Luisa Omielan interview: 'It's snobbery that comedians aren't held in as high esteem as playwrights and artists'

Luisa Omielan is sitting at the back of a Café Nero at Euston station by the door to the staff room. It occasionally shudders open as baristas barrel through. At one point she is almost thumped by a passing elbow.

It’s a marked drop in the glamour stakes from the night before: she was in Piccadilly, where she was acknowledged by Bafta as one of its Breakthrough Brits. She rubbed shoulders with Gemma Arterton and showed Tom Hiddleston pictures of Bernie, her Burmese mountain dog. “He was like ‘cool story, bro’. I humiliated myself but it’s fine. He’s lovely.”

Sitting in this noisy coffee shop before she heads home to Birmingham, she is back down to earth, conceding that “breakthrough” is a loose term in her case: aged 36, she has already had success with two acclaimed tours, What Would Beyoncé Do? and Am I Right, Ladies? Her annual Valentine’s Party sells out every year. But she’s grateful to be on a list of those from film and TV drama who, she says, receive the lion’s share of praise and financial support.

“I’ve never understood why there hasn’t been arts funding for stand-up,” she says. “Or proper awards. If you want to be in theatre, you go to drama school. You can get bursaries. But stand-up? You have to go out and work, every day for years. That’s hard.”

So why are stand-up comedians not held in the same esteem as playwrights or artists? “It’s classist. Snobbery, even, because it’s ‘just’ a man or a woman with a mic. You’ve had to train for it but it’s not something where you go to a school or an establishment to do it, so it’s not seen as high-brow culture. But it really is: any time there’s a trying time, comedy goes through the roof. People want to go somewhere to laugh, to forget about the fact that they’re broke, or they can’t live anywhere, that they’ve got somebody like Donald Trump.”

Politics for Bitches, her latest show, is an exploration of social issues for those who may need help understanding the intricacies of this country’s problems, such as housing or public spending. Coming to The Grand in Clapham next month, it is insightful, informative and side-splitting. But it is also informed by pain, and the death of Omielan’s mother from cancer last year.

Discussing her mother is clearly painful but Omielan is also angry. “We didn’t see the same doctor twice. We had to wait four weeks to see an oncologist, and by the time we saw him there was nothing he could do: we had to wait four weeks for him to tell us there was nothing they could do. Then you get sent home to die. It was so Victorian.

“I tried to go out on tour to do my old show but I just didn’t care. I wasn’t ready. But I had had this idea before my mum died: what does the referendum mean? What does Trump mean? What’s the House? What’s the Senate? They [the BBC], were like ‘let’s make that’.”

The result, which is on iPlayer, shows a comedian who interacts with her audience with respect and insight. Omielan shares her struggles but also her learnings, and she listens to those with their own hurdles. “I’m not a comedian who’s going to berate you,” she says. “If you tell me something, like you’ve been homeless, I’m not going to make you look like a tw**.” But that doesn’t stop unwanted correspondence: she shows me an email she got from a man named Nigel after one of the episodes aired. “It’s usually from a man named Nigel,” she says, scrolling through it on her phone. It’s several pages long and, I’m told, is indicative of the sort of contact she gets from men: the opening paragraph pays her a compliment, states that the sender is a big fan, and then reams of comments, complaints and suggestions for improvements.

It ends with a goodbye and a kiss — “Is an x appropriate here?” Nigel asks. “It’s always a guy,” Omielan says. “It’s a different guy every week. You just go ‘I don’t care, mate.’ But I’m getting women going, ‘Thank you so much, you speak to me on a level that I understand’.”

Does this disparity transfer into the men of stand-up? She insists otherwise. “Male comics are so supportive of female ones,” she says. “Men love me, and I love men, and we have a great time.” She doesn’t know why I’m surprised. “Comedians are the humblest, coolest, f***ing weirdo solitary people,” she says. “I love hanging out with men backstage. But when you meet the girlfriends, and they talk to you like you’re one of the girls. I’m like, ‘No, mate, I’m a comedian, like your boyfriend, I’m going to stay over here.” I compare it to the scene in Titanic where the men retire for cigars and leave the women to gossip. “Like, ‘No, you’re in my cigar room, bitch: I didn’t sneak in here’.”

Luisa Omielan is on tour with Politics for Bitches, which will include her Valentine’s Party at O2 Forum, NW5 (iloveluisa.com). Politics for Bitches is on BBC1 at 11.15pm on Wednesday