Undivided Inattention: Comedians on ADHD

Edd Hedges

"It was like trying to tie a rope round a fly," says Edd Hedges, describing his problems focussing at school.

To speak with Hedges now, as he's about to bring his sophomore hour For Eva, from Forever Ago to Edinburgh, he already seems a mature storytelling comedian. And he also seems like a man who is right on top of his to-do list; the kind who has a 'work/life balance'. He writes out a daily schedule each day in half-hour blocks and as soon as we finish this call, he's off to play squash. He doesn't seem lost, spaced out or fidgety. Yet, Hedges has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder – a condition which includes scattered concentration and a fidgety restlessness. In relatively recent years it's been recognised these childhood symptoms often persist into adult life. Scratch beneath Hedges' "rigorous schedule" and we find he simply learned the hard way how to knot a rope around that fly.

"People think you're going to be swinging from the trees," he says, "the reality of ADHD is a lot more sad and jittery."

For Hedges, his schedule actually works more like a map than a management guru's priority matrix. When he finds himself staring out of a window and can't remember how he got there, "I simply have to look at my schedule and pull myself back to what I'm meant to be doing.

"It's so painful to me when I waste entire days. I had a four-day stint last year where I took the kettle apart. I took out all the pieces and left a huge mess. That is what happens when my brain is just allowed to do whatever it wants. It's not structured; it's me asking stupid questions and getting stupid answers."

Hedges knew his concentration could trip him up from a crushingly early age: "I think it was in about Year Three when I was six, there was a moment when all the kids in primary school needed to start getting things right – and I didn't. The things that you learn in primary school are the most important because you build the rest of your education on it. But I couldn't read until I was 13. I didn't learn how to tell the time until I was in Year Nine."

With his ADHD also compounded by dyslexia, Hedges found himself doing tedious remedial work. "I went to these learning support classes. The last thing a child wants to be told is that you're going to catch up with the rest of the school by going twice as slow. I swear to god, one day, one of the questions we were asked is if we could make a sandwich. We didn't need to be learning that – we needed to be doing algebra!"

ADHD often hides an able kid behind its symptoms, finding themselves lost at sea in their own brain and attempting to fidget-paddle their way into focus. But by the time Hedges finished A-levels he was offered a place at Edinburgh University, an academic turnaround he puts down to one particular teacher. "There was a teacher in the school that actually cared about my education and within two years she taught me how to read and write and lifted my exam results up," he says.

Hedges turned down his Edinburgh place, preferring to arrive in the city via another route. In 2013, he won – aged 19 – the Gilded Balloon's acclaimed comedy competition So You Think You're Funny? sharing the top prize with Demi Lardner. "Until I won So You Think You're Funny?", he says, "I hadn't really ever felt I was good at anything."

Kiri Pritchard-McLean

When Kiri Pritchard-McLean was at school she was in the top set for English. Yet her teacher found her puzzling. "She told me: 'Your essays are an absolute mess.'

"She sent me to see an educational psychologist and they diagnosed me at that time with 'dyslexic tendencies'."

The problem was more one of Pritchard-McLean not being able to follow a linear thought pattern, even when this mindset occasionally offered her success: "One of the interesting things was when we did poetry, because it's not linear, and it's a little bit nonsensical, I did really well with that."

She continued to pose an enigma to her tutors well into university: never exactly failing, but also not fulfilling a potential obvious to others. She was sent for an assessment – "it was like a broad IQ test" – and it showed up a canyon-sized gulf between her general ability and her short-term – or 'working' – memory.

Working memory is what we use when we're keeping track of things in the present, and is famously limited in its capacity. But for people with ADHD, it bottoms out to another level. 

Attention-deficit may have been missed in Pritchard-McLean's earliest childhood because she went to a "brilliant primary school" and doesn't have the H in the ADHD acronym. "My official diagnosis is ADD," she says.

Because the more overt symptoms of hyperactivity tend to stand out, it leads to an overemphasis on that side of the condition. Before the name ADHD was coined, it was often referred to as 'hyperkinetic disorder', or just plain old 'hyperactivity'. But inattention is often its primary symptom and children who stare into space rather than pace the room are harder to spot. 

Another shade of difference when Pritchard-McLean discusses ADD is that she does so in terms of what's going out of her brain as much as what's coming in: "It's like a brain stutter," she says. "I wish I didn't have it, and I wish I could've gone into exams and put down what reflects what's actually in my brain, instead of writing something that makes me look like an idiot."

As she now brings her third-hour Victim, Complex to Pleasance Courtyard – a show about love and lies – she feels grateful to have found comedy, which runs along those same non-linear lines as poetry. She also adds: "In comedy, because it is about having a unique worldview, I think if you've got a brain that's a bit different it gives you a bit of a head-start." 

Ross Brierley

"I never slept," says Ross Brierley, recalling his childhood. And Brierley was always restless by both day and night: "There are videos of me, from when I'm about four or five, where I am in and out of the shot. The main thing was at school though, the teachers saying imagine what you could achieve if you'd applied yourself."

He's pacing his way through our phone call and occasionally finds he's failing to hold onto the thread: "Even now, I was well into this conversation, but now there are all sorts of stuff going on around here: there is a car wash to my right, and some drilling to my left, and suddenly I feel out of the moment and really self-conscious."

He seems quite a textbook case, but remarkably he wasn't diagnosed until this January. Now that ADHD symptoms are recognised in adults, a retrospective diagnosis can be made if it's clear the patient has always had it – as was the case with Brierley. But the idea didn't come from him. It seems his partner is attracted to the restless type. "My girlfriend's ex- had it, and she thought I had a lot of similar traits. I said, 'What are you talking about?'. She printed off some information for me and it was like: this describes my life completely."

Brierley seems to prefer to focus on the positives it brings him though. "We haven't talked about all the good stuff it might do," he says. His debut solo show Accumulator, which he describes as "life lessons through betting on horses", is now coming to Underbelly. And certain types of bets may suit a splintered mind. "Most of my betting is done 'in running', so that's during the race. It's almost like a speeded-up stock exchange where the odds change depending on what's happening at the time. You have to watch and scan everything that's going on with 20 horses. A lot of people aren't very good at it, because they see one horse doing well, or they'll look at the favourite, or the horse they fancy, and only be able to focus on that." For Brierley, an attention span that is more of a net than a laser beam is extremely helpful.

This chimes with the well-known study where a man in a gorilla suit walks onto a basketball court and people don't notice because they are focussed on the game. 'Inattentional blindness', which is what the invisible gorilla study measures, can actually be part of a healthy mind. But it's suggested in one other study that those with ADHD often do spot the ape because they're not focussed on one thing. "Ha!" laughs Brierley, "Yes, we're constantly looking for a gorilla!"

And he adds, with some understatement: "Back when humans had to look out for wild animals, being able to spot one was probably pretty useful."