by Gina Yashere
We wrote a great show with sketches, one of which included me playing my own mother, harassing my guests in the green room before they then came out to be interviewed by me. I would then play back the video of the harassment to much amusement. My show had quite a few celebrity guests, including Jonathan Ross, who had been a fan of mine since Mum and I had appeared on The Big Big Talent Show years previously.
My show was so popular that the line for our live audiences would snake around the BBC building, and when my week was up, they called me back to do another week to fill another shortfall in the schedule, as my ratings were the highest out of all the other performers.
I was ecstatic, believing I was on my way to my own late-night talk show—my dream since I’d started doing comedy six years before. I had won! I temporarily forgot that showbiz isn’t built on fairness. When it came time for them to hand me my show, as had been promised to the winner of this challenge, they changed the parameters and gave the show to a young white actor, Ralf Little, who was on a hugely successful sitcom called The Royle Family, a gig he had landed straight out of school. He had absolutely no comedy, interviewing, or hosting chops whatsoever, and he had pulled in a fraction of the viewing audience I had, but he was, as said by a random executive at the TV station, “more recognizable, and fits the demographic we are aiming for.”
That show lasted one season.
I never got to host another talk show, but I watched as some of the ideas I’d pioneered on my show were used on other people’s. With that promise broken by the BBC, I was left, once again, heartbroken and disappointed.
A few years later, I was approached by producers working with The Lenny Henry Show and asked if I’d like to write sketches for his new show. Lenny Henry had seen me on one of my many short TV appearances and thought I’d be a great addition to his show. I made it clear to them from the start that I was a performer, that I didn’t want to write for other people. I was only interested in creating characters if I would get to play them.
I was asked to write some material they would take a look at, and they would take it from there. That’s when I created Mrs. Omokorede, the pushy Nigerian mother whose daughter was going to be a doctor at any cost (sound familiar?), and Tanya, the fast-talking street girl who’s catchphrase was “I don’t think so!” I sent them in, and they loved them. By that point, they had also recruited Ninia Benjamin, Tameka Empson, and Jocelyn Jee Esien, the cast of 3 Non-Blondes, a British hidden-camera comedy created by Gary Reich—the same man behind the hidden-camera career of Sacha Baron Cohen, of Ali G and Borat fame. The trio would do pranks, like visiting a hotel and pretending they were African royalty, and the joke would be in the hidden cameras. Lenny wanted to recruit younger comedians to make his show a little bit more relevant and cool.
But they were actors, not writers. Lenny and his team needed material that these women could perform. On a phone call with one of the producers a couple of days after I had sent in my characters, they just dropped a bombshell on me. “Oh yes, we love these sketches that you’ve written. We’re thinking you can play the Nigerian mother and then we’ll take Tanya and give it to Tameka. You can still write the sketches and we’ll pay you for writing them, but Tameka will be Tanya.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. “Let me think about it.” I put the phone down. And then proceeded to destroy my living room. Fuck, fuck, fuck! I screamed and threw things around the room for about ten minutes to expel my fury. This shit was not about to happen to me again. They had promised me that I could play whatever character I created, and here was the BBC again trying to move the goalposts and scupper yet another opportunity for me to get on. Nope. Not this time. I calmly called them back. “I’ve thought about it. I’m sorry, but I created both of these characters, so nobody gets to play them but me.” If I lost the opportunity to be on the show, then so be it. Nobody was creating anything for me, and yet I had now created something for myself, and they wanted to take it and give it to someone else. I told them that I was good with whatever decision they made, but I wasn’t giving up my characters. They were mine. They called me the next day and agreed to let me play my own characters. Thank God, because the Nigerian Mum was very well received, and Tanya was the standout of the show.
Tanya did so well that she was on the show every week. She became insanely popular and catapulted me to mainstream fame in the UK. Tanya came before Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard and before Catherine Tate’s “Am I bovvered” Lauren. It was because of Tanya that I was able to do my first string of UK national tours. I started to sell out large theaters, and my audience became decidedly more mixed. I kept my Black audience but added a mainstream white audience to the mix. I went from comedy clubs to theaters because of The Lenny Henry Show. People would yell out at me in the street, “I don’t think so!”
Can you imagine if I’d given that character to somebody else? If I’d decided to continue playing the game that I was always destined to lose? Then someone else would have reaped all the benefits of my work, and I may never have reached the next level of my career.
I used some of the money I made from my UK tour to buy my first-ever brand-new car, a Mercedes-Benz SLK roadster. I went to the Mercedes showroom and picked exactly how I wanted my car to look, and in three months, I had it, an electric-blue, hardtop convertible with cream leather interior and a walnut dashboard. I loved it.
19
A Flea Can Trouble a Lion More Than a Lion Can Trouble a Flea
It was at this time I began being stopped by the police at least three times a week. The pattern was always the same: the police followed me for a distance, hoping to find something wrong or to scare me into making a driving error. If that didn’t work, they’d pull me over anyway, just to ensure I indeed owned the car. Once, I was driving with my mum and I could see them following us. So I just pulled over and made sure that I was curbside so that when the police drove by they would see this older Nigerian woman sitting in the car too. They were constantly stopping me and checking my paperwork. The harassment never ended. It got to a point where I decided that the next time they tried to pull me over, I wasn’t stopping.
A few days after I made that decision, the police began following me again—this time in an unmarked van. There must’ve been maybe five or six officers inside. Oh, for fuck’s sake. Here we go.
I was on my way to the hairdresser’s, driving from North London to East London. I was on North Circular Road, which is kind of like a freeway inside London. My windows were rolled up. I had my baseball cap to the back, hip-hop playing. I knew that all they saw was the baseball cap and a Black face inside an expensive Mercedes, which to them was enough to warrant harassment.
They drove behind me and flashed their lights, indicating that they wanted me to pull over. I didn’t speed up so as not to turn this into a car chase, but I ignored them. I carried on driving at the same speed, like a regular person driving a car they had indeed paid for, and had committed no crime. The van sped up alongside me, and from my peripheral, I could see them gesticulating for me to pull over. I kept looking straight ahead and carried on driving. I just wanted to get to my hair appointment.
They continued to follow me, wildly weaving in and out behind, flashing their lights and tailgating me. I continued to ignore them, keeping a steady speed. Once I got off the North Circular Road and into a more densely populated residential area, I pulled over outside a council estate in East London, in Leyton. The police jumped out of the van and ran towards me, flinging open my car door and dragging me out. They immediately started to search my car, looking for contraband.
“There’s nothing in there. You pulled me over for no reason, so give me my ticket and let me go about my business.”
“Nope, we’re arresting you for failing to stop.”
What? This was unheard of. Failing to stop usually comes with another offense. Failing to stop and possession of a class A drug or failing to stop and possession of a gun or failing to stop because you’re running away from a
robbery. You don’t just arrest somebody for failing to stop if there is no crime to go with it. But they put me in handcuffs, threw me in the van, and left my Mercedes there, open, with my purse on the seat.
“Can I at least get my stuff?”
“No.” They deliberately wanted to leave my car open so that it would get broken into. They wanted to mess with me as much as they could, hoping that when I returned to my car, I’d find my purse gone and a trashed car.
“Oh my God, oh my God, is that Gina Yashere? Is that Gina Yashere being arrested?” It was a group of young boys who had recognized me from TV.
“Dudes! Watch my car! Don’t let anyone break into it!” I shouted as they bundled me into the van.
The police took me away to a police station miles away from where my car was left. They put me in a cell for no reason; I’d committed no crime. It was a completely pointless arrest. I should have just been given a ticket. After about four hours, they let me go, with a form to fill out to pay a fine, or if I believed that I committed no crime, to go to court. They threw me out of the station late at night, in the middle of nowhere. I had no money because everything was in the car.
“How am I supposed to get home?” I asked them.
“We don’t care. Off you go.” They had deliberately stranded me.
I walked till I came across a minicab company. I told the available driver that if he took me to my car, I’d have the money to pay him, plus a considerable tip. He drove me to my untouched car. I paid him and I drove home.
I was so angry. I could have paid the small fine and that would have been the end of it, but I decided I was going to take a stand against the relentless police harassment I’d suffered for driving while Black. I’m taking these fuckers to court. I knew it was going to be a complete waste of money, but there needed to be some kind of pushback for what they had done to me that day.
When you go to court, you don’t know when your case will be called, so you have to be there first thing in the morning and hope your case is called early. I knew these five police officers, who wanted to be out on the street and doing more exciting stuff, like harassing more Black people, would be furious that they had to sit in a waiting room for who knows how many hours for this minor case. I’d even hired an expensive lawyer to interrogate them on the stand. It was a total waste of money, but these cops had to at least be made to think that there may be consequences for harassing innocent Black people in their cars. Even if those consequences amounted to nothing more than sitting in a magnolia-colored waiting room, drinking tea and eating stale biscuits out of a vending machine. We were there from about nine thirty in the morning, and our case didn’t get tried until about three that afternoon. They had to sit there all day. I sat with my lawyer in another room, down the hall from theirs. Every hour I would walk by their room: “You all right in there, lads? You all right? How’s it going? Long day, innit? Are you bored? Yeah, that’s how I felt when you had me in a cell for hours for nothing.” We were finally called into court, and each of those police officers testified. I discovered in court that they hadn’t even been on duty when they’d arrested me. They had been on their way to a training course, when they decided that I didn’t deserve to be in that car. The first officer testified that I had driven erratically, which was bullshit. He said that I had been speeding. Again bullshit. He claimed that when they tried to pull me over I stuck my hand out the window and flipped them the finger and cursed them out. Lies. They all lied. When someone is arrested by the police, they are all supposed to write their statements separately from each other. But they all went up and told exactly the same story. Word. For. Word.
My lawyer got up and began to cross-examine them.
“So you say when you first saw Gina, her windows were up and the music was blaring?”
“Yes.”
“So then when you pulled alongside her and told her to pull over, she immediately stuck her hand out of the window.”
“Yes.”
“Immediately?”
“Yes.”
“Without taking time to open her window?”
Silence.
“So that means the window must’ve been closed when you pulled up alongside her, which means she couldn’t have stuck her hand out the window to give you guys the finger. Otherwise you would have heard the glass smash and she would have said, ‘Ouch!’ as her elbow went through the window. So what you are saying is untrue, and furthermore you all said exactly the same thing in the statement.” He went on to ask each officer if they wrote those statements independently of each other. They all swore an oath that they had. “It’s funny how you all say that you wrote your statements independently yet all of you have the exact same spelling mistake on the name of the street that you pulled her over in.” It was obvious that they’d all written their statements together. He blatantly showed them up to be liars in court.
I went on the stand and testified that I had not been speeding or doing anything that would have given them cause to pull me over. I also produced records of the sheer multitude of police stops I’d endured since purchasing the car. None resulting in a prosecution of any kind.
I admitted failing to stop. But only because I had committed no crime, and as far as I was concerned, I was being pursued by an unmarked van full of unidentified white dudes.
If I’d been found guilty and punished to the full extent of the law, it would have been a two-thousand-pound fine. They still found me guilty, but I was fined only a nominal fee of fifty pounds. It was their way of saying, “We know these police officers lied, and we know they harassed you, but we cannot be seen to rule against the police, so here is a small slap on the wrist.” That was what was to be expected from the British justice system as a Black person. I was glad they hadn’t fined me the entire amount. I had known I would lose against the police, but it had been just a matter of how badly I would. I took this as a small win.
My white lawyer was furious. “That paltry fine is obviously an admittance of your innocence! This is a travesty! I think we should appeal, and I’ll represent you for free!” I’d already spent three thousand for this fun day in court, and I had planned to move on, but another free opportunity to punish these racist cops couldn’t be passed up, so I agreed to apply for an appeal. But six months later, when the appeal came through, the lawyer was in the middle of another case and couldn’t do it. He told me his colleague would take the case, but unfortunately not pro bono. Yeah, no thanks. I needed a cheaper form of activism. I paid my fifty-pound fine and walked away.
20
If You Are Building a House and a Nail Breaks, Do You Stop Building or Do You Change the Nail?
As time went on, I became more frustrated with my career in the UK. I felt like I’d hit the glass ceiling, and having been around for so long, I was being perceived as “old news.” I was no longer the fresh Black talent that could be tokenized. I needed to have another plan and quick.
I loved traveling to the US every year on vacation, and whenever my best friend, Lila, and I would go, she knew I would find a comedy club somewhere to test my skills on a US audience, my plan to emigrate never far from my mind. Another avenue for getting noticed by the American comedy market was the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal, Canada. This is the largest comedy festival in the world, where comedians from all over are invited to perform, hoping to be snapped up for American superstardom. Shows vary from large star-studded televised galas to outdoor events to hole-in-the-wall comedy nights. It’s an invite-only festival, and scouts from JFL scoured the world for talent, at showcases set up in comedy clubs in most major cities around the globe. There were many stories of comedians being given major development deals with TV networks to create their own sitcoms, just on the basis of a good set in Montreal. I was convinced that once they saw me, I’d be on a private jet to LA, eating caviar and crackers as soon as I walked off the stage. I just had to get to Montreal.
Though I had won places in the London showcases year after year, and
had done well, I had never been picked to attend the festival. The last showcase I was scheduled to perform in—The Comedy Store in London—I had decided would be my final one. I was dejected by the yearly rejections and no longer wanted to humiliate myself in front of people who obviously didn’t want me. I’d just have to get to America another way. I hit the stage at that final showcase with an attitude of no longer caring. I felt no nervousness. At that point I knew they were not going to pick me, just as they hadn’t the previous four years, so I was just going to have some fun, tear this crowd up, and at least make it difficult for the people they were going to pick. I had a blinding set, and I was the only comic of all those who performed to be asked to attend the festival. Go figure. Turns out not giving a shit had freed up my performance. I was on my way. Managers, agents, and TV and film producers all came to Montreal looking for the next big thing. Maybe I’d be it. And even if I wasn’t, Canada was just a hop, skip, and a jump from my dream destination: the US of A.
I ticked a lot of boxes in Montreal. Originally booked to appear at the Brits showcase (a show with all British comics), I was also able to perform on any type of ladies-night-style comedy bill as well as in Black (or, as they’re called in North America, “urban”) shows. Uptown Comics was the most popular urban show on the Just for Laughs calendar. This was the festival’s version of an American urban comedy night. It was all African American comics . . . and me. It was an eye-opener. I’d never heard the words “dick,” “pussy,” and “motherfucker” uttered so many times within an hour. Although all the shows I’d been performing in during the festival had had a majority white audience, this crowd was almost entirely Black, and they screamed with laughter. This night reminded me of the VHS tapes I’d watched of the iconic Def Comedy Jam, the stand-up show created by Russell Simmons, Stan Lathan, and Bob Sumner that had put urban comedy on the world map.