There was a time around the mid 2000s when Keeley Hazell was a regular on the newspaper’s now-extinct Page 3 carousel of topless women. She was even voted the second sexiest woman in the world by FHM magazine. Now, nearly two decades on, she’s a comedian, actor and writer who’s appeared in Ted Lasso (though not in the part she wanted – more on that later), written for the show too, and has a new Edinburgh Festival Fringe show, Everyone’s Seen My Tits, based on her memoir of the same name.
“The nerdy theatre kid in me is just very, very happy,” she tells me. “There’s something about telling my story to an audience that I really find quite powerful.”
It is a heck of a story. Hazell grew up in Grove Park in southeast London, where, she writes, “people sold drugs, got into fights, drank themselves silly, and went to jail”. Her dad was a window fitter and her mum worked as a dinner lady. It was a childhood scarred by domestic abuse – her dad would hit her with a wooden metre stick, the metal part of the vacuum cleaner, or a belt. If her mum didn’t have dinner ready, her dad would grab her by the neck and choke her.
“The violence was absolutely horrific,” Hazell says, “but also incredibly normalised.” Hazell’s parents split when she was 13, which was when she first had therapy. “I’ve been in therapy for most of my life,” she says, and speaking to her, that is pretty evident: she comes across as someone who has spent many hours professionally revisiting her past.
