Taskmaster’s Fern Brady: How a late diagnosis of autism explained my meltdowns

Fern Brady still has the meltdowns which have plagued her life – overwhelming anxiety which she masks until she gets behind closed doors, kicking furniture, smashing ornaments, punching walls.

“I’ll always have a sensory system that is wired differently; where a light touch makes me want to scratch my skin off, sudden noises cause me pain and fluorescent light feels like it’s sucking the life out of me,” the stand-up comedian and TV’s Taskmaster contestant writes in her new book, Strong Female Character, in which she charts living with autism.

Brady was only diagnosed in 2021. She pursued an assessment following a gig in Berlin in 2017, where Brady joked onstage that she didn’t fit in with other women. A woman in the audience approached her afterwards and told her it sounded like a description of autism.

Today, at 36, she says the meltdowns are less prevalent. “I reduced them a lot with some really good therapy and amazing coaching and over the years I’ve managed to reduce the meltdowns more and more, but it will never go away. All you can do is prevent the build-up.”

Some of the therapy involves Brady learning scripted lines to help her navigate her way through situations which can be stress-inducing to her, from social engagements to hair and make-up sessions for TV. She wears noise-cancelling headphones on public transport to cut out the sensory overstimulation around her.

Her overwhelming anxiety had long been mistaken for anger when she was growing up in Bathgate, West Lothian, as her parents and teachers considered her to be very clever but very difficult.

“I’d have meltdowns at an airport as a kid – because of the lights and the noise and the smell of the perfume. They thought, we’re not having problems with the other two [she has two brothers]. They just thought, why is she doing this?”

At one time she hated her parents, she recalls.

“They were so noisy, I had to calm myself down in the evenings by punching my bedroom wall repeatedly or spending hours in my rocking chair.”

At eight, she contemplated suicide, she remembers, spent her school years mirroring the popular school bully with whom she had nothing in common, just for safety, and by 15 was self-harming. Diagnosed with OCD and depression and put on Prozac, soon after that, Brady was sent to a teen psychiatric unit.

“It was odd because it felt like we were being treated like we were bad, when we hadn’t done anything bad. They didn’t want to help us,” the comedian recalls. She duly signed herself out of the unit shortly after her 16th birthday.

There are other revelations in the book – discovering she was bisexual, being groomed by a creepy couple on a dating site, the various partners who have come and gone, becoming addicted to Xanax and her experiences at Edinburgh University, during which time she worked as a stripper.

“The way young women are on social media now makes what I did years ago look so tame,” she reflects now. “And it opened my eyes. It didn’t make me overly cynical, but it gave me a healthy wariness of men.”

Her boyfriend, Conor, who she lives with in London, knows exactly when she is struggling in any given situation. There have been times when he’s laid on top of her and hugged her, mimicking a weighted blanket, which calms her down. They’ve been together 10 years and he was instrumental in encouraging her to get help, she says.

The online community has also been really supportive, but she feels doctors need to learn more about the condition.

How does Brady feel now about being autistic?

“I still get angry and frustrated at the lack of understanding about it, but I also feel excited when I meet other people that have it and we can talk about it. In the next 10 years, looking at what the autism community is doing just now, there’s going to be a big shift in people’s perception of it.”

While writing the book, she considered how her autism revelations might affect her comedy career.

“I kept thinking, ‘This is probably going to ruin things for me’. But then I reassured myself that the people I’m most worried about are probably not going to read it, although quite a few comedians I’ve sent it to have read it.

“I had a lot to say about autism and didn’t feel like it was stuff that I could say in stand-up, because not everyone is interested in autism stuff.”

Brady had ditched a promising career in journalism (she was editor of a student newspaper) when the editor of an arts magazine she was working for asked her to try stand-up and write an article about it. She soon discovered the comedy circuit was somewhere she felt immediately at ease, and quit a post-grad journalism course to pursue it.

“I just had an instinct that it was the right thing to do,” she says now. “It makes sense because if you are used to people sniggering at things you’ve said, it just felt so natural and so comfortable to just talk to people and know there’s only going to be maybe two or three reactions – they’d laugh, get angry, or just stare me out. And my comedy is very scripted – a party is so much more frightening for me than a gig.”

After around 1,000 gigs in ‘grim little pubs’ she got an agent and clinched some TV work.

“The nicest year of my life was when I did Taskmaster, a show that accidentally is a really good format for autistic people. Most comedians appear on panel shows, where there is typical banter.

“Everything that a panel show is, is the scenario that I have difficulty with in my day-to-day life. I can’t thrive on that kind of show, whereas Taskmaster is very clearly laid out. Every day, you are going to do nine tasks and you are just interacting with one other person.”

Improvisation is very difficult for her, she explains, because she would tend to drop clangers. “I also have quite a slow processing time, so I don’t take in what people are saying.”

She believes in some ways, her autism has hindered her comedy career.

“You stick out like a sore thumb. There were bridges burned early on because people would misread me. But I’m not blaming everything on my autism. I’m pretty happy with where I am.”

She is currently on her ‘Autistic Bikini Queen’ UK stand-up tour, managing her autism by following a strict routine as she moves from city to city.

“The more you tour, the more you go back to the same places. So when I go to Leeds, I go to the same coffee shop for my breakfast, then in Manchester I’ll go to the same place I always go. Every morning, I have the same number of coffees and the same breakfast, which really helps.”

She thinks about how different life would have been had she been diagnosed earlier – with surprising reflections.

“My parents would have been more over-protective, which is bad, and I think I might have been underestimated more because it’s not like people’s perceptions of autism are so great.

“But one of the reasons I wrote the book is because I would rather be an autistic woman than a neurotypical one,” she says. “I always felt like women seem to look left and right at what other women are doing and are influenced by their peers.

“If I’d have been more influenced by my peers, I don’t know what I would have ended up doing.”

Strong Female Character by Fern Brady is published by Brazen, priced £16.99. Available now.