FEATURE:
This Way Up
How Aisling Bea’s Words Have Been of Comfort to Me – and Why She is Inspiring Future Ambitions
_________
THE second part of this feature…
IN THIS PHOTO: Aisling Bea photographed in 2019/PHOTO CREDIT: Dean Chalkley
will relate more to music but, as I have been meaning to write about this for a while… so this is a bit overdue. I wanted to talk Irish comedian, writer and actor Aisling Bea. I will explain how she related to music in a bit but, on a personal level, I wanted to offer her thanks. I know she will never see this – as she gets hundreds of notifications a day and cannot respond to all of them! -, but I follow her on Twitter and Instagram, and her posts provide me with comfort and inspiration. Recently, she posted tips about how she deals with bad days – ones where she is struggling with her mental health. I know a lot of other people do this, but Bea has written about mental health and loneliness before. It has been addressed in interviews, and she does not shy away from the topic. As a comedian, she is naturally very funny, but I assume people think that she must be very happy all of the time – and not have any problems or struggles herself. I will come to why Bea and mental health concerns are particularly relevant to me at this moment. Bea, as a woman in comedy, has campaigned for equality. She has spoken before about her experiences of sexism within comedy and T.V. She has recounted an experience where she was told to shut up on a panel show. You do see more women on panel shows now, but there is still imbalance. Bea is no doubt inspiring a lot of young women coming up in comedy! She is one of my all-time favourite comics and writers, and she is also someone with a beautiful heart. Raising awareness and support for a food bank in Hackney in conjunction with the The Bill Murray Comedy Club, Angel (just down the road from me), Bea uses her platform to help others.
A tremendous comic and writer (her award-winning comedy-drama, This Way Up, is one of my favourite shows of the last ten years), I have a lot of admiration for her incredible work. At the moment – so young is 2023 -, I am facing a bit of a struggle. With redundancy a possibility in the next couple of weeks, financial security is causing a lot of stress. I have lived with depression for decades now (I am thirty-nine), but, lately, it has intensified and deteriorated (reaching suicidality at times). Loneliness is another big concern. You can be in a big city like London and be surrounded by people and yet feel lonely and isolated. As I was hoping to spend some time in America this year, that has had to be delayed because of unexpected financial strains. I have also have some creative frustrations that are causing their own headaches – but more on that when I come to the music portion of this feature. I will come to some other Aisling Bea interviews where she has talked about mental health. There is one particularly personal and heartbreaking feature (written by Bea) that was published in The Guardian just over five years ago. I remember reading it at the time and being incredibly moved. Bea’s words and recollections about her father’s suicide (when she was a child) were incredibly brave and powerful. My situation is not the same as Bea’s father, but her words have resonated with me:
“I didn’t care that he had not been “in his right mind”, because if I had been important enough to him I would have put him back into his “right mind” before he did it. I didn’t care that he had been in “chronic pain” and that men in Ireland don’t talk about their feelings, so instead die of sadness. I didn’t want him at peace. I wanted him struggling, but alive, so he could meet my boyfriends and give them a hard time, like in American movies. I wanted him to come to pick me up from discos, so my mother didn’t have to go out alone in her pyjamas at night to get me.
I look like him. For all of my teens and early 20s, I smothered my face in fake tan and bleached my hair blond so that elderly relatives would stop looking at me like I was the ghost of Christmas past whenever I did something funny. “You look so like your father,” they would say. And as much as people might think a teenage girl wants to be told that she looks like a dead man, she doesn’t.
And then there was the letter.
My mother gave us the letter to read the day she told us, but, in it, he didn’t mention my sister or me.
I had not been adored. He had forgotten we existed. I didn’t believe it at first. When I was 15, I took the letter out of my mother’s Filofax and used the photocopying machine at my summer job to make a copy so I could really examine it. Like a CSI detective, I stared at it, desperate to see if there had been a trace of the start of an “A” anywhere.
I would often fantasise that, if I ever killed myself, I would write a letter to every single person I had ever met, explaining why I was doing it. Every. Single. Person. Right down to the lad I struck up a conversation with once in a chip shop and the girl I met at summer camp when I was 12. No one would be left thinking: “Why?” I would be very non-selfish about it. When Facebook came in, I thought: “Well, this will save me a fortune on stamps.”
Sometimes, in my less lucid moments, I was convinced that he had left a secret note for me somewhere. Maybe, on my 16th … no, 18th … no, 21st … no, 30th birthday, a letter would arrive, like in Back to the Future. “Aisling, I wanted to wait until you were old enough to understand. I was secretly a spy. That is why I did it. I love you. I love your sister, too. PS Heaven is real, your philosophy essay is wrong and I am totally still watching over you. Stop shoplifting.
This summer was the 30th anniversary of his death. In that time, a few things have happened that have radically changed how I feel.
Three years ago, Robin Williams took his own life. He was my comedy hero, my TV dad – he had always reminded my mother of my father and his death spurred me to finally start opening up. I had always found it so hard to talk about. I think I had been afraid that if I ever did, my soul would fall out of my mouth and I would never get it back in again.
Last year, I watched Grayson Perry’s documentary All Man. It featured a woman whose son had ended his life. She thought that he probably hadn’t wanted to die for ever, just on that day, when he had been in so much pain. A lightbulb moment – it had never occurred to me that maybe suicide had seemed like the best option in that hour. In my head, my father had taken a clear decision, as my parent, to opt out for ever”.
Bea wrote how her father’s death had given her an increased appreciation of women and their grittiness and hardness, in addition to new love for men and their tenderness and vulnerability – traits not often associated with masculinity. Aside from the feature being this very personal and sad part of my Bea’s life, it was also designed to raise awareness of suicide and mental health issues. I know so many people were helped and even saved by Bea’s words!
Something I can also relate to is burn-out. Having a full-time job and being a music journalist, balancing a normal job and a passion can be a real struggle. I have been especially busy and frantic the past few weeks. Coming back to The Guardian, Bea explained why filming the second series of This Way Up was especially tough during the pandemic. Not only is the comedy connection with Bea (which I shall elucidate on later) a reason why I am writing this. As writer of This Way Up, Bea revealed why writing about her character, Áine’s, struggles with mental health was particularly important:
“The second series of your show This Way Up was written and filmed in lockdown – that must have been a gruelling experience.
It was a very tough thing to make the show in January. I was completely burnt out, and everything was done in the hardest possible way for many different reasons. I wrote some of it during the making of Home Sweet Home Alone: I’d go on set and go: “Oh no, where’s my son gone, I’m in Japan and he’s at home.” And then try to rewrite some notes in between scenes. I don’t think I’d ever got to that point from work before, where there was still so much work to do and I had nothing left. It has an effect on your personality. I definitely became less nice. I didn’t like myself very much. I say this with the utmost gratitude knowing what I get to do, but it was too much for one person. I’ve put out my hip, I’ve got repetitive strain injury, the nerves of my little finger’s gone. Woe is me, I’m very aware of that! But it definitely beat the spirit out of me. I never thought when I wrote: “written for anyone who needs a reminder to find hope” [the final episode’s dedication] that I’d be the one needing it then – my past self saying it to me in the editing room.
The show portrays mental health in an impressively nuanced and insightful way. Was that theme there from the project’s inception?
No, initially it was just myself and [co-star] Sharon [Horgan] playing sisters – that was the core of it. But then when I wrote the article about my dad [in 2017, Bea wrote a piece for the Guardian about her father, who took his own life when she was three], I couldn’t possibly reply to all the people who got in touch – there just aren’t enough emotional hours in the day. You feel so guilty because you know that it took a lot for someone to actually type that. I think in some way the show became a reply, or a way I could speak about it that felt the most time-efficient.
Many of This Way Up’s most powerful moments depict Áine struggling mentally while continuing with her normal life. Was that an important aspect of the show for you?
I wanted to make a show about loneliness. I felt like I didn’t always see what most of it looks like. I wanted to challenge drama or excitement. For most people the struggle is the daily-ness, that’s where the heartbreak lies. That’s what grief looks like most of the time: today it’s going to be hard to make a cup of tea. And this sounds like such a tangent, but I realised I love watching Real Housewives, and rather than denounce reality TV, I thought: why do I love watching those shows? A lot of it was the hugeness of the smallness of life. It’s the same in chick lit – I grew up reading Irish authors like Maeve Binchy. Women weren’t allowed to have what you might determine as big lives; a lot of the revolutions happened in kitchens and health centres and in your private parts. For me that’s the unexplored life that we’re only just getting to [own] as women. To go: no, that’s my life and it’s important”.
I can relate a lot to Aisling Bea. Our lives are different, but her posts and words about mental health and loneliness have connected with me in a very raw and real way. A reason why I wanted to thank the Kildare-born legend. I shall come to cheerier subjects soon. There is another interview I wanted to quote from. Going back to 2019, it is again I go to The Guardian. Bea talks about her experiences with loneliness. As a high-profile comedian and actress, many might assume that this would not be an issue. It is a common misconception. I have also included a bit from the interview that mentions Bea’s vital and constant activism and passion for worthy causes:
“In This Way Up, Bea (who took that stage name in memory of her dad, Brian) plays Aine, a foreign-language school worker who’s recovering from a “teeny little nervous breakdown”, with her sister, played by Horgan. “When I started writing the characters, I’d think, what’s their loneliness? Is it being the only person in an environment that does a certain job, or is it the relationship they’re not happy in? Is it being an immigrant?” Loneliness is something she thinks about a lot.
“I don’t think it has anything to do with being alone. I’ve never really been alone. I have an amazing family, amazing friends, I’ve been in amazing relationships…” In recent years, she has been snapped on red carpets with boyfriends including Michael Sheen and Andrew Garfield. “But loneliness,” she says, “for me comes from being your own worst enemy. In not being able to trust your head sometimes, and what it’s going to do next. That’s a wound and a gift.”
She’s not afraid of an audience booing. “I’m afraid of myself. What if I am not on my side that day?” That’s why she has a pint before a performance. “It’s not for confidence, it’s to stop getting in your own way. To forget you’re on stage before the other you realises you’re there. To me, that is a really lonely feeling. Because it’s just you and yourself in that little battle.”
Peppered throughout our conversation are references to books about the brain and the body, which perform, in 2019, as self-help guides for people, like Bea, who are constantly striving and constantly questioning. “The biggest constant in terms of my friends is to do with the plastic-ness of their brains – who’s working on themselves and who will admit that they’re idiots sometimes? We’re all having these mini-breakdowns, some realisations and then some expansions.”
One such expansion has been her increased activism. Bea was a supporter of the change to Ireland’s abortion laws: she and Horgan dressed in Handmaid’s Tale bonnets urging people to vote, and wrote a comic essay published in a collection titled Repeal the 8th, which explains the mystery of women”.
I wanted to write about Aisling Bea, because I have revisited her 2017 article for The Guardian, because it has become sort of relevant to me at a very hard time. As we look out on a new year, it is meant to be a time for hopes, opportunities and resolutions. It can be very hard to feel that optimism when life throws a lot at you. There was more I wanted to say before wrapping up. I know Bea is going to be busy this year, but I always wonder whether she will release a book. Maybe not a self-help one (though that would be amazing), I feel a memoir or a novel would be something people would love to read. I am not sure whether she liked the experience of writing alone, so that might not be appealing to her. Her words have given so much heart and strength to so many people. I would especially love to read her life story. She is such a compelling, warm and talented human. She would give so much inspiration to a lot of people – she does already too. I wonder whether there will be a new Netflix comedy special. There would be so much demand for an Aisling Bea filmed special (she has done one before). Not that this dream would ever be realised, but I have been writing and planning a comedy music film. Bea is a writer and actor I respect so much, but I don’t think that I will ever be lucky enough to have her involved.
It has been a real struggle getting it off the ground, but I am hopeful it will see the light of day in years to come. I also wonder whether Bea will write another comedy or comedy-drama. Shows like This Way Up show what an immense talent she is as an actor and writer. Bea has appeared in films, and it would be nice to think there are a very other major films with her name attached this year. A music biopic I have always wanted to happen is one concerning Blondie. The legendary U.S. band have not had their story brought to the screen, but I have been wary about biopics, as they tend to have mixed fortunes. Aisling Bea is actually involved with a Take That film that has an interesting angle. Starring alongside a stellar cast, it has given me inspiration. Last year, Deadline reported on what we know so far:
“Based on the hit stage musical The Band, the film will feature music from Take That and has buy-in from the band and Universal Music Group. Songs set to feature in the movie include Greatest Day, Patience, Back For Good, A Million Love Songs and Shine. There are also rumors that the band might be writing some original songs for the film.
The story follows five best friends who have the night of their lives at a concert from their favorite boy band. Twenty-five years later their lives have changed in a myriad of ways as they reunite to reminisce about their past and discover their future.
Coky Giedroyc (How to Build a Girl) is directing the adaptation, which is written by Tim Firth (Calendar Girls). Mike Eley (The Dig) is attached as DoP, Amanda MacArthur (How to Build a Girl) is aboard as production designer and Drew McOnie (Me Before You) is choreographer”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Aisling Bea shot by Charlie Clift for BAFTA
It was Bea’s attachment to the film that made me interested. I am trying to do a Blondie biopic but, reading about what the Take That film will offer, there is a new angle that I could explore. Not sticking rigidly to biopic rules, I could do something more musical/comedy-based. Not that the project has actually been green-lit, mind! It is a passion I have and hope to fulfill. I wanted to wish Aisling Bea a 2023 filled with love and exciting opportunities. Maybe time in America filming or excitement relationships. I can see a new sitcom with her involved somehow (I love the fact Bea has such a love for the iconic Father Ted). Whatever this year holds, I felt compelled to write about times where Bea’s words and work have made a real difference. I know I am not alone in saying that. Someone I would love to work with years down the line (when I get good enough to make it to her feet!), I am going through a tough time and am not sure how it will all work out. I wanted to thank Aisling Bea for, at a rather shaky moment, giving me…
SOME invaluable guidance and comfort.