Grace Campbell: ‘I don’t really understand why anyone is friends with me’

If she’d wanted to go into politics, then having Alastair Campbell as a father may have been an advantage.

But as Grace Campbell decided to go into stand-up comedy, being the daughter of the former Labour spin doctor and senior advisor to Tony Blair hasn’t always been easy – especially when it comes to audience members heckling her at her gigs.

“When I started doing stand-up I got that a lot,” remembers Grace, 30, speaking to the Cambridge Independent from Margate, where she was staying with a friend and working on a film script, “but no-one has done that for quite a long time now.

“When I started doing stand-up I got heckled so much about it that it’s just trained me into being quite bulletproof, like I can’t imagine that anyone would feel confident that they’re going to win if they heckle me about that now, because I have some amazing comebacks.”

Grace’s latest touring show, which is coming soon to Cambridge, is titled Grace Campbell Is on Heat.

“It’s a story basically about me getting a dog, which I did when I was about 28 in an attempt to grow up a bit,” she explains, “and then my dog came on heat very young, before I’d managed to get her spayed.

“The initial idea for the show was going to be about me getting a dog and life lessons from trying to grow up, in my late 20s, and then I got pregnant accidentally the day that my dog got spayed.

“So I ended up going through this process of having an abortion and it really brought me and my friends together.

“And so the show is a story about growing up and about me going through these experiences, I guess, with my friends supporting me, and it’s about what I’ve learnt in the last year or so.

“But a lot of it is looking back at what I was like as a teenager, and it’s really just a love letter to my friends as well – how incredible and funny and ridiculous my friendships have been throughout my life.

“I don’t really understand why anyone is friends with me, but for some reason I have loads of friends, and all of my friends have been very loyal to me over the last 20 years.”

Recalling how she first came to consider stand-up comedy as a viable career option, Grace, who says Billy Connolly is her “favourite comedian ever”, says: “I don’t know if it was ever completely conscious and actually to be honest I’ve not really made a living from just stand-up – ever.

“It’s hard to make a living just from doing stand-up, but when I did Edinburgh for the first time, which was in 2019, I thought ‘I could do this for the rest of my life’.

“And I do feel that way. I think stand-up is one of the great loves of my life. It’s one of the few things that I do and when I’m doing it I feel truly present in the moment, and happy in myself while I’m doing it.

“So after I did my first gig, even though it was to like three people, I was like ‘This is amazing’. You get such a crazy rush of adrenaline.”

Grace, whom The Times called “one of the funniest women in Britain”, has various television credits to her name, including Rhod Gilbert’s Growing Pains, Alan Davies: As Yet Untitled, and Celebrity Gogglebox, as well as interviews on Sky News and BBC Two’s Newsnight.

She has also just released her new podcast, 28 Dates Later, with Novel and iHeart Radio, which gives listeners a front row seat to her sometimes delightful, sometimes dysfunctional dates, as well as the post-date debrief with her friends.

Grace Campbell will be performing at the Cambridge Junction (J2) on Friday, 22 November. She believes her latest show is “really good for groups of girls to go and see together” and that it’s also been popular with mums and daughters.

Tickets, priced £21, are available from junction.co.uk. For more on Grace, go to disgracecampbell.com.