From theguardian.com
While facing grief, illness and a very public breakup, the comic reached for his diaries – and found a happy kid who spiralled into despair. Inspired by a Nobel laureate, he wrote a frank, funny book about that boy and what he grew into
It begins on Christmas Day, 1996: “It’s been a lovely day … I realised how much I love my family.” It ends three years later: “I’m lying on the floor in floods of tears and all I want to do is die.” Say what you like about adolescence but it is nothing if not an emotional tumult. “If I’d known as a teenager,” says the comedian Jon Richardson ruefully, “that I’d one day write a book about them, I couldn’t have bookended my teenage diaries with better quotes to show what a storm of shit those years can be.”
The book is The Teenage Diaries of a Stand-Up Comedian, and it has been two years in the making. Two years that, if not quite the hormonal rollercoaster the book itself records, have been quite the ride. The project is borne of a crossroads moment in the Lancashire man’s midlife, after he experienced bereavement, serious illness among family and friends, and the breakdown of his marriage to fellow comic Lucy Beaumont. The last was an inevitably very public ending, splayed across the tabloids, to a relationship which itself played out in public, courtesy of the couple’s acclaimed mockumentary about their domestic arrangements, Meet the Richardsons.
"It’s a handbook – a way to make sure your kids don’t turn into me"
“There was a lot going on,” he recalls, “some of which called for self-reflection, and some that was completely beyond my control – to do with getting to a certain age, when the people around you get frailer, and you start looking differently at your relationships with your parents and your own childhood. So I was in quite a reflective period anyway.” But in Richardson’s case, there was a specific focus for that reflection. “I have genuinely accumulated a horrific amount of paraphernalia from my own back story,” he says. An inveterate hoarder, the 44-year-old had cupboards full of detritus (ticket stubs, photos, certificates, VHS videos, letters and emails – and of course, his teenage diaries) salvaged from the early years of his life.
“I felt like there must be a reason I’ve kept it,” says Richardson. “And perhaps the reason is that, one day, if you’re lucky enough to have the time, you can work out: what is of meaning, why did you keep certain things, what can you afford to get rid of? That’s the journey of the book really. It’s in the present tense because it documents me doing the reflecting and the clearing out. But it’s about those first 20 years and how much of them you carry over.”
While writing, the comic deep-dived into teenage memoirs from Rae Earl’s My Fat, Mad Teenage Diary, via the works of Nobel prize winner Annie Ernaux (thanked by Richardson in the acknowledgements), to the recent Coming of Age: How Adolescence Shapes Us by psychologist Lucy Foulkes. The resulting book may not be the one you’d expect from the neurotic standup once branded “the nation’s favourite worrier”, or from the team captain on Channel 4’s 8 Out of 10 Cats, or even from the presenter of popular documentaries about OCD. This is not a book to nestle snugly in the humour section of Waterstones, nor one that jauntily glosses the anxieties of adolescence.
“I’m always very aware my job is to make people laugh,” says Richardson, “and I hope there is plenty of humour in the book.” There is. Its structure – diary extracts followed by grownup Jon reflecting ruthlessly thereupon – offers Richardson endless opportunities for entertaining self-abasement. And there is nostalgic delight to be had in the period detail: “Blockbuster video, Tupperware parties and Ann Summers.” And there is droll dramatic irony too, as per Richardson’s favourite entry, aged 14, apropos of nothing: “I’ve decided that although I’ll probably end up being a teacher, I’d love to be a comedian.”
"A lot of kids just need to be told that it’s OK to be sad or struggling"
He says now: “But in terms of the emotions, I couldn’t sugarcoat what those years were. Very few people become comedians because they’re well-adjusted and just want to spread joy in the world. Going back to the 60s and 70s, and those people who now have BBC Four documentaries made about them, people tend to come to comedy through having unscratched itches, or to make amends for some shortcoming in themselves. And I’m no different.”
In the book, we follow Richardson’s teenage self from 14 to 17. “I think I watched Zack Morris on [the sitcom] Saved By the Bell,” he recalls, “and thought, ‘Oh, teenagers are supposed to keep secret diaries.’ But those early entries don’t have anything to say. I’m in my room playing Mario Kart most of the time.” At first, teenage Jon comes across as kind, bright, tentatively happy. But as time passes, his diary increasingly records a sense of isolation, frustration and low self-worth. He goes to a single-sex school. He feels ugly. He is growing up in a town – Morecambe, Lancashire – that seems to him like the dead-end back of beyond. His parents are separated and, in a book that is eloquent on poverty and class, money is tight.
These are all factors in Richardson’s spiral into a dark place. “There were an awful lot of happy times that I never wrote about,” he insists. But “very quickly the diary becomes a place to put the emotions that you don’t want to burden other people with, a place where you only talk about the struggle. It can become quite unhealthy.” In the book’s final chapter – ring-fenced from the earlier material, says Richardson, because it’s hard to be funny about – diary entries show teenage Jon considering suicide.
In 2023, alongside the former athlete Jessica Ennis-Hill and broadcaster Dan Walker, Richardson launched Bright Young Dreams, a fundraising campaign to support youth mental health – into which he will “put more of my energy over the next few years than anything else”. When I ask what might have made life more bearable for junior Jon, he would not, he replies, have changed any of the material circumstances of that boy’s life. What would have helped, he says, is “some understanding that it’s OK to be struggling and to be sad. A lot of kids just need to be told that, yes, it is really hard, these are difficult years”.
As the parent myself of a boy on the precipice of his teens, the book terrified me about what’s in store – while rallying my resolve to care for him through it. “If nothing else,” says the comic, “consider this a handbook for parents to make sure their kids don’t turn into Jon Richardson! That is a great gift I bestow on the nation.” But if his book offers a sobering reminder of the trials of teenagedom, it is also very affecting on family love. Its heroes, alongside the foundering teen centre-stage, are Richardson’s mum, dad and sister.
“You can’t talk about those years without bringing other people’s lives into it,” he says. “My main concern was protecting the privacy of people who haven’t chosen to write a book.” But his loved ones, off the page as on it, have been unstintingly supportive. “I write about my dad’s depression in the book, and I had to say to him, ‘Do you mind if I tell that story?’ And he said: ‘You do what you want to do.’” That conversation, says Richardson, was easy. Far harder for this working-class northern male was having to address his family about – ugh – their love for one another. Towards the end of the book, he reprints an email from his sister, sent at a fragile time of Jon’s life, that is so trenchant and loving in its support of her wee brother, that I couldn’t read it without welling up.
“It had the same impact on me,” says Richardson. “But my sister doesn’t know yet that it’s in the book. I haven’t been able to have that conversation. It’s easier to just put it in and not talk about it. ‘I love you. It’s in a book, so it’s a fact. Bye!’”
Now living a life his teenaged self could scarcely have dreamed of, is Richardson still keeping a diary? He is not – give or take the purely factual records he keeps, in an array of journals behind his head on our Zoom call, of his every gig since taking up standup in 2003. Grownup friendships and counselling have all supplanted the role diaries once played in his life. “They ended,” he says, because “I started going to the pub and hanging out with people.” And then he discovered standup, which was “transformative”.
“My approach to standup has always been: ‘How do I feel at this moment, and how do I package it in a way that’s interesting and amusing?’ It’s like a house conversion, like walking into a dilapidated wreck and turning it into something presentable. I take a difficult emotion and, instead of blurting it out on a page, I get to talk to people every night who’ve had similar experiences, and convert it into punchlines. And I can see people laughing and having a good night because I’ve confronted this emotion. And that,” says the tormented teenager, the teacher manqué turned comic and now memoirist, “has done wonders for my wellbeing.”
The Teenage Diaries of a Stand-Up Comedian: One Man’s Journey Into His Embarrassing Past is published on 22 October
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