She is still selling out live shows, stars in the CBS comedy series Bob Hearts Abishola (which she devised with Chuck Lorre, nicknamed the king of TV sitcoms), has just written her memoir, Cack-Handed, and now at 47 is finally content.
Yashere is Zooming from her home in the heights of Altadena, 14 miles from downtown Los Angeles. Nobody knew who the fuck I was, and I literally started again, doing open mics, performing wherever I could.” “I wasn’t doing it in the way Ricky Gervais and Russell Brand were doing it, where they were coming off hit shows in England, and coming over to America already recognised, with their faces on billboards. “To get off my arse and start again, knowing it may take me years to get recognition, if any – you’ve got to have a pretty astounding amount of self-belief to do that.” And, to be fair, she did have. I’m not going to stay in England begging for crumbs,” she says. “I always knew I had something special, and I wanted to swim with the big boys. So she packed her bags and headed to the US, where she was an unknown. She felt that any number of less-talented standups had their own TV shows, while she was always on a promise that never materialised. She had a recurring slot on the BBC’s Lenny Henry Show between 20, sold out theatres when she toured and was a regular guest on the TV panel show Mock the Week. It’s not that she wasn’t successful – she was. The standup comic was sick of accepting second best. I t is 14 years since Gina Yashere walked out on Britain.