Comedian Judi Love: ‘I’m a big girl, the boss, and you love it’

Judi Love was 17 when she was kidnapped, though she adds a couple of years on when reliving it on stage. It was only the anecdote’s second to-audience outing when I watched her recite it, peppered with punchlines, at a late-October work-in-progress gig. The bones of her new show – All About the Love, embarking on a 23-date tour next year – are very much still evolving, but this Wednesday night in Bedford is a sell out, such is the pull of Love’s telly star power.

She starts by twerking her way into the spotlight, before riffing on her career as a social worker and trading “chicken and chips for champagne and ceviche”. Interspersed are opening bouts of sharp crowd work – Love at her free-wheeling best. Next, she’s at college, studying IT, but mostly “going into the games room looking for boys”. It’s here that Love meets this unnamed lad.

“He was damn crazy,” Love tells me over Zoom a few days later. She’s stuck at home in south-west London, waiting for a delivery. “We didn’t do red flags then. He just had some issues, but I wanted to nurture, and didn’t recognise the warnings. At that age, you don’t know yourself, or what a good relationship is.”

As she tells it, the first date didn’t sound promising: “He came to my mum’s house, stripped naked and cried.” Still, round two nonetheless followed (he was six foot four! And had a six pack!), this time at his place. He made them spag bol and then, from nowhere, forced her upstairs and into the shower, holding her hostage for the best part of 48 hours.

“You try to convince yourself it isn’t happening.” She shakes her head in retrospective disbelief. “And then: oh, it actually is.” Momentarily, she contemplated the worst. “I decided not to go down that rabbit hole. That wasn’t going to be my legacy. Get out alive; I’ll survive anything else.”

Today, again, she recounts it all, and her lucky escape, with a playful buoyancy. It’s this everything-is-an-anecdote attitude that defines Love’s appeal as both presenter and comedian; her dexterity when switching between serious sincerity and infectious laughs. “What I’ve learned now I’m a 45-year-old woman,” she says, “is that traumas I’ve gone through remain in my system. It’s laughter that’s helped me. Bringing the funny out of it all might allow someone else to also laugh, to lose that shame, to forgive themselves and to heal.”

It is a mantra that Love intends to shape her new show around, as and when she finds time to write it. Life has been hectic these past few years. “Let me tell you, babe,” she says, “I’m surprised I’ve got a hairline left at this point. I should be slimmer, because of this up and down, up and down? I’m doing jobs like I’m on the stepper at the gym!” There’s the daytime chatshow Loose Women (she’s a regular), where she makes drawing laughs from unscripted, off-the-cuff storytelling seem impossibly easy, and at times unintentional. It’s all part of her charm.

She’s on a steady stream of TV panel shows, and has had a script commissioned. Recent turns on Amazon hit Last One Laughing UK and Taskmaster saw Love in her element. At the intersection between anarchic standup and more structured TV work, Love is able to showcase her improv chops, but with rules to poke fun at, other comics to bounce off, and authority to rub up against. She’s also taking on acting work: an upcoming Channel 4 comedy, Schooled, and she just finished a stint on set filming Girl Group, a Rebel Wilson film slated for a 2026 release.

It’s also been a relentless period personally – fertile ground, she concedes, for material. “Friends losing loved ones, my family, too. I’ve two children, aged 20 and 16, and let me tell you something.” She shakes her head, lifting the thick rim of her glasses. “Well, shit, I’ve been a single parent for like, 20 years, and it’s exhausting. I’m fucking tired. Money and success doesn’t take away the emotion of my kids not growing up with their dad.”

There’s also her fitness kick, “not necessarily to lose weight, but get healthy”. She’s in therapy now, with “the mental space and finances to afford it. Oh, OK, that’s what that pattern is. And I’m 45, perimenopause … that bitch is trying to climb her way out. I’m like: not today! I can’t be sweating on stage more than I already am.”

It’s almost surprising, I suggest, that Love has booked such a hefty solo tour – potentially exposing, definitely exhausting – with so many other lucrative opportunities dangling to which she’s so well suited. She suffers severe stage fright, and while her first tour in 2023 relied on “material slowly worked on over years after coming into comedy”, this time she’s starting from scratch.

“It’s about authenticity,” she says. “I sometimes speak patois on TV, or like I’ve just come off the road in south London. I’ll speak about being a single mum and hard times, dealing with racism and sexism and misogynoir.” However, lunchtime broadcasts of Loose Women come with certain restrictions. “I say it how it is, but in a very TV, PC way. We haven’t got time for Ofcom to be coming every day. It’s a filtered version.” She does spend a significant chunk of her stage time in Bedford recounting sexual exploits and contemplating the allure of “becoming a massive hoe” in her mid-40s.

More than that, a full standup set offers Love the space to go deeper. “You can be selfish and take up the time,” she says, “On TV, you’ve got two minutes, with someone in your ear on the next subject. Up there, I can explain, whether about childhood or the last relationship I had. As nervous as I am, and as sick as I feel before, the moment I step on that stage it feels like: this is me.”

Love grew up in east London, the youngest of five. “I was the class clown at school,” she says, “but shy and nervous. I was dyslexic and didn’t know. I would look at words and think: I don’t understand. Anything creative, however, I did great.” She was raised by “women who came over in the Windrush era: nurses, social workers, cleaners or social carers. Those were the jobs they were allowed to have when they came … For me, that always seemed the natural thing.”

Becoming a young carer herself also steered her in that direction. “I was exposed to social services from nine years old. My mum wasn’t well, and my next sister was only 19.” The rest of the siblings and extended family weren’t around, “so we had support from social care. Mum was in hospital for months.” She had an aneurism, five strokes, and was later diagnosed with dementia. “A social worker came round and looked at what we needed. I learned about these people out there who could help.”

Talk to the hand … Judi Love. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Guardian; Hair: Edmund Bossman; makeup: Sam Lascelle using S’able Labs Skincare & Lisa Eldridge Beauty; stylist: Adama Paul; dress: River Island.

Love worked in social care for years: young offenders, kids in the care system, mental health services. “I could empathise,” she says, “having a complex family with complex lives myself. There’s a lack of funding, and a high proportion of Black and working-class women in there. Seeing women who look like me, but just had a different path. It was a constant reminder of how easy it is for things to happen.”

In 2009, Love’s mum died; later that year her second child was born. “It was around then that I got bad depression,” she says. “I was lost. I’d grown up as ‘Judi with the sick mum’, but then she died. Who was I now?” On the brink of breaking down, “I said to my family: please look after the kids, I need to take a break.” An old colleague had relocated to Barbados. “I didn’t even know her that well, but I called her, at my most vulnerable, and told her I needed to get away but couldn’t afford … I didn’t even finish the sentence. Come, she said.” Love wraps her arms around herself. “I stepped off that plane, and was shown so much love and empathy.” Her voice breaks. “I came back thinking: right, I’m going to do something. People had always said to me: you’re empathetic, and you’re funny. I started comedy around 2011, then a few years later [2014], my social work master’s.”

There’s a banging at the front door. “Sorry babes,” Love calls out, springing up, “that’s my delivery.” Off-camera, she jokes (and flirts) with two burly blokes. “It’s a velvet sofa to go in my outhouse,” Love says, leaning briefly into view. “It’s blue, but I wanted orange. The kids weren’t having it. Booboo, I said to them, we’ve got an outhouse. Easy on your damn selves.” Eventually, Love returns, having slipped them a tenner. Then the door goes, again. “Yes babe, we can take a selfie.”

While Love has funny bones, she took the scenic route into entertainment. Open mics first, before making a name for herself on the “urban circuit”. It wasn’t her comfort zone, initially, but something shifted on stage. “It felt like I found my power: I’m a big girl, the boss, and you love it; I’m a beautiful Black woman and I’ll tell you how it is.”

Meanwhile, she was working full-time at Waltham Forest council in north-east London. “We’d moved to south London – there’d been a lot of black mould in my previous council property.” It made for a two-hour commute, impossible to juggle with childcare and comedy. “I was getting tiny offers – bits of filming, small roles on pilots – all clashing with work.” In 2019, she quit her job, taking on cleaning work and zero-hours care roles to supplement her comedy income. “It was very scary, but I thought: girl, please, you’ve been broke before.”

Life is unrecognisable now, hanging out with Dave Chappelle, Talib Kweli, Kevin Hart and Chris Rock. A Soho House dinner “with the director of The Greatest Showman on one side, and James … Corbyn? Corden! I was talking to him about his whole mess, because you know …” Home now is a fancy corner of the London suburbs. “My daughter will always say,” Love mimics a teenage voice, “‘Yeah, I remember the days, yeah.’ Girl, what do you remember? My son don’t remember shit. He thinks we always lived this good life.” She’s pleased about that: “Even then we were rich in love. We might have only had a couple of three-for-a-pound packets of noodles, but we filled our time with joy, because we had less.”

The industry doesn’t always feel set up for Love to thrive. Live TV can be a minefield. “When the Autocue comes up,” she says, “I still panic, even if before that, my team has worked with me to break down words into phonics so I can pronounce them right.” Often, she’ll simply use this to her advantage: her Taskmaster mispronunciation of Rubik’s Cube (Ruby Cubey?) an expertly landed, pre-planned gag.

“I’m also constantly called the wrong name,” she continues, “confused for another Black woman. It doesn’t matter how rich or successful I am: bitch, you’re Alison Hammond today.” Being a single parent doesn’t make for smooth scheduling. “If I’m filming or performing away,” she says, “even if it’s a 2am finish and four hours of travelling after, I’ve got to get me home so my kids wake up with me there. If I’m not, nobody else is. The hardest thing is managing guilt … When they’re 30, will they turn around and say: it was great, but you missed everything?”

It has paid off, of course. In 2024, she became the first Black British female comic to sell out the London Palladium. She’s hoping to achieve that same feat at the capital’s Eventim Apollo next year. “When that was put out there,” Love retorts, “I said, are you sure? Sure sure? There’ve been so many others who could and should have done all this. Just like the slew of Black British actors who have felt a move to the US to be a career necessity (John Boyega, Daniel Kaluuya, Cynthia Erivo … the list goes on), the same has been true for Black women in comedy. “You’ve got Gina Yahsere and London Hughes – they went to America to make it. I’m happy to be doing this, as long as I’m not the last.”

Love is acutely aware of the strains that come with this representation. The second half of her show is dedicated to the compounding pressures of playing mother, entertainer, public figure, groundbreaker, and the deep-rooted desire to “scream fuck it” and torch it all.

“I wrote my master’s dissertation,” she says, “on how stereotypes of the ‘strong Black woman’ affect our emotional and mental health. That was my mum and my family. They’d been through so much: emotional abuse, physical abuse, working five jobs. This narrative, I realised, is killing us.” It’s a balance she’s still striking, “trying to not take on that same trophy. I see it happening: working hard, supporting others, not always looking after myself.”

It is tempting to portray Love’s transition from struggling social worker to booked-and-busy celeb as some sort of girl-done-good elevation. Only, I point out, it sounds quite like she misses her past professional life. “Yeah babe,” she replies, smiling, “I’m going to do my PhD in psychotherapy. I don’t know if it’ll be weird, someone coming to my little office in the back and realising their therapist is Dr Judi Love.”

There’s already a sofa ready and waiting out back. “It’s the great thing about being a 45-year-old woman in 2025. I can go and study my PhD, I can sell out the Palladium; I can have another baby, get married, or go out and be a massive hoe. I can do what my mum, aunties and grandmas couldn’t. I’ll never let that go.”

Judi Love: All About the Love is touring 12 February to 24 May; tour starts Basingstoke; she performs at Eventim Apollo, London, 19 June.