Lucy Beaumont: I didn’t have a middle-class upbringing – I was educated at Asda

Lucy Beaumont, 42, is a comedian from Hull. She won the BBC Radio New Comedy Award in 2012, and her debut Edinburgh show, We Can Twerk It Out, was nominated for best newcomer in 2014. She has appeared on QI, Taskmaster, The Celebrity Traitors, and co-written and starred in five series of Meet the Richardsons with her former husband, . They have a nine-year-old daughter, Elsie. Here, she looks back at the moments that shaped her. My mum was only 20 when she had me. She’d been a bit of a tearaway at school, and I think that got put on me. On my first day of art, my teacher said: “I hope you’re not going to be like your mother, because the last time I saw her, she was rolling around on the floor fighting.” So I had a lot to live up to. Mum and I were brought up like sisters. I’m an only child, and we lived in Hull with my grandparents. I shared a bedroom with my mum’s younger sister. My dad lived down south, in London. It really annoyed my mum when my granny would say: “I’ll bash both your heads together in a minute.” It must have been tricky, wanting to parent while my granny took over. Working at Asda changed my life. That sounds mad now I’m 42, have lived in London, and been on telly. They built one near us in Hull – it was a fishing community with a thriving, working-class high street, and we thought: “Oh wow, they’ve picked us.” I couldn’t believe I’d been chosen to work there. Asda was owned by Walmart, so even the training felt like Hollywood. Shorts They put me on the meat counter, but a big dog chased me home, so the other women petitioned to have me moved to pizzas. The pizza, which sat on a plastic plinth, would collapse, so I learned to fold it over to hide how many toppings I’d used. I thought I’d invented the calzone, and then when I first went to Italy at 17, I couldn’t understand how my idea had caught on so quickly. I didn’t have that middle-class upbringing where you take your kids to museums or on educational holidays. Mine was about family, and the food wasn’t very adventurous. I got my education at Asda. I fell into comedy. I really wanted to be an actor and had done plays since I was a child at Northern Theatre, which was life-changing. It was run by eccentric, lovable, dramatic teachers who genuinely cared about kids from Hull. Sheridan Smith came through there, too. I’ve still got a chip on my shoulder about not getting into drama school. Other people went on to Lamda and Rada, but it crushed me that I never got in. I was sure my accent was too strong. I remember doing an audition monologue and thinking that when I said “no”, it made them wince. I still get a lot of misogyny because of my accent. It’s the one thing men attack online if they want to put me down. I get so many comments saying they can’t bear listening to me on telly because they think I’m putting it on, which I find fascinating. I think: “A: why would I choose this accent? And B: how would that help, when most people on television are posh?” I think it’s because you don’t often hear a Hull accent, whereas you hear plenty of people with, say, a Bolton accent, like Peter Kay. No one would accuse him of putting his accent on. I love speaking with a Hull accent on telly. People in Hull used to be ashamed of how they talked. Hull was always the butt of the joke, and slagging it off was an easy go-to, so we grew up with a chip on our shoulders. I would never dream of putting my daughter on social media. Some parents put their kids all over it. Before I was in the public eye, I’d post pictures on Facebook of us having a nice day out, because it was just friends and family and a way of documenting her childhood. But now there is this weird environment of using your children to build an Instagram following. I’m scared by the thought of her posting a picture and having her day ruled by how many likes it gets. Being a parent gives you a reason to stay alive. I once freaked out a woman who didn’t have children by asking: “Why do you want to stay alive, then?” Now, not having kids seems lovely: sleeping really well and not constantly worrying whether you’re doing a good enough job. ‘Lucy Beaumont: Bad at Quiz Shows, Good With Weirdos’ tours from September