Ashley Storrie is describing her “massively surreal” experience at last month’s Bafta Scotland awards. There she was, standing in the spotlight, holding the two statuettes she had just picked up. “And all anyone can say is: ‘Sorry for your loss.’”
“But I won!” she says plaintively.
Just two weeks before, in the early morning of 2 November, her mother, the comic and writer Janey Godley, had died at 63, surrounded by family and friends in the hospice where she was receiving palliative care for ovarian cancer. And now Storrie was dressed up for the Baftas, where the BBC Scotland comedy series Dinosaur, which she co-wrote and stars in as an autistic palaeontologist, had been nominated for four awards.
Mother and daughter had a joke about it, before Storrie was even on the list. “I said: I’m going to win a Bafta, but you’re going to die that day and it will all be about you.”
But is she allowed to joke? Other people’s expectations of how she should behave can be as heavy as the grief, as overwhelming as the triumph. The awards night was “very, very weird”, says Storrie, sitting straight-backed and self-contained at a corner table in her favourite Italian cafe in Glasgow’s West End. She is 38, but with her big hazel eyes, apple cheeks and soft dark curls, she looks much younger.
Before Godley’s death, Storrie, who was diagnosed with autism in her early 30s, posted a simple and rather humbling request on her Instagram. She explained how she intended to carry on working rather than keeping a tearful bedside vigil, because that is what her mum wanted, and asked for “a bit of compassion to recognise that not everybody processes things the same way that you do. I have an autistic brain.”
At the awards, that anxiety about “doing grief wrong” surfaced again: “Am I allowed to be funny? Will people think it’s inappropriate? I don’t enjoy being solemn, because it makes people feel more at ease if I’m funny. And I did not like having that taken away from me,” she says.
On the night, Storrie told jokes and people laughed. After all, the close-knit Scottish film and television industry feels “more like family than my actual family”. Storrie had been attending the awards since her mum first sneaked her in as a 15-year-old.
She won the best writer award for film and television alongside Matilda Curtis, who conceived the pilot for Dinosaur, in which Storrie was cast as Nina, a thirtysomething dinosaur expert working at the Kelvingrove art gallery and museum in Glasgow, whose well-ordered world is disrupted when her sister and flatmate accepts an impulsive marriage proposal from her boyfriend of six weeks.
She also walked away with the award for favourite Scot on screen, voted for by the public, trouncing two Dr Whos – David Tennant and Ncuti Gatwa – as well as Baby Reindeer’s Richard Gadd. “It was really nice,” she says. “But, like I said in my [acceptance] speech, I’m just a bit better at Facebook. David Tennant’s not sitting sharing the link to vote for that. He’s got other things to do.”
Dinosaur, which has been commissioned for a second series, is produced by the Fleabag producer Two Brothers Pictures, alongside the BBC, for Hulu in the US. It garnered praise from individuals and support organisations for its portrayal of neurodiversity. Nina’s autism is not hyperbolic, nor does it dominate the plot, which steers well clear of stereotypes, dinosaur obsession notwithstanding. It’s a work of great charm and unassuming depth, with a sharply observed running theme about the unseen but relentless daily accommodations that neurodiverse people have to make to exist in the neurotypical world.
“There is a burden with something that’s underrepresented or poorly represented,” Storrie says. “Everybody wants to see themselves, which is really hard – especially with autism, when it’s a spectrum. The only thing I could do is be completely honest about my experience and hope that lands with some people.”
Although Storrie’s condition was diagnosed later, she first spoke to her GP about autism in her late teens, just after her father had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. “I think it’s the most autistic thing I’ve ever done,” she says. “I presented him with a spreadsheet with the Baron-Cohen test [a self-assessment used to identify autistic traits] and the ways in which I met it.” But her GP warned her not to get diagnosed, “because it will impact your employability – and you’re employable”.
He was an older man, she explains; this was a response of its time. But did it make her feel as if her condition was something to hide?
“I came from a family where there were lots of secrets, so it wasn’t unusual for me,” she says. “My parents felt a lot of shame, because we came from the East End [of Glasgow] and I went to private school in the West End, so I was constantly told: ‘Just don’t tell people stuff.’”
Her family’s violent and chaotic hinterland was well documented in her mother’s comedy and memoir. After a childhood of poverty and sexual abuse, Godley married Ashley’s father, Sean Storrie, the son of a gangster, when she was 19. Her parents spent their 20s running the family pub in Calton, an area cited at the time as having the lowest life expectancy for men in the UK, but later cut ties completely, moving to the west of the city, where Godley embarked on a standup career. What is less well documented is how her daughter came in on her act.
Storrie describes herself as “obnoxious and precocious”, picking up bits and pieces of acting as a child, including a long-forgotten Fairy Ultra commercial directed by Ken Loach. But it’s evident that the performance expected of her by the neurotypical world and the freedom from expectation she feels on stage have intertwined since she was tiny.
As she puts it: “I was more myself on stage, but I could pretend that the weird stuff was just comedy, a performance.”
When she was 11, Storrie went with her mum to an International Women’s Day gig at a students’ union in Glasgow. She had written her own set and, when she asked if she could perform, too, the booker agreed – to humour “the cute kid”. “It was pretty horrific, because I’d been watching adult comedy, but everybody laughed really hard, and I was like: ‘Oh! This is a great feeling!’” she says.
For a few years, Storrie enjoyed more traction as a novelty act than Godley did as a middle-aged woman – having to pretend she wasn’t Storrie’s mum because “she didn’t want to be perceived as a pushy parent”. In 1999, when she was 13, Storrie made her Edinburgh festival fringe debut, with a show entitled What Were You Doing When You Were 13?.
Then puberty hit: “I did not want people looking at me any more.” With hindsight, this was when her autism “started to make me feel very othered … up until then, there was the gangster stuff, the pub stuff, the comedy stuff – and so being different made sense. Now, I was just a girl who lived in the West End and I still wasn’t fitting in. I made a concerted effort to be normal, but it just didn’t work.”
After she left school, Storrie studied film-making at the University of the West of Scotland, then spent much of the next decade working as an unofficial personal assistant for her mum – flyering at the fringe, overseeing ticket sales, writing pitches. “Her career felt like a family business,” she says. “There was a big chunk of time that was spent being very anxious, undiagnosed and just focusing all my attention, my energy, on my mum.”
She dipped in and out of standup and occasionally posted sketches online. But she quickly established a different relationship with social media than her mother, who was developing an ardent fanbase for her comedy voiceovers, but also attracting vicious trolling. “It’s a generational thing,” says Storrie. “I love my online community, but I’m also very aware of boundaries and of curating more. Whereas Mum lived everything out loud.”
Moving beyond her 20s, with her mum established, Storrie finally felt: “I can be my own person.” There came a realisation, too, that she didn’t have to mask on stage: “If I said the weird stuff that I had been keeping secret, those were the best bits. Those were the bits that people went: ‘Finally, somebody said that thing that we don’t talk about because it’s too embarrassing.’”
In 2018, she started hosting a regular Friday night show on BBC Radio Scotland, for which she has won a clutch of awards. That was followed last year by a BBC Radio 4 series, What’s the Story, Ashley Storrie?, which has been commissioned for a second run. The intimacy of radio suits her confiding style: frank, idiosyncratic, but with an edge – at any moment, she might just take your breath away with something very funny or very true.
Godley lived her final months online, posting clips of herself singing bits of Taylor Swift songs with visitors, despite the hindrance of a stomach tube running down her throat. Does Storrie ever wish she had been less public?
“There’s good compartmentalisation in our family, because my dad has nothing to do with any of this – he hates it and he doesn’t want to be talked about. My mum was mad, but she was magic, and I can see why people loved her. And I’m very lucky that I got to peek behind the curtain, because as much as people said: ‘She’s very authentic,’ there was also a little bit of her that didn’t slip out.”
All the same, Storrie says she would beg her mother to come off X, where the trolls who had previously hounded her for criticising Donald Trump or supporting Scottish independence were now mocking her cancer. “I would constantly say: ‘Why do you have to justify yourself to strangers?’”
Storrie can understand the imperative, but it’s still sore. “We’d had to fight for so long just so she could get a little space at the table, and before that she had to fight when she was in the pub, and before that she’d had to fight when she was a little girl.” She is crying now, dabbing the tears with the edge of a paper napkin. “Even when she didn’t have to fight any more, she couldn’t stop. And that always broke my heart.”
She sighs. “But that was part of her, and you can’t just dissect people into the bits that you can cope with.”
I ask who is supporting her now and she admits that she is not very good at asking for help. “I’m very self-sufficient and I’ve always been that way. But I have people who check in and I say I’m fine – and then eventually I won’t be. I just won’t know until that happens.”
Anyone who has followed Storrie and Godley over the years will be aware of the third character in their menage, Honey, the irascible dachshund. So, I have to ask her: how is the dog?
“She’s lost so much weight because Mum isn’t there to overfeed her.” Storrie acts out the vet’s delight when she last took Honey for a checkup. “‘She’s finally reached her goal weight! What’s the difference that’s been made?’ ‘The woman who feeds her is dying in a hospice.’”
Storrie smiles quietly. “That dog was so fat.”
