Ashley Storrie on being the daughter of a comedy legend - and taking her on at her own game

Ashley fronts a series of comedy sing-a-long shows, such as Frozen and The Sound Of Music and she’s back at the Edinburgh Festival this year.

The 30 year-old can be proud of her achievements. However, the very reason for Storrie’s entry into comedy is also the reason she did her damnedest not to make it her career.

Ashley is the daughter of Janey Godley, a comic force of nature from the east end of Glasgow, whose one-liners are as cutting as the broken edge of an Irn-Bru bottle.

At first, Ashley couldn’t not follow her parent into the business.

“My mother became a comedian as I was growing up so I was always part of it,” she recalls, sipping Coke in a Glasgow hotel bar.

“I never had summer holidays. I flyered for her at the Fringe and that was the world set out for me. I’ve been performing since I was 11 and wrote my own show at 13.” (In fact she’d had acting roles since the age of three.)

But when Ashley left school she hoped to find a job in which she didn’t have to make audiences laugh.

“I’m a natural worrier. I’m fiscally aware,” she says. “And I saw what my mum went through to break into comedy. She had to fight for every little piece of success she had.

“Yes, I had felt happy up there on stage coming out with lots of daft stuff when I was young but I was also up against this notion in my head if you’re not wanted you shouldn’t force yourself in.”

Ashley adds: “I tried hard to avoid the lure of getting up there on stage only to have your heart broken.

“So I worked for East Renfrewshire Council, where my job involved making scones and looking after the Lady Provost’s handbag.

“I then worked for a big Glasgow law firm as a receptionist but I got sacked.”

Was it an attitude problem? “Sort of,” she says, grinning. “A load of Japanese visitors were arriving one day and my job was to present the Coke and sandwiches nicely, so I stacked all the Coca-Cola cans into a giant pyramid. But the bosses didn’t like it at all.

“I then worked for Etam Plus, selling clothes for fat women, and got saleswoman of the Year after Michelle McManus wore one of our ponchos and it sold thousands.

“But my temporary contract wasn’t renewed after I made up a window display that was too provocative, of a woman in her bra pulling a dog on a leash.”

It doesn’t take a time-served shrink to detect an apparently self-destructive young woman railing against the jobs she’d fallen into.

“Yes, but at the same time I was told you can’t make a career in comedy. I was told comedy isn’t a real job.

“And then it turns out you’re not good at the things you try to fall back on.”

Ashley was pulled in opposite directions, by a natural love of writing jokes and performance and her funny mother but also by the need to live in a sensible, balanced world.

It’s not surprising she was straddling the line between conformity and dysfunctionality; that had been her life up to this point.

Janey Godley and her husband Sean Storrie ran a bar in the Calton in Glasgow’s east end.

But they deemed that their daughter should be privately educated. “My dad had such a terrible education and couldn’t read or write properly,” says Storrie.

“He desperately wanted me to have a better chance. I was sent to Laurel Bank School, a private school for young ladies of privilege and means in the west end of Glasgow and my best friend was called Coriander.

“I would get shipped in to this posh school from the Calton in the back of a van used to humph booze into the pub. “Occasionally, my east end uncles would pick me up at the school gates, with their Rottweiler dugs.”

A wry smile emerges: “The other children’s parents were wary. They wouldn’t let their children come to my house to play unless their mums wanted to come to the pub to get drunk.”

But the school’s initial impact on five-year-old Ashley was very positive.

“As you walked into the entrance there was a photo of women ironing. And we were told this was not going to happen to any of us. We were set for careers and as a result, I’ve never ironed anything in my life.”

She grins: “Thankfully, new fabrics don’t call for it.”

This social divide, however, created inner conflict. Ashley lived a middle-class existence during the day, and a working-class life at nights.

“At school, I had to stop eating sweets and lose the slang. Then when I went back to the east end a girl called Noreen would put on her sovereign rings and punch me on the face.

“I was a big girl but I didn’t like to punch people – I’ve got small hands – so I’d use my rotund weight to push the bullies over and sit on them until they calmed down.”

Is it fair to say Ashley didn’t feel she really fitted in anywhere? “I’d say my parents were raising an experiment and it was fun for them,” she laughs.

“I was seen as strange and odd by my own family. I’d get laughed at to the point of hilarity when I asked for honey in my porridge. Or the time I asked the van driver for a bottle of sparkling water.”

“These days,” she adds, smiling, “I can’t get enough Coca-Cola. I’m rebelling against my upbringing.”

However, the return to performance aged 27 was inevitable.

Gradually, Ashley built on her comedy career, on stage, radio or in podcasts or videos.

Her comedy style, clever, reflective but at times hard-hitting, has been successful.

But now that Ashley has accepted her comedy fate, does that suggest a competition for air space at home?

“I think I’m funnier than my mum,” she grins. “And I think she’d say, ‘Aye, the wean is funnier.’”

She adds; “My biggest bugbear with my mother is I come up with a routine, say about being bad to my teacher in primary, and my mother will say, ‘I told that story at the Fringe in 2003.’

“I say ‘Bitch. That was my story!’

“And she says, ‘Well, how did I know you were going to become a comedian?’”

*Ashley Storrie’s Morning Glory, Laughing Horse is at the Counting House, Venue 170, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, August 3-27 at 6.45pm.