Born in 1985 in Tooting, London, Nish Kumar is a comic and presenter. He started standup while at Durham University and has twice been nominated for best show at the Edinburgh comedy awards. He fronted topical comedy news series The Mash Report and co-hosts political podcast Pod Save the UK with the journalist Coco Khan. He takes his show to the Edinburgh festival fringe this month.
This picture was taken at our house in Croydon, and I’m sitting opposite a ThunderCats book. At five, the central pillars of my life were ThunderCats and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I was obsessive about the things I loved and I didn’t have a good distinction between reality and fantasy. During one intense period of SuperTed fandom, I even called my mum Spotty.
The hair is quite telling in this photo. My parents have clearly tried to comb my curls into a neat side parting, but a few minutes later it would have sprung back up again. This totally encapsulates my childhood: everything about me was unruly. My dad is an ordered man and had no idea how he birthed such a child. On more than one occasion he has said, “If you didn’t look so much like me, I’d have assumed your mother was having an affair.”
As a strange, loudmouth, slightly geeky child who loved to read, I was precocious in all the wrong ways. After my first day at school, Mum said, “How was it?” I replied, “Yeah, it’s pretty good. I don’t think I’ll be going back. An interesting experience but not my thing.” They had to bribe me to keep going. Crunchie bars, Batman pens, whatever it took to get me through the gates. I found it hard to make friends, mostly as I was really young in my school year, but also because I was a dweeb, happy in his own world.
As a teenager, I was a real piece of shit. Half my teachers found me deeply irritating; the other half encouraged my “audible engagements” with their attempts to educate me. One even told my parents I was going to be the first non-white prime minister. I have no idea what that was based on, but my parents took it as a solemn promise. When I turned out to be a comedian, they were like, “Well, this product has not met its guarantee.”
As I got older, I worked out that making other people laugh was a way I could connect and ingratiate myself into wider society. At university I joined the Durham Revue, which is where I met Ed Gamble and Tom Neenan. They were enterprising people and decided they were going to set up their own comedy night. They hired the upstairs of a local bar and, without asking, signed me up for one of the first shows. I was awful for the first five years of standup, but slowly the momentum built. It’s only because I met that group of people and had the space and time to experiment at university that I now have this job.
There were many years where I had to balance being a terrible temp worker, doing data entry and photocopying for the Central Office of Information, with gigging. But by September 2013 things were going well and I could leave office work behind.
By the time I got on TV, I was 30 and felt well-adjusted enough for the ruthlessness of the industry. I did Have I Got News for You and Live at the Apollo, and even though some people would get wound up by my political jokes, I was prepared to face criticism for my comedy and prided myself on my resilience. But nothing could have prepared me for the ferocity of the feedback when The Mash Report came out. That inbuilt resilience took me up to about 2019, when I started getting death threats. Then it evaporated.
It was then that my friend Brett Goldstein and my partner Amy [Annette] told me to see a therapist. I’m not sure what they noticed in my character to suggest it’s what I needed, but it was possible I had stopped being able to manage my emotions. I was reluctant at first – I thought I could withstand anything and that needing therapy because my dream job was stressful would be indulgent. But I was wrong. Because as well as being incredibly arrogant, I have generalised anxiety, and that period of my life was the most relentless buildup of pressure.
The media coverage, in retrospect, was beyond hysterical. The show became a kind of proxy battle about the BBC and political balance. Some people said, “Nish Kumar is a threat, and the BBC has to get rid of him” and others said, “No one’s watching this show.” I kept thinking, “Both of these things can’t be true.” On top of that, there were newspaper columnists who did not believe that someone of my skin colour should be able to have an opinion on the operation of the British government, and that any criticism I expressed was a form of ingratitude.
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When I was a kid, my parents – like the parents of most ethnic minority kids – would constantly tell me, “You need to keep your head down. Stay safe, get a proper job.” I thought it was because they lacked imagination, but my mum arrived in England in 1973, when the National Front were on the streets. It wasn’t that my parents didn’t “get me” and my creative ambitions – they just wanted me to be a lawyer or doctor because it’s harder for them to kick you out of the country when that time inevitably comes. One of the best things my therapist has said is, “People who are children of immigrants have to realise their parents are both paranoid and correct.” I grew up surrounded by a level of anxiety that was disproportionate but not unfounded, and coming to terms with that has really been the lesson for me.
That’s not to say I regret doing the job I’ve done or making the jokes I’ve made, but maybe I was naive about how personal the response to me on TV would be. Now I’m in a much better place: I did a treatment programme for post-traumatic stress disorder because my brain had internalised the death threats, and my support system includes a mental health professional.
It also helps that I have so many good people around me. From being a kid who struggled to make friends, I now realise how fortunate I am to be surrounded by my partner and a peer group in comedy that really have each other’s backs. We all came up at a time when there were lots of opportunities, and instead of trying to destroy each other on panel shows, we were supportive. Not because we are especially virtuous people, but because we were very sociable, and if you were a dick to a comedian on Mock the Week on Wednesday, it would make X person’s birthday drinks pretty fucking awkward on Friday.
Sometimes, on bad days, I feel as if I have let my younger self down. Like I’ve fallen short of my ambitions for the type of person I wanted to be. Then, on better days, I think, “All I wanted to do was get inside the TV, and I’ve done that.” Because, deep down, I am still that obsessive, strange, loudmouth geek. All that’s different, really, is the beard and grey hairs.