Photo: Courtesy of Francesca Martinez
“It’s quite hard having a medical label slapped on you very early on,” Francesca Martinez tells me cheerily, sipping on an elderflower concoction in a studiedly rustic northwest London cafe. “A lot of baggage comes with that – I’ve grappled with that all my life.
“Normal is what you’re used to, that’s what normal is. I don’t think I’ve got ‘celebral palsy’. To me, I’m normal, and I would wager that most people with disabilities feel like that.”
Martinez, now 35, was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when she was two, and her parents were told she would never lead a “normal” life. So she went on to win the Daily Telegraph Open Mic award for her gig at the Edinburgh Festival at the age of 22, just a year after she began doing stand-up, blasted her way onto the mainstream comedy circuit, and wrote a book praised by the likes of Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross and Steve Coogan. The doctor was right. That’s not normal.
Such rapid success in stand-up is rare, and even rarer for someone who faces a television industry that she describes as “terrified” of people like her. She eschews labels, particularly medical ones, and calls herself “wobbly” when referring to her disability.
“I became aware that I could pick my own label,” she explains, “so I started calling myself ‘wobbly’ because it’s cool, and not scary, and it’s not judgemental and it doesn’t make me feel like some kind of medical abomination.”
Her book, What the **** is Normal?!, is an amusing autobiographical commentary on defying the norms society forces upon us, and tells her story of overcoming the need to conform. It’s very funny and touchingly reveals her struggles over the years without straying into sob story territory. The “Disclaimer” at the beginning of the book is a jolly mockery of society’s label of any disabled person who has achieved something as “An Inspiration”.
The premise of the book comes from her live show of the same title, which she describes as “apart from being a show about disability, it was a show about struggling to live in this society with its values. That’s the pressure that we’re all under – to conform and be normal.
“And even though my journey was unique in some ways, actually it was universal. Because they’re battles we all struggle with: questions of self-acceptance, confidence, happiness, goals. How do I see myself? What do I value? And I realised they were questions that we all ask.
“Most of my audiences are able-bodied and yet they really seemed to respond very strongly to what was in the show – beyond a comedy show, beyond just laughing.”
Throughout our interview, Martinez displays energy and confidence to the extent that it’s tough trying to interrupt her. However, she wasn’t always so self-assured. She writes about her tough time in school during her teenage years, days when she first realised that others viewed her as not being “normal”.
“High school was very difficult because up until that time, I’d felt really capable, normal, loved and very confident. And what happened when I went to high school, there was a huge clash between how I saw myself and the others saw me, and it was a massive comedown to realise the two did not complement each other at all.”
She continues: “It was a huge shock to realise that everything I felt was unimportant, like how I walked or talked or moved or wrote, or how I dressed, were the very things I was being judged on. And over a period of about a year or two, my confidence completely eroded away. . .
“It was funny writing those chapters because it made me feel really sad to go back. . . It’s kind of sad to think of your younger self suffering so much. Now I’m so beyond that, I wish that my teenage self could’ve looked into the future and I could have told her: ‘It’s alright. Things are going to work out. You’ll have friends. You’ll have boyfriends. You’ll have a great work-life.’”
The turning-point for Martinez came when she was speaking to a boy called Dylan in a Soho pub, who she describes in the book’s prologue as having hair “the colour of dragonfly wings”.
He told her: “You’re not ‘brain-damaged’. You don’t have ‘cerebral palsy’. Those words are vague attempts to try to define you. Your brain is your brain and you are perfectly you.”
Martinez dreamily describes this moment, saying he “shattered everything I’d assumed, and he made me realise that nobody is normal, and rather than brain-damaged or disabled, I was Francesca. And that realisation lifted this huge weight off my shoulders.”
She ended up falling in love with Dylan, but, as she writes, he “turned out to be an arsehole”.
At this point, she had already enrolled on a stand-up comedy course, where she met Dylan, and her success was rapid. Following her Edinburgh Festival award just a year after her first gig, she went on to tour all over the world, and has performed alongside high-profile, established comedians.
Female comedians are always asked how they approach an industry that is seen very much as a man’s world, but Martinez’s response reveals a different perspective of the entertainment world and its prejudices:
“People when they see me don’t go ‘oh my god, she’s a woman!’, they go ‘she’s wobbly!’ I’ve never had sexism in the same way. If I get an ‘ism’, it’s wobblyism. The fact that I’m wobbly and a woman does terrify TV commissioners.”
Martinez has also written in the Guardian recently about being judged a “novelty act”, and being dropped from radio shows because of her “funny voice”.
However, Martinez won’t be downhearted. She is already planning her next book, and is hoping to have a mainstream television sitcom she’s writing commissioned. She is also a vocal campaigner against cuts in disability benefits and aims before the next general election to, “pressurise Labour to take a stand against austerity and the welfare reforms”.
Just don’t call her an inspiration.
Francesca Martinez is performing at the Stand Up Against Austerity show tonight at the People’s Assembly benefit gig at the Apollo tonight. Details here.
Her book, What the **** is Normal?!
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