Person of the Week: Catherine Tate

I'm a very negative person, maybe a bit manic, but one thing that gets you through even the darkest hour is a tiny voice which puts it through a filter and turns it out as a sketch at the other end. In any situation - awful, good, or average - there's always part of me thinking, 'That would be a good two-shot there.'  --Catherine Tate

The above quote fairly well sums up the attitude of comedienne, actress and writer, Catherine Tate. Miss Tate has survived a variety of struggles and admitted “dark hours” to create one of the most enduring comedy shows in the U.K. and to offer the world a new word which was named by Oxford English Dictionary as “Word of the Year.”

In short, Catherine Tate isn’t “bovvered.”

Tate as Lauren
BBC Television

Tate was born in 1968 in Bloomsbury, Central London. She recounts growing up with an Obsessive Compulsive mother whose disorder took on the form of word association. For example, Catherine could not leave a jumper (a sweater) on the floor because it started with the letter “J” as did her mother’s name. Leaving the sweater on the floor seemingly constituted a threat to her mother’s life. Despite this rather unusual situation, Catherine was able to put her energies into her schoolwork and soon set her sights on an acting career.

She acted in small parts on a variety of television shows and began a successful stand-up act. Fellow comedienne Dawn French was heard saying, “Catherine Tate is far too talented and must be destroyed.” In 2004, Geoffrey Perkins of the BBC encouraged Catherine to develop her characters—one of whom was a rough teenager named Lauren whose response to any perceived slight was an indignant. “Am I bovvered?” Audiences certainly were not bothered. In fact, they were delighted by Lauren and the growing host of characters in Miss Tate’s repertiore. “Am I bovvered” quickly became a phrase repeated throughout the U.K., earning Oxford Dictionary’s distinction mentioned above.



Tate as "Nan"
BBC News



The Catherine Tate Show debuted in 2004 and ran for three seasons to much acclaim and earned numerous awards for both Miss Tate and the program. Throughout, Miss Tate showed enormous versatility playing women and men of many nationalities and personalities. My personal favorite is “The Aga Saga Woman”—a rather posh woman who is easily thrown into a total state of true panic when circumstances are not quite as elegant as she would want.

Throughout the last two seasons of her series, Miss Tate battled severe postpartum depression. Yet, she managed to continue working and, amazingly, making people laugh. She is also known for her work on the extremely long-running Doctor Who in which she played the Doctor’s companion, Donna Noble.

With an impressive resume of both comedy and drama roles (including the recent adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House), Catherine Tate still manages to find time for her family and for the causes in which she most believes. She has donated her efforts to Comic Relief, Children of Courage and the Willow Foundation.

Try though she might to paint herself as a negative person, the effect that Catherine Tate has on the world is certainly a positive one.

Enjoy this clip of Miss Tate in various scenes of the easily-frightened “Aga Saga Woman.”