Anything but normal: Funny man Ashley Blaker on his wonderfully atypical family
Six kids, one wife, performances around the world, a looming stint at the Edinburgh Festival and a new book to boot. How does Ashley Blaker manage it all?
With a packed schedule of performances at Edinburgh Festival, a radio series, and a UK live tour this September, comedian Ashley Blaker is a busy man. And yet the father-of-six has also found the time to release a book, Normal Schmormal – part memoir, part how-to guide on parenting, adoption and raising children with special needs. His wife Gemma is equally busy, as recently-appointed head teacher of Clore Shalom School in Shenley. Struggling as I am to juggle my own work and family life (a measly tally of two kids), I’m intrigued to know how they do it?
“I’m not quite sure… 99% of it isn’t down to me, truthfully,” says Ashley. “As I wrote in the dedication of the book, I don’t do the real work. I just wrote a book about it. And I guess it’s one of the crucial reasons why I’ve written it now because ten years ago, I wouldn’t have had the time. Now the kids are older, I can find that time and have perspective.”
Considering three of his six kids have a SEN diagnosis, that’s a lot for anyone to handle, but Ashley has a wonderful outlook. “Our oldest girl is nearly fifteen but has Down syndrome so she has the mental age of a four-year-old. She’s the one you can’t take your eyes off as she requires an incredible amount of care.
“Once, we had no hot water and called the plumber out. After an hour of trying to resolve it, we realised our daughter had simply turned the switch off. On a recent trip to New York, I kept getting Amazon notifications which I discovered was my daughter buying random stuff through the iPad.”
The chapters read like an A to Z, but are listed in random order, a nod to kids who find learning a challenge. “‘O for onward and upward.’ ‘M for meeting’. Another covers our eldest’s primary school enrolment process, which proved very challenging.”
Of the more light-hearted moments, ‘C is for celebrations’, referencing their eldest son’s bar mitzvah. “He refused to do anything. I didn’t really enjoy mine either so our mantra is ‘let the child decide’. He had a video arcade and pizza party at home with his friends and it was great.”
With Edinburgh Festival on the horizon, Ashley is busy condensing the book’s material into an hour’s show. “At the Edinburgh festival in 2018, I mentioned that I had six kids and it would get a kind of gasp, so I thought it would be interesting doing the 2020 show about my family, but Covid stopped all that. I pitched it to the BBC and Radio 4, and it was commissioned as a four-part radio series about the mechanics of having a large family, specifically that of having kids with special needs.”
The show features some extra revelations that aren’t in the book, and I ask Ashley if he discovered anything new about himself in the writing process.
“Most definitely. One of the greatest gifts is that we forget and I talk about stuff I hadn’t thought about for a long time – really big challenges and traumatic stuff. I’m a pretty organised person and hadn’t binned anything, including the box file of IEP (Individualised Education Program) documents from my eldest’s diagnosis, plus of all the paperwork from the adoption application for our daughter.
“We’d just had our fourth son and in a moment of madness as the only explanation, we saw an advert in local paper about a child with Down syndrome who needed adoption through Norwood and London Borough of Hackney. How they determined that we were suitable, I have no idea.”
Every parent does their best to attend key school calendar events, but with six kids surely a few concerts have been missed. “I’ve only really been able to do this stuff more recently because the early years was all meetings. In adopting, one condition was to stay off work for a period, so I became a stay-at-home dad and we were pretty good about making it to kids’ events.”
With family life a literal open book, is there anything off limits? “I never say never to anything. The weird thing is, when you are living in the public eye, at any level of fame, there is such a big difference between public and private persona. The Elton you see on stage at Glastonbury isn’t the Reginald you meet at his home. People assume that they know everything about you from what they see or read but the thing with life is, people change. All the time. Except my parents…”
So, is there anything we don’t know about you? “Not many people know I’m a Mossad agent. The comedy was just a convenient cover to go around the world uncovering subversives in the Jewish community.”
Always hard to tell whether a comedian is joking or not.
Normal Schmormal is published by HarperCollins, RRP £16.99 (hardback)
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