She was smashing

the ceilings and getting huge backlash for doing things that were far less offensive than the men around her were doing.

And actually, when I got talking to her about the obstacles she'd faced or someone like the late night talk show circuit in terms of hosting, you know, she was really held back because of her demographic not because of her talent and I hadn't and she you know she'd had a tough paper round Joan Rivers you know lost her husband under really tragic circumstances really tough and I hadn't thought of her as this inspiring feminist woman's woman until I got to hang out with her and anyway she and I absolutely hit it off from the get-go And we ended up having dinner together not long before she died.

I joke in the show that, you know, nothing to do with me, but not long before she died.

And she was the one who said, Callie, I think you can do stand-up.

I've watched you on stage introducing me.

You've been my warm-up.

How did it feel transferring those oratory skills that you had honed in the boardroom to make people listen to you or before a dinner speech? How did that transfer onto the stage and how did you feel when you got off that stage?

Yeah.

And, um, not that doesn't stop everyone doing it, but it did stop me pursuing it.

That and sort of cripplingly low self-esteem when I was a younger woman.

And I think when, uh, all those years I ended up working in television behind the cameras and I would see the people on screen, um, and particularly then I worked with a lot of comedians over a period of my life then.

In fact, I often worked in comedy in telly.

That was, that was an area I was often in.

And I would see these comedians, and I think a bit of me just thought, "Well, I, I, maybe I could have gone that way," but I never did.

Yeah.

Is that fair to say?

Well, yes, and it's interesting, isn't it, because...

The reason I actually wanted to write the book was from my perspective as someone who had reinvented in a sort of an unlikely way at an unlikely time and in a messy way.

So I thought I can write to the topic of being ambitious in your reinvention, which is not the same as being perfect in your reinvention, about defying stereotypes.

You know, whoever we are, we have things that annoy us, whether it's about the way in which people perceive us and assume things, whether it's because of our age, our gender, the color of our skin.

And I also had spent many, many years after sort of my reinvention from boardrooms.

I then spent years being a motivational speaker, a sort of funny TED talk type person.

me I cannot get my head around it at all I'll be doing a show about turning 60 but it's just like I've done 50 and 40 and even then it was like it's a bit of a joke 50 was a bit but 60 just seems like such a brick wall

[laughs]

So yeah, so I had like...

So I thought when, when I...

So when I, when I was thinking about writing the book, I thought, when I do corporate stuff, what people like is the combination of robust kind of experience, like seriously having walked the walk, not just bollocking on about it, being funny, and having takeouts so when you give a speech, people go away and there's like, "Oh, here's three things I can actually do, like, right now.

That's helpful." And I thought, well, if that's what people like hearing, and I'm one of the most booked speakers in the country, so I must be doing that right.

But listening to people-I- I think if you are riddled with imposter syndrome, as many people are, uh, and I think you're very normal, and it probably is a sign of not being a psychopath or a narcissist-

Mm.

And what you realize when they get older, and I never saw this coming until mine were, pretty much left home, was that I had inadvertently provided a really good role model for both of them, which was you do get off your own ass and earn your own money.

And

I was the one who went, she's seen something in me.

And I said to her, you know, I'm a single parent.

I've got two kids.

One of my kids has additional needs.

I'm stuck in a boardroom every day.

And she said, you know, you're in the thick of it, Callie.

Is that still the case?

But, you know, there was obviously some sort of pulling in there because you took this great change in direction.

Yeah.

Well, I...

Quite a few things happened that led to me fully pulling the rip cord on my day job, and on the sort of career side, my standup was going better.

I'd done some telly, and I was starting to think, "This is really weird that I work for a company that owns Channel five and Comedy Central, and I'm on the BBC doing standup." No one's had a-- said they had a problem with it, but I remember thinking, "This is gonna get very weird soon.

At some point, someone's not gonna be happy with this." But the other thing that happened is that I had a complete sort of perimenopausal burnout collapse.

I just...

Why the fucking hell did you go for stand-up? [laughs]