I remember being very excited by the prospect of a younger sister. The earliest memories I have of Helen are her having a personality beyond being a baby. She was fiercely independent and ploughed her own furrow.
We grew up in Tunbridge Wells in Kent, and while we were never at the same school I’d say we’ve always had a close relationship despite the five-and-a-half-year age gap. I do remember reading lots of stories to Helen from when she was tiny. Richard, our older brother, works in environmental business. But Helen and I loved comedy and later, as adults, both gravitated towards the podcast format.
My mum had been a radiographer before having children and was later a teacher. My dad was a mathematician before he became a sculptor. I probably get my love of numbers from him. I loved cricket from an early age too but I was no good at playing it. I loved the history of the game. When I was seven my dad gave me a couple of books about the 1981 Ashes, so that was my gateway into the wonderful world of cricket numbers. Later, my wild teenage years involved me trawling second-hand bookshops for old cricket books, not entirely realising that I was actually investing in my future career on Test Match Special.
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Growing up, there was no blueprint for an obvious career path. I just knew that I loved cricket, comedy, numbers, statistics. I studied classics at Oxford University and part of that course was ancient Greek comedy, which I found fascinating. In my later teenage years I got better at making people laugh and then performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1999. I did have a go on the open mic circuit, and that sort of accidentally became my job. If it had gone badly for me I don’t think I’d have done it again. But it didn’t. Helen would come to my early shows — she was always supportive, never heckled — but I never offered her any advice because I didn’t think she needed it. She was always strong, individual and had an entirely independent approach to life. It was clear to me that she would do something creative. We both just made our own way.
I used to work with John Oliver a lot before he went to America to do Last Week Tonight. We met quite early on, just after my first Edinburgh Festival, and worked together for six years. We launched the podcast The Bugle in 2007, which was like a topical comedy newspaper with a sports section. I talked about cricket a lot and then I wrote a column for a cricket website, which allowed me to focus on the stats. Eventually in 2016 I was asked on to Test Match Special as their numbers person. I do love statistics.
The Bugle lasted for several years until John went off to America. It’s nice to watch a friend become successful but it was also a little difficult, especially when my career wasn’t particularly going anywhere. He was doing the world’s biggest topical comedy show and I was playing to 25 people. I found that hard to deal with.
Helen’s career has been extraordinary. Her comedy podcast Answer Me This! was a hit and now so is her linguistics podcast, The Allusionist. The industry didn’t exist when she started, but she has grown with it and done such fascinating work.
Helen now lives in Canada with her husband, Martin. When we talk we do tend to discuss the state of the podcast world. We have occasionally appeared on one another’s shows, but we don’t always listen to what the other is doing. I spend most of my week thinking about my own podcast and recording it. I also now host The News Quiz on Radio 4. We don’t talk super-often; we’re both very busy. But I still feel close to Helen, always have.
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Helen
I’m the youngest of three siblings, the mistake baby — and, yes, I was made very aware of that. My mum was contracepted-up and it failed. But I didn’t mind that at all because, theoretically, it took the pressure off me in what was quite a high-pressure environment. Our brother, Richard, is seven years older than me, and there is five and a half years between me and Andy. In our household being articulate and funny was the big currency. But when you are three years old and everyone else is much older, you can’t compete.
Andy was always very kind and a big influence on my life. He was sweet and tender-hearted, more so than was usual in my family. He let me hang out with him and his friends, and introduced me to lots of formative comedy, TV shows such as The Day Today, which I was probably too young to understand. Later I used to visit him at university. He was doing comedy then, which I thought was just the coolest thing. Tunbridge Wells was relatively boring, so anything else felt dazzling.
The siblings, aged 7 and 12, at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, near Wakefield, in 1987
The fact that Dad had left a proper job for something creative was probably a big influence on us all. It showed that we could follow a similar creative impulse if we wanted to. I also found it useful to watch Andy doing stand-up to see just how much was involved in making it work. He used to get quickly bored with the material he did, so he had to write more. He refused to try to get away with the same jokes for years.
I knew that I was never going to go into comedy in the same way as him, but I had no idea what I was going to do. I’d listened to lots of radio growing up, but I knew that what I wanted to do wouldn’t work on radio. Basically, I had to wait for podcasts to exist. In 2006 a friend said, “Do you want to make a podcast?” I didn’t have a reason not to, so I said yes. Andy started doing his own podcast, The Bugle, about a year later.
My husband and I lived with Andy and his wife, Miranda, and their two children between 2016 and 2017. We’d been kicked out of our rental and the flat we were trying to buy had Japanese knotweed. We came to Andy’s for a few weeks and stayed 14 months. I couldn’t have done that with many people. There’s a lot to be said for communal living — we all got on really well.
We’re very supportive of each other but I’ve no idea what Andy thinks about anything I’ve done. We are not the most expressive of families, which is funny because I can talk to anyone about anything. It would be interesting if the door between us was more open, but then I might be scared by what crawled through it!
Andy’s tour, The Zaltgeist 2026: A Second Thwack, begins in February. Helen’s podcast The Allusionist is available on streaming services
Strange habits
Andy on Helen
She leaves tea leaves at the bottom of a mug, and keeps filling it up with more hot water
Helen on Andy
He finds wasps very difficult to be around. He gets a weird clicking sound in his ears, then waves his arms about