Katherine Ryan recounts being followed by ‘lone-wolf’ male fans in early career

‘Some of those interactions were scary,’ said comedian

Katherine Ryan has reflected on feeling unsafe in her early career when she noticed that “very strange lone-wolf men” audience members would follow her after shows.

The Canadian comedian and actor rose to fame on British panel shows like 8 Out of 10 Cats, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, and Mock the Week, before appearing in her own Netflix series The Duchess.

In a new interview, Ryan reflected on travelling home after shows during her early career, and noticing that some audience members were following her.

“When I started doing television, male audience members could be weird with me. I had this following of very strange lone-wolf men,” she told Good Housekeeping for its forthcoming February issue.

“Before I had a tour manager, they’d follow me on to the train and keep talking to me,” she said. “I was trying to be polite and create a boundary, but some of those interactions were scary.”

Ryan is often outspoken about topics surrounding women’s safety and violence against women.

The comedian previously expressed disgust over how her teenage daughter was routinely sexually harassed by much older men on a day out in London, calling a man who had filmed her daughter on the tube a “sick freak”.

Speaking on her podcast Telling Everybody Everything, Ryan told listeners she was “p***ed off” because her daughter Violet and her cousin Lily had been sexually harassed “everywhere they went” in London.

Ryan pictured in 2022 (PA)

“They’ve been out in the day; they’ve been out on the train just doing very wholesome activities. Shopping, going to a theme park, doing this and that. And everywhere they go, every day, they have been sexually harassed by grown men.”

“There’s no mistaking Violet’s age. She’s 14, she has braces on her teeth,” she said on her podcast. “Anyone looking at these girls, no one is mistaking them for being adult women.”

Ryan recently criticised the lack of female evening chat show hosts in the UK, saying that men predominantly front late night talk shows while women are allocated daytime slots.

Ryan said: “I thought that either myself or any of my female peers could have a late night chat show in this country. I think Sarah Millican had one for a little while, not any more. I think for whatever reason, women are sometimes relegated to daytime and then the boys do all the late-night chat shows.”

Both Sarah Millican and Charlotte Church have hosted late night chat shows in the past, but contrastingly, male UK chat show hosts including Graham Norton, Jonathan Ross, Michael Parkinson, Alan Carr and Paul O’Grady all enjoyed decades long runs of their respective late night programmes throughout the 2000s.

Ryan previously said she left Mock of the Week because there was only one seat on the panel available for women comedians, and she didn’t want to take opportunities away from her female peers.

“I had to stop doing it because I knew that every time I was booked on that show I was taking food out of the mouth of another woman. I was never taking James Acaster’s spot, I was never taking Ed Gamble’s spot on that show, I was always 100 per cent of the time taking a job away from one of my female peers,” she said.