 she triumphs at Cannes in the pitch-black, visceral Nil by Mouth — famously flown over, in a panic, on Luc Besson’s private jet, when everyone realises she’s won. And then in 1999, she starts playing the fabulously grotesque Linda in the none-camper sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme.
Really, to be able to go from Waynetta Slob to Nil by Mouth is as if Meryl Streep had played Sybil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers — then gone straight into The Deer Hunter.
And this is why, for the past three decades, she has been the top “Imaginary Dinner Party Guest” for anyone of my generation. There’s something so exhilarating about seeing a woman so embarrassingly capable of deep, emotional acting while being so sui generis. She has become iconic for simply expanding the options of how you could be a woman: that you can be the clown, the matriarch, the pub philosopher and the greatest talent of your generation — while also never having to bother with the stupid shoes or the sultry, corseted photoshoots, or giggling supportively while the men do the fun stuff. She was the fun stuff. Briefer, shallower takes would describe her as “blokey Burkey” — but who’s to say all that stuff is blokes’ stuff?
Besides, in the character of the awkward teenage boy Perry in Harry Enfield & Chums, Burke beat the blokes at their own game: if there’s ever been a better depiction of teenage boys — their awkwardness, their sudden verbal flurries, the terrible vulnerability at the core of them — it’s only in Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole books. And that was a woman’s take on male adolescence too.
And this is the main thing I’ve come to discuss with Burke today. How furious I am that she hasn’t had the career she should have had. Despite her obvious, generational talent, over and over, A Mind of My Own describes the kind of demeaning scripts she was sent throughout her career — “just ‘fat mate of attractive girl’, or ‘thick f*** in a crowd of whatever’ ” — or else on projects where she was “paraded around like a fascinating little monkey”.
There are directors who are astonishingly insulting (“I asked why he was talking to me as if I were a … f***ing halfwit. His answer: ‘I didn’t know when we met that you are working class … so I thought you might need some extra help’ “). And, in interviews — when she used to do them — “People always saying I don’t look ‘like [what] an actress should look like’. What’s an actress supposed to look like? I don’t want to be Elizabeth Taylor. I know I’m not Elizabeth Taylor. I want to be Irene Handl.”
Why, I ask Burke, pinching another ciggie, were there not people lining up to write roles just for you? Why didn’t they treat the star like a star?
All morning Burke has been brilliant, sharp, garrulous fun — but her next answer sounds like the One Big Speech every main character is allowed to have in a movie. She delivers it with both crystal clarity and a shrug.
“When I first met Gary Oldman, he tried. He really tried for me. He was pushing the Royal Court, ‘Why aren’t you seeing her? Why aren’t you giving her the big roles?’ And he came to my house and said, ‘I don’t understand. They should be seeing you. There’s a play you’d be perfect for.’ And I said …”
She says that back then, most “male directors, producers — if they didn’t want to f*** you, if they didn’t find you attractive, if there wasn’t any flirting going on — they didn’t want to know. And I gave the impression that was absolutely not going to f***ing happen. And that’s why it didn’t happen for me.”
It seems to be a taste many are simply too stupid, or unknowingly sexist, to acquire. On page 288, Burke phones her agent and gives up acting.
If A Mind of My Own often stands as a frustrating testament to how an actress “who doesn’t look like Elizabeth Taylor” will have her talent squandered — while actors like Steve Buscemi, Gérard Depardieu, Willem Dafoe, Philip Seymour Hoffman and even Dustin Hoffman, for that matter, get decades of juicy roles — there are also plenty of moments where you realise, there are people who still see it. Game recognises game.
The late Rik Mayall sees Burke in Scrubbers and practically adopts her for the night — dragging her around London and insisting that the manager of the Comedy Store give her a free, lifetime membership right there and then, “as Kathy will be a star for a lifetime”.
When Burke refuses to do another series of Harry Enfield’s show, bored with playing just Waynetta Slob, her co-star Paul Whitehouse is horrified, immediately contacting Enfield and suggesting that a character Burke had once invented for a sketch on The Jonathan Ross Show, “Perry”, would be the ideal best friend of a new character called “Kevin the Teenager”.
And Peter Cook tracks her down to her dressing room and sits at her feet, telling her, “You are a genius” — although, with masterful timing, 100 pages later, Burke realises that Cook, in his cups, has done this to half the actors she knows.
Danny Boyle, on the other hand, who directed her in Mr Wroe’s Virgins in 1993, does not come out of it well.
“Oh, I thought I was quite restrained,” Burke says, of the man she calls a “supercilious priest”, and who disapproves of Burke cracking jokes “to lighten the mood … but didn’t seem to mind when Jonathan Pryce did it”. Burke describes him as “never asking me any questions, never asked me about myself”.
Instead, Boyle relied on “bonding exercises”: “We just chucked beanbags at each other. What the f*** is that?”
“Well, he’s got Oscars coming out of his arse now, so me giving him a f***ing slap in the book isn’t going to do any harm,” Burke tells me, shrugging again.
The last 20 years of Burke’s career have been a shrug, really. Finally accepting that the industry didn’t get her as an actress, she mainly works as a theatre director.
“I’m not ambitious now, no,” she says, almost laughing. “I like a quiet life. Peace and quiet.”
After “lots of therapy”, she’s not the “dark and angry” woman she was in her thirties. Even her much hyped “feud” with Helena Bonham Carter — when the latter suggested that, “If you’re not pretty and you’re working class, you have an easier time in terms of people’s attitudes to you,” only for Burke to write a “sisterly” letter to Time Out, briskly suggesting, “As a lifelong member of the non-pretty working classes: shut up, you stupid c***” — is now over. Burke was introduced to her at a party by “naughty” Samantha Morton, “and she was very gracious. We had a good chat about it all.”
“I should have got her to do my audiobook,” Burke says now. “Someone who can speak proper!”
When she started writing A Mind of My Own, it began with her dictating stories into her phone, “but the bloody software was American: it didn’t have a clue what I was on about. It don’t speak Cockney.”
In the end, Burke wrote the whole book “on my phone. Typing away. Fast thumbs. I mean, every so often, I did wonder — is anyone going to care about this? I’m not as famous as I used to be.”
For the first time today, Burke looks like she’s experiencing a moment of doubt.
“Do you think I should have put more of my wild stories in?” she asks, looking worried. “About the Nineties and such?”
I remind her that this is a book about her being raised as a feral, motherless child; starting work at 17; immortalising several of this country’s most endearing catchphrases; triumphing at Cannes; being told you’re a genius by Peter Cook; and, at one party, accidentally taking some of Shaun Ryder’s crack, then attempting to set fire to a woman’s arse.
No. A Mind of My Own is in no way boring. But it’s infuriating. My goodness, it’s infuriating.
