Sophie McCartney interview

Allerton-born comedian and best-selling author Sophie McCartney has been dubbed ‘Instagram’s funniest mum’ for her hilarious representations of modern day parenting.

With a sell-out stand-up tour getting underway next month and new novel just published, we caught up with Sophie to discuss her remarkable rise from PR manager to internet sensation.

Words | Lawrence Saunders

Live Nation has revealed that your new tour is the fastest-selling debut tour of the year so far. How does that make you feel? Pretty good I imagine!

It’s a little bit mad and quite overwhelming! I was getting some good feedback before the tickets went on general release because they were selling out on the likes of O2 Priority and the Live Nation presale. But I didn’t have a full grasp of what that meant because I know they only sell a certain percentage of the tickets that way.

Before my husband left for work on the day they went on general sale he said: “Brace yourself, they’re not going to all sell out straight away. We might have a couple of months of graft flogging tickets but you’ll get there in the end!”. By the time he’d reached work, they’d all gone! It was complete madness.

Is the material for the tour based around the content fans will be used to seeing on your social media?

Yes. I think for my debut tour it might have been a little bit foolish to completely stray from what people are used to seeing from me. I get a lot of people telling me my videos got them through lockdown and those are the kinds of people who have bought tickets. So I think if I just suddenly started rambling on about politics, they’d be like ‘what is this!?’

The show is very much a journey, as I say, from perky tits to killing nits – being 20 years old and carefree, to the stage of life that I’m at now with a newborn baby, when my eldest are 10 and seven, and I’ve gone right back to the beginning. Before my third child came along, I could leave the house without a million bags, and I’ve put myself straight back into it and obviously, there’s a lot of comedy which comes along with that.

I think if you’re a parent, you’re going to enjoy the show but even if you’re not, there’s going to be bits in there for you as well. I do a lot of ’90s and ’00s throwbacks to when the world was so much more simple than the one we’re living in now. There’s a little bit of something for everyone.

How do you think you will cope with being away from your kids during the tour?

I’m really conflicted about this because I do joke that I’d do anything for eight hours in a Travelodge on my own! But my little one is only six months old. I thought because he’s my third and last child, that I’d be happy to ship him off to childcare. But because I know he’s my last, I’ve been really emotionally attached to him and I’m absolutely terrified about leaving him.

I’ve only had one night out since he was born. But I’m kind of easing into the idea of being away from him. My mother-in-law is coming up for a few weekends to look after the kids, but my two eldest might come with me for a few of the dates as there are places on the tour they’ve never been to before. Mummy can do her thing and they can just not listen to all the swearwords!

How did you first get started on social media with Tired and Tested?

I got knocked up basically! I was working for a PR company in Manchester, commuting from where we live in Warrington. When I found out I was pregnant with Jack, who is my eldest, it was an opportunity for me to step away from a job that I wasn’t overly in love with. I started doing a written blog about the trials and tribulations of being a new mum.

I was 28 years old at the time and didn’t really have any friends who had children. I felt a bit isolated and when I started blogging, I immediately felt a connection with other people who felt the same way that I did. Then I had my second child, Evelyn, and it was just absolutely pointless for me to go back to work. The amount of money I was earning in comparison to what I’d have to pay for both of them to go into childcare, I would have been taking away £100 a month for other people to raise my kids. That was the time I really started looking at social media as an option.

Early on, I had about 500 Facebook fans and one of my friends told me that in order to grow my followers, I needed to start doing videos. I was a bit of wallflower but I decided to do this all-singing, all-dancing parody of Ed Sheeran’s ‘Shape of You’. I look back on it now and cringe but it was actually the one thing that really propelled me into doing what I’m doing now. If I hadn’t done the video, I don’t think I’d be sitting here now talking to you with a sellout tour and whatnot.

I put the video up and it just spread like wildfire. It resonated with so many people and I think it was all very timely because the song was number one at the time. I suddenly went from having about 500 Facebook followers to about 80,000 in the space of a few days.

A lot of your fans comment on how they appreciate how honestly you speak about the realities of having children. Is that something you had in mind when you started Tired and Tested?

The whole reason for me doing what I do is to make other people feel better about the way that they do things [with their kids]. There’s nothing worse than a judgy parent is there? They’re everywhere you go! When you’re feeding the baby, if you choose to breast feed or bottle feed. Regardless of what you do, there will be somebody who has their own opinion and will be more than happy to tell you. I don’t know what it is about children because when it comes to other aspects of life, people can hold their tongue, but whether it’s because it’s a child, and there’s a commonality, maybe people think: ‘Well, I have my own child, so therefore I am an expert!’

Nate, my youngest, was born three weeks early, and he had quite bad reflux when he hit about four weeks. I was breastfeeding him and people were messaging me on the internet saying: ‘Give that baby a bottle of formula. You’re starving him. You need to go to the doctors and get this special baby milk’. I was like ‘Oh my god! Nobody has asked you for your opinion! And actually, the doctors have told me that my milk is the better option for him anyway. You’re not a medical professional!’

But that is a small percentage of people though and what I do find with my socials is that actually, for all of those people who weigh in with their opinions, there are people who actually are genuinely caring and want to help. That’s what is quite nice about having a community on social media, you have got people that have your back.

As well as the tour, your first novel, ‘Mother Hens’, has just been released. What made you move away from non-fiction for your latest work?

About 15 years ago, I had some half-written manuscripts that I never quite got around to doing anything with, but I always wanted to do fiction. The non-fiction book (‘Tired and Tested: The Wild Ride Into Parenthood’) was kind of a step into fiction, I guess. Just to see how I land as an author and then move forward. But my publisher, HarperCollins, are brilliant, and they had such faith in me because they signed me straight away for two books. The first was always going to be non-fiction and then the second was going to be fiction.

Writing my novel has been a completely different experience to writing non-fiction. Also, I was pregnant throughout all of it and then Nate came early, and I hadn’t finished it. So I then had to finish it postpartum, you know, rocking in the corner with a brand new baby. So that was quite stressful! I now fully understand the phrase ‘lost the plot’. I had about four or five chapters left to finish when Nate arrived. For a couple of weeks, I was writing things and the sentences just didn’t make sense.

Nate was up every hour during the night with his reflux, I wasn’t sleeping, and I wasn’t eating, but I still just had to just finish the book. My biggest driver was thinking that once it was done, I could enjoy my baby and this new part of motherhood. So yes, it was a bit of a slog, but I’m so proud of myself for being able to spell my name at the end of it all!

Can you give us a brief overview of what the new book is about?

It’s a bit bonkers and quite a departure from my first book. I do like to give people a little bit of a heads-up if they’re about to pick it up thinking it’s going to be in a similar vein to ‘Tired and Tested’. It’s not just about motherhood. It’s about what a bunch of mums are like when they don’t have their children around.

It celebrates motherhood, but it’s not about the school run, it’s not about feeding your baby or changing nappies. It’s actually about a bit of escapism, and finding out who you really are when you actually don’t have any kids around you. You lose your identity, and I think this goes for men and women, when kids come onto the scene. Your life is based around them, isn’t it? Everything you do is for them and you put yourself to one side, you don’t go out and don’t have fun. The minute a hen or stag party comes along, for some reason, it’s those things that you manage to carve out a bit of time for.

So that’s what this book is about. It’s a hen party, where a bunch of frazzled mums put the time aside in their diaries to go to Ibiza. It’s a little bit ‘murdery’ in places and there’s a little bit of accidental drug ingestion and the Mafia might be involved as well. I just wanted to make something that was a complete departure from everyday, mum life. Hopefully I’ve managed to do that!

Sophie McCartney plays Liverpool’s Epstein Theatre on 27 May.

Her debut novel, Mother Hens, is available now.