Gina Yashere – the popular stand up-comic, once a prolific face on British TV – has spoken to The Big Issue about the relief of moving to California, away from the barriers she faced in the UK.
“I got to a point in England when I was reasonably successful,” she said, in an interview to be published in next week’s Letter To My Younger Self. “A nice house, a nice car. I had a pretty good life. But I felt I’d hit a glass ceiling and there was more I wanted to achieve, but I wasn’t going to get to do it in England because for Black comics there’s like a nightclub policy – one in, one out. Basically we were all waiting Lenny Henry to die.
“So I played the game. I did all the panel shows to show the BBC I was a team player, so that they’d trust me and give me my own project. But I watched people like Russell Howard get plucked to stardom and sell out stadiums and I was left still struggling to get these big TV gigs. So I thought, obviously my face does not fit in England. Well, I’ve always dreamed of living in America. I’m just going to go and do auditions and see what happens. So I put my house in London on the market and gave away everything I owned and I threw a big party saying, goodbye. I’m going to America. And I’m not coming back.”
Yashere, who’s just had the green light on the fifth series of her co-created sitcom Bob Hearts Abishola, spoke frankly about the outsider status which began at school and worsened when she began working.
“School was not fun for me. I was not one of the cool kids. My parents are Nigerian immigrants so the other students laughed at my name, my mum’s accent, the clothes she wore, the clothes she bought me.”
After becoming the first Black and first Black female engineer in lift manufacturers Otis’s long history, Yashere faced a daily wave of shocking racist and misogynistic abuse.
