Alison Spittle: ‘I'm treated more like a human being now I've lost weight'

Irish Times

a day ago

Alison Spittle
is so competitive, she's had to apologise to people after board games. It's one of her worst traits, but she's also 'kind of proud of it' and knows that 'if you're not competitive, you don't win as much'.
When she won the trophy on quiz show
Pointless Celebrities
, her family took pictures of her with it 'like it was the Sam Maguire'.
An official
BBC
clip shows
Spittle
explaining she's a superfan, then screaming as one of her early-round answers is revealed to be pointless (the best outcome). Her elation is pure.
But the episode, which aired in January, was filmed two years earlier, and Spittle now feels deeply protective of the person she was then, which is to say the same person, only 'significantly fatter'.
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'When Pointless came out, I watched it with people who were like: 'Oh my god, you are half the size you were then, look at you there.' And I'm looking at myself and I'm thinking, 'That was the happiest day of my life.''
What she regretted about her appearance on the show was that she and fellow comedian Fern Brady didn't win the elusive charity jackpot, not her size.
Now the feelings elicited by this encounter with her past self are at the crux of Spittle's new stand-up show, BIG, which comes to the
Dublin Fringe Festival
in September after its current, month-long run in Edinburgh.
'I really don't like the idea of denouncing myself,' she says. 'I liked the person I was. I did, and I know I f**king did, and that's the annoying thing about losing weight. You're expected to denounce the person you were.'
Being a 'public fat person' has taught her that there are others who will do the denouncing for her anyway and she's sad that poster rules at the Edinburgh fringe mean she couldn't use her original title: Fat Bitch.
Alison Spittle was eight when her family settled in Ballymore, Co Westmeath. Photograph: Karla Gowlett
'If I have a bad interaction with a stranger, there's always a 'fat bitch' in it, and sometimes I see it as a trophy. Like, 'You've resorted to that, I've won'.'
Whenever she went on television, the online comments would either be women – mostly thin women – declaring 'go girl, you're an inspiration', or they would be men harassing her by demanding to know what she was putting on her bread and accusing her of glorifying obesity simply by being on TV.
'When I got messages like that I would wake up over a toaster and be like, 'Little do they know, the more they attack, the bigger I become'.'
In the show, she talks about how she started 'roaring and shouting' at one man who called her a fat bitch on a train, embarrassing him in front of other passengers. He hadn't been anticipating a confrontation.
'He thought he could just dismiss me with 'fat bitch',' she says. ''Fat bitch' is like 'goodbye' for a lot of people.'
The worst part about losing weight is noticing how strangers are nicer to her: 'People treat me more like a human being now, which is messed up.'
A lot of thin people who have a go at me about being fat, they think they're better than me
She never wanted to change for the benefit of 'a**holes' who would only afford her dignity if she was a certain weight.
'People would keep telling me I was not conventionally attractive, and, like, it wasn't an interest of mine to be conventionally attractive. So that was kind of my process. My process? I don't know, I've been fat since I was eight years old.'
She hung on to an 'element of defiance', she thinks, in order to reject the validation of the sexist, classist comedy culture she came of age in – one in which women were there to laugh, not make others laugh.
'That's what I loved about being on telly. Men would get angry with me because they weren't being titillated. Their erection wasn't being catered for on mainstream TV.'
Recently she was crying on the couch to a fat female friend about the emotional fallout of weight loss. 'She goes to me, 'I hate to break it to you, Alison, but you're still fat'. And I said, 'Thank you'. I was delighted.'
But she has lost a lot – with the aid of Mounjaro injections – since the trigger of a health crisis. She contracted cellulitis, which led to septicaemia, hospitalising her.
'Ireland's too small a country to have a women's weekly gossip magazine.' Photograph: Karla Gowlett
'The doctors were like, 'You do have to lose weight now'. And when you're attached to a drip and you're not able to move for weeks, you're like, 'Okay, fair enough, yeah'.'
Our interview takes place over a pot of late-afternoon tea in the top-floor bar of the Aloft hotel in Dublin 8. It's her first caffeine on a day that has so far involved a missed flight, rebooking drama and two podcast recordings and will end with a gig at Iveagh Gardens.
'It's been a mad one, a mad one!'
She's snacking on popcorn – 'which is funny' – but only because she's hungry. Before, her eating would go beyond hunger, beyond comfort; she would eat until she was uncomfortable.
'I would eat until I couldn't feel anything any more, because I didn't like feeling the way I felt about stuff, so the feeling of being overly full overtook everything else. It was like a comfort blanket, an anxiety blanket.'
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Mounjaro has suppressed her appetite, meaning food is just fuel now, and she does sometimes miss the dopamine aspect. 'It's like doing your laundry, you're not eating for pleasure any more.'
She has no time for celebrities who 'suddenly found willpower' just as medicines such as Ozempic and Mounjaro came to the fore.
'They go, 'Oh, it's the power of walking'. You're on the jabs, just say you're on the jabs,' she says.
'I tried losing weight without the jabs and couldn't do it, so I'm on the jabs, and if you are the same, you shouldn't feel ashamed.
'This whole idea of attaching morality to the size of your body absolutely disgusts me and now the idea of morality attached to the way you lose weight as well, it makes me so, so angry.'
She knows she has a 'full-on addiction to food', and it's still there, unfixed, even if the self-injections are preventing her from acting upon it, but she had to sort her health out before it got any worse, she says, and she's scathing about people who insist weight should be lost the 'natural' way.
'They're just telling a fat person they should be in pain as punishment for being fat in the first place. Why do they want that off a person? It's very Calvinist or something. It's very Opus Dei, like whipping yourself on the back. I'm like, no, I'm not going to do that for you. I don't you owe you pain.'
BIG is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, September 16th-20th, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival. Photograph: Karla Gowlett
It's not hard to understand why Spittle was compelled to devote a show to this subject yet is wary of the personal risk it carries.
'It is very vulnerable putting your wares on display and saying, 'Consume this, review this!' I'm very scared about that aspect,' she says.
'Even when I'm talking to you, I can feel myself getting animated. I can feel myself get emotional about stuff, and that's only with us chatting.'
There are, she stresses, 'loads of jokes' in the show.
Our conversation is joyously soundtracked by the bar's penchant for Noughties classics. Identifying them – which music fan and trivia-master Spittle can do within seconds – becomes her occasional side-quest as she tries to explain how she feels.
Her sense is that stand-up is the 'one and only medium' where she can truly do that. People mistake her choice of 'loud' clothes for confidence, but she doesn't feel confident most of the time; she just likes colour. With stand-up, that's when she's at her most powerful. She has the microphone, she has the control.
'I can never get across how I feel about stuff, properly, unless it's through stand-up.'
It would be mad to say I'm happy with my life, because I don't think anybody is happy with their life
She has 'built a whole career', she tells me, out of being the funny friend. Born in London in June 1989, Spittle moved around a lot when she was kid, including a nine-month spell in Germany, as her father, a builder, sought work. It meant she was never the 'established friend' in a friend group, which prompted the discovery that making people laugh was the quickest way to befriend them.
'A lot of thin people who have a go at me about being fat, they think they're better than me, but the thing is I had to develop a personality when I was younger.
'They're f**ked! They have absolutely nothing now. And I feel sorry for them, because there's going to be so many fat people getting thinner, they won't know what to do with themselves.'
She was eight when her family – she has four siblings – settled in Ballymore, Co Westmeath, where there was 'a definite pecking order' on her council estate. Being 'fat and eccentric' was her way of removing herself from it. To be 'valuable', she became 'the nice one, the people-pleaser'. She felt she didn't have the option of any other identity.
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She 'fecked up' her Leaving Cert, but this turned out to be serendipitous. During a media course at Ballyfermot College she did work experience at Athlone-based iRadio, where comedian Bernard O'Shea was DJing. He told her she should try stand-up and booked her a gig, giving her two weeks to prepare.
'He said do your funniest joke at the start, so people trust you, and do your second-funniest joke at the end, so that's what I did, and I loved it. I had this massive rush coming off stage. I had so much adrenaline, I felt like I was in love.'
'So I moved to Dublin then, and ... Aw, I love this song! Sorry. It's Nelly Furtado, Turn Off the Light!'
In Dublin, not far from the Noughties-loving bar where we meet, Spittle rented a box room for a cheap rent from a non-gouging landlord, making it possible for her to live in the city while she performed stand-up and wrote plays. After encouragement from a producer who saw her at the International Bar, she and her boyfriend, Simon Mulholland, wrote a script for what became
Nowhere Fast
, a sitcom that aired for one season on
RTÉ
in 2017.
'I was a baba. A little baba. I had people coming up saying, 'Oh my god, you're making this and you're this age'. When you're young, you don't realise that you're young. Nobody's going to say that to me now!'
In 2018 she and Mulholland moved to London, from where she has developed her stand-up career and scratched her old radio itch through podcasting. A BBC-commissioned podcast, Wheel of Misfortune – she presented it first with 'best pal' Brady, then with 'icon' Kerry Katona – means people in the UK sometimes recognise her when they hear her voice.
It's over now, but she has a new one called Magazine Party, where she and co-host Poppy Hillstead dissect the wild stories contained in That's Life!-style magazines and compile their own 'Women's Bleakly'.
'Ireland's too small a country to have a women's weekly gossip magazine. You'd read a story that goes, 'I slept with the ghost of my husband,' and you'd be like, 'That's Mary from down the road, I knew that'.'
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She would 'totally love' to emulate Brady and star in a series of Channel 4's comedy gameshow Taskmaster – 'I would kick a child to get on Taskmaster' – but Pointless Celebrities hasn't been the only TV outlet for her competitive spirit. She also flew to Glasgow to film five episodes of Richard Osman's House of Games in one day.
'I fell down the stairs at one point, out of excitement, and made my shin bleed. We had to pause filming for 10 minutes while we found another pair of tights for me.'
Swooning reviews for BIG have since poured in, but as we speak she's still a week away from the start of Edinburgh and so conscious of her desire to do her show justice, she's waking up every morning with a pain in her chest telling her to get out her Post-it notes and work on finessing it.
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'My problem is structure. I have several bits of the puzzle that I'm still working out now, and I'm moving house as well, so it's ... Dido, Thank You.'
We listen to the mildly depressive first verse of the singer's 2000 hit.
'Very chill. Very pre-September 11th, an innocent time,' is her verdict.
She wasn't 'a learned scholar of the craft' of stand-up. Her approach used to be 'just be as funny as possible with what you can remember'. Being around other comedians, and their love for the art of comedy, has inspired her to distil what she wants to say into a narrative and hone her onstage persona.
'My persona is I am becoming less of a people-pleaser, and I think I need to become even less people-pleasey, because it doesn't do my comedy any favours. Likeability can only get you so far.'
I compliment her on a photo shoot for BIG in which her head emerges from a triangular cloud of multicoloured netting. She made it herself by ripping apart shower puffs and attaching them to a bridal petticoat using a stapler and hot glue.
'There is a part of me that just wishes everyone was like a floating head,' she says.
She sings along to Kids by MGMT as she checks what time she's meant to be at Iveagh Gardens, then we talk more about her show – her walk-on playlist will be entirely women artists who have been labelled fat – before leaving the bar.
The hotel wasn't open in her Dublin 8 days, though as we look down Mill Street, she gets a nostalgic thrill when she sees one stretch of wall is still home to the painted outline of a bear asking for a hug.
'It would be mad to say I'm happy with my life, because I don't think anybody is happy with their life,' she had said in the bar. 'But I really like the turns my life has taken. I couldn't really imagine it happening before.'
Alison Spittle's show BIG is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, September 16th-20th, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival 2025. Details at
Fringefest.com
.