Tough times have helped Shappi Khorsandi’s career to take off, she tells Viv Hardwick.

SHAPPI Khorsandi reckons it took a pregnancy and birth to focus her mind on a career and a divorce this year to make her realise she was a leading member of the “can’t have it all” generation.

The resourceful 37-year-old turned her single mother blues into a stage act, which was another hit for her at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and is now bringing The Moon On A Stick tour to Durham, Harrogate and Whitley Bay.

“My act is about becoming a single mum and separating from my husband (Christian Reilly), which doesn’t sound too much like comedy. My comedy is quite personal and I enjoy making jokes about stuff I’m actually going through at that time. You can have it all, but it’s exhausting,” admits Khorsandi, who now puts any spare time into bringing up her son.

She says that the act changed over several weeks in Edinburgh having started out with her “quite upset”

about the collapse of her marriage.

“A woman friend told me not to worry and said, ‘you wanted to work and have a baby, you don’t want the moon on a stick’ and I knew I’d got a title for my new act,” she says.

She apologises for juggling a phone conversation with me while working on a laptop-based script and playing with three-year-old son, Cassius, at The Jungle Gym play area.

So Khorsandi is no mood to discuss becoming one of female comedy’s top stars.

“I’m not aware of that. It’s nice to be told that they are saying I’m becoming a household name. That’s great, I already am in my own household,”

jokes the best-selling author, who produced an autobiography last year, A Beginner’s Guide to Acting English, telling how her family was forced to flee Iran for London.

I’m asked to hang on while she comes down a Jungle Gym slide before she adds: “I waited for about ten years before having a child and it was no coincidence that my career started to get somewhere literally from the moment I got pregnant, but I now know I had a reason to create a career. Before that, I just seemed to be treading water for ages. To me, it was destined to happen together.”

Having been invited to appear on a number of high-profile stand-up shows, such as Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow, plus BBC’s Question Time, Khorsandi is about to take the biggest gamble so far, in creating a new comedy act linked to the colour green and inspired by the environmental Green Party in Iran.

“I’m going to be recording my radio show (Shappi Talk) for BBC Radio 4 in December. I’m also determined to be back at Edinburgh next year with a show featuring anything green. From Kermit the frog to the Green Party of Iran.

“I’d like to go back to Iran one day and take my son, but I feel I belong here now and the language I speak is English,” says Khorsandi, who feels that the ability to cope with so many ethnic minorities is one of the UK’s often overlooked qualities.

“I did experience discrimination as a child and was told to ‘go home’ and that had a profound effect upon me, but as I grew up I realised people like that were boorish idiots,”

says Khorsandi, who had to go into hiding in the UK at one stage because her magazine-publishing father was declared an enemy of Islam and threatened with death.

TOUR DATES: September 17, Durham Gala Theatre. Box Office: 0191- 332-4041 galadurham.co.uk October 15, Harrogate Theatre. 01423-502-116 harrogatetheatre.co.uk December 4, Whitley Bay Playhouse. 0844-277-2771 playhousewhitleybay.co.uk