Arabella Weir: I was a few months pregnant and my Mum asked 'Have you any idea how fat you are?'

Bullied by her mother since childhood, former 'Fast Show' star Arabella Weir has finally turned those wicked barbs into an Edinburgh show

Arabella Weir’s new show isn’t so much a journey into her past as it is “a white knuckle ride”. Taking to the stage at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this month, the actress, writer and comedian (The Fast Show, Two Doors Down) will introduce the audience to her mother.

“She’s dead, but don’t worry, she’s here,” Weir will say. “And if she was here, she’d say: ‘I see you haven’t managed to lose any weight since I died.’”

And so begins Does My Mum Loom Big In This?, Weir’s new one-woman comedy routine. Its title is, of course, a pun – a brilliant one – on her most famous creation, the fretting woman in the Fast Show sketches who was always asking strangers: ‘does my bum look big in this?’

It’s only now, at the age of 61, divorced and with two grown up children, that Weir has achieved enough distance from her “appallingly dysfunctional” family background to alchemise the dark muck of her childhood into comedy gold.

“When I was a few months pregnant,” Weir begins over breakfast coffee and pastries in her north London kitchen, “Mum said, ‘Have you any idea how fat you are?’ I said, ‘Mum, I’m f---ing pregnant. What is the matter with you?’ ‘Yes, but look at the size of you, you’re only a few months…’”

Weir can laugh about it now, as she must, but she’s still aghast.

“I said to my dad one time, ‘Sometimes I cannot forgive her ability for cruelty.’ He said: ‘Darling, I never learnt the lesson, but you have to remember: to mum it’s just meat and drink.’”

Weir’s mother Alison was born in 1926, into Scottish money. Her late father, Sir Michael Weir, was also Scottish. He became a career diplomat and a leading Arabist: Weir was born in San Francisco and had a childhood ping-ponging between the US, the UK and the Middle East.

Her mother, highly educated but singularly lacking in the nurturing instinct, was wholly ill-equipped for any of the tasks the era, her station and her class expected of her.

“She was a fantastically intelligent women with a huge sense of entitlement and precious little sense of rolling up her sleeves and getting on with it,” says Weir.

“She was a mother in the Fifties and Sixties, a time when there were no books about mothering. The idea that you might think it was at all hard was just a nonsense – it was all ‘just get on with it’. And the idea that you might become a bit depressed? You wouldn’t even know the word.”

This manifested in a sweary disdain for her daughter. When Weir was eight, her parents split and her father moved alone to his next posting in Bahrain. When young Arabella asked where dad was, her mother replied: “F--- off.”

Within a few months, because her questions as to father’s whereabouts didn’t let up, her mother eventually said: “I can’t f**king bear the sight of you, you can go and live with him.” Her five-year-old sister was kept home and her two brothers were already off at prep school.

Remarkably, Weir has taken all this – the rejection, the cruelty, the fat-shaming – and turned it into a show that, even in its telling in her kitchen, is hilarious.

And yet: in the retelling, has she found herself being plunged back into the trauma? Weir shakes her head.

“There are a couple of incidents that aren’t in the show because there’s no comedic opportunity – they’re just horrible.”

For example? “Mum got it into her head that I had to be able to tell the time,” she says of when she was eight. “She didn’t go in for hitting much – there were a few slaps – but this time she grabbed me and shook me and said, ‘We are not leaving the f---ing house until you can tell the time.’

“I remember thinking, ‘Please, please let me guess the right time.’ Because she’d lost it completely. And of course I didn’t, and she just went berserk, shaking me and screaming. I just thought: ‘I don’t know what to do here.’”

Weir became self-sufficient at an early age, later forging a “rebellious” path for herself at Camden School for Girls in north London (despite her mother ending up a teacher there) and studying drama at Middlesex Polytechnic. Nonetheless: did all this mayhem mess her up? Her answer is typically forthright.

“There’s no question I was very promiscuous, and I make no judgement about that in terms of my gender. I realise now I was looking for someone to love me. So I would sleep with a lot of boys. I mean, that was sort of true in the Seventies anyway – we’d all do a bit of drugs and sleep with each other. We were the overhang from the beginning of feminism so we thought we were entitled.”

She also “drank a lot and shot myself in the foot” – she’d get great jobs as an actress then sabotage them. Equally, it wasn’t the easiest of times for a young actress. “When I started acting you were either Greta Scacchi or Hattie Jacques. There were no rounded women with ordinary figures. If I’d got much bigger I suppose I could have become the fat friend,” she sniffs.

She describes the industry, prior to the #MeToo movement, as a sleazy one.

“When you went on to a TV or film set, it was like going onto a building site. On my first film, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), the crew hadn’t worked out I was connected to the director,” she says of Karel Reisz, whose son she knew.

“I was just a young actress playing a bumptious country girl. And one of them said to me his balls were heavy because he had so much semen because he hadn’t had a f---. I was 20 and didn’t understand why he was telling me this. But it was ‘sexy banter’, I suppose,’” she smiles grimly.

Weir’s current relationship status could be described as ‘Single and Not Bothered’.

“I’m pretty confident I’m happier on my own than I’ve ever been. I never thought I’d end up single… ‘End up?’” she snorts, catching herself. “It’s not over yet! But I’ve been in a relationship of some description most of my adult life. And certainly having children, I fought very hard to keep my marriage working, but it was just not possible.

“I was very freaked out by the prospect of being a single parent. I was terrified I’d turn into my mother, sitting at the kitchen table crying, going, ‘You don’t know how s--- my life is.’ But seeing I could do it on my own, learning to be straight with my kids, was a great relief,” she says.

As for Does My Mum Loom Big In This?, what does she think the “heroine” of the show would make of it?

“To her eternal credit, I think mum would find it pretty funny. She was an egomaniac, a narcissist. Damaged, obviously.

“But she loved being teased. Because, of course, being teased means you’re the centre of attention. So if she could see a room full of laughing, and that she was the subject, she would have loved that.”

There’s just time for one more so-appalling-it’s-brilliant story, this time about her grandmother. Not long after her parents’ divorce, young Arabella was packed north from London to Dunfermline on a 14-hour coach trip to stay with her paternal grandmother, aka “the nastiest granny in the world”. Arabella had started wetting the bed in the wake of the split, so her mother put a rubber sheet in her suitcase.

“I want you to know that only stupid, fat girls wet their beds,” said Granny Nancy on discovering the bed linen.

“And of course my bowels emptied there and then,” Weir hoots.

Does My Mum Loom Big In This? is at the Assembly George Square, at Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Aug 12 - 25, and tours nationally from February 2020