My Family and Other Strangers

Jeremy Hardy became a stand-up comedian in January 1984. His BBC Radio 4 work includes Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation, The News Quiz, I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue and You’ll Have Had Your Tea. He has also done various bits of television, most notably, Now Something Else with Rory Bremner, Saturday Live, Blackadder Goes Forth, Loose Talk, Jack and Jeremy’s Real Lives with Jack Dee and If I Ruled the World with Graeme Garden and Clive Anderson. He’s been in three films: Mike Figgis’s Hotel with Burt Reynolds, Oliver Irving’s How to Be with Robert Pattinson and Leila Sansour’s documentary, Jeremy Hardy v the Israeli Army, which involved a degree of personal risk. He has written columns for The Guardian and Red Pepper and has written three books: When Did You Last See Your Father, a spoof childcare guide; Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation, based on the radio series; and My Family and Other Strangers, an examination of his lacklustre ancestry, published last year. More importantly, he is still a stand-up comic, performing his one-man show in theatres and arts centres throughout Britain and Ireland. He is also part of the live touring version of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. A kind soul in The Guardian wrote of him, 'In an ideal world, Jeremy Hardy would be extremely famous, but an ideal world would leave him without most of his best material.' He does not usually refer to himself in the third person.