Helen Lederer - 3.00pm

Helen is one of Britain's best known familiar faces in the field of comedy, writing and acting. She is thrilled to still be alive and kicking. 

 BACK with a bang in 2024! And with her first ever memoir which is alarming honest and filled with legendary funny stories from the outset

 Helen Lederer was a regular on the stand-up circuit and new-wave sketch shows in the decade that launched the careers of today’s comedy household names and national treasures. She shared stages with comedy pioneers like Ben Elton and Rik Mayall, and TV screens with Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Harry Enfield, and many others. From the iconic Absolutely Fabulous, to Bottom, Happy Families, Naked Video, French and Saunders, and Girls on Top; it is difficult to think of a comedy show that Helen wasn’t a part of. So, plain sailing then? Well, not really.

 Not That I’m Bitter is a powerful, frank, moving and characteristically funny memoir, revealing exactly how choppy the waters could be. Even in those ground-breaking, anti-Thatcher days, there was only room at top for so many women. For the rest, it was as much a struggle to be seen and heard in the world of comedy as in any boardroom or workplace – and just as difficult to avoid the predators.

 But this is more than the story of one decade. The child of a Czech wartime refugee, Helen was never part of the mainstream. How do you make humour from a lifelong battle against problems with weight and low self-esteem? Where are the jokes in addictions to diet pills and steroid injections? How can laughter defeat the darker moments, like a child’s anorexia or PTSD? How do you cope with constant self-sabotage and when, despite enormous success, you still feel like a failure?

 A genuinely funny memoir with lots of heart (and just the right amount of bitterness!), there’s something that everyone can relate to. Helen pulls no punches, but every blow is wrapped in a laugh of recognition. Brilliantly written, revealing, and moving, Not That I’m Bitter is sweet, sour, and unforgettable

 Helen Lederer is a writer, actress, comedian, and presenter. Apart from TV, stage, and radio, she’s best known as Catriona, the dippy journalist in the TV series Absolutely Fabulous – although, her stay in the Big Brother house caused a different kind of notoriety. Her novel, Losing It, was nominated for the PG Wodehouse comedy literary prize. In 2019, Helen set up the Comedy Women in Print Prize (CWIP), to celebrate witty women writers.

She acts, she does stand up, she writes - there are the TV shows, radio shows, one woman shows, she does voices, she does speeches, she talks about wine, she writes about wine, and she drinks wine. And she set up Comedy Women in Print to shine a light on other women who write funny books.