In a dimly lit bar in Melbourne’s Hardware Lane, comedian Tania Lacy steps onto a makeshift stage. It’s April 2023, and the city’s International Comedy Festival is in full swing. Lacy is wearing a sleeveless metallic dress; her crimson stilettos add a few centimetres to her lithe 158-centimetre frame. Her show, titled Everything’s Coming Up Roses, is terrific, culminating in a re-enactment of Kylie Minogue’s ­Loco-Motion music video, which she choreographed for the budding pop princess in 1987. The reviews are ­glowing – “slick”, “iconic”, “masterful” – yet, to my ­astonishment, there are just seven people in the ­audience on this chilly Saturday night.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lacy was among the ­biggest stars of Australian television: a comedy ­pioneer once compared to Garry McDonald and Noeline Brown. But her 2023 tour – spanning Australia, Edinburgh and Berlin – left her $60,000 in the red. Devastated, she asked her agent to take her off the books.

Now 60, Lacy works as a flight attendant for a budget airline. “I was so embarrassed that I thought I could be something again,” she tells me, her voice faltering. “I had this realisation that I’m nothing. I wanted to change my name. I just wanted ‘Tania Lacy’ to be dead.”

Shorn of conversational context, such utterances may seem bleakly self-pitying, especially to those familiar with Lacy’s energetic TV presence. Often, reviewers described her as “kooky” or “zany” – the preferred adjectives for funny, redheaded women. But in person, she has the deliberative, analytical style of a lawyer-in-training. (She’ll complete her bachelor of laws in 2026.)

I was introduced to Lacy in 2020, when she was ­living in Berlin, through comedian and podcaster Meshel Laurie. As we chatted over Zoom, she seemed polite but guarded. I couldn’t shake the feeling she was keeping me at arm’s length. Five years on, Lacy confirms my hunch was correct. “I will stand back and observe for a long time before I let people get within an inch of who I am,” she admits. “I’m just too scared.”

Initially, I found this hard to reconcile with the ­upbeat comedian I admired as a boy, re-enacting her skits from the ABC music series The Factory and Countdown Revolution. I’d watch her on Hey Hey It’s Saturday, Tonight Live, The Midday Show, A Current Affair and the educational series Sex, which I’d surreptitiously record on our ancient VCR. But as our Zoom catch-ups continued, I noticed other aspects of her personality come to the fore. She began to laugh more easily, and was quick to poke fun at herself (even when she broke her back while we were mid-conversation, which we’ll get to soon). Without fail, she’d inquire about my COVID-induced health issues. It felt like she was emerging from her protective cocoon.

When I ask Lacy if she ever looks at her early TV footage, she gives a small nod. “It makes me so sad,” she says. “I can see what’s been killed inside of me.”

Lacy and I are in the lounge room of her cream-brick home in the sedate Melbourne suburb of North Balwyn, where she lives with her German ­husband, Ole Sturm, their 19-year-old son, Per, and his girlfriend, Caity. Her auburn hair is swept into a bun; she’s wearing gold hoop earrings, an oversized black jumper and charcoal pants with a metallic thread. She’s never been one for jeans (“I don’t work in a coal mine”); even when she’s ducking out to buy milk, she’ll put on make-up.

Over two days, Lacy and I spend more than 14 hours in conversation. I’m here to find out why a trailblazing performer – and an inspiration to a generation of funny women – seemingly vanished without explanation. I’m not the only one who is curious: the most commonly asked question about her on Google is simply, “What happened to Tania Lacy?”

‘It was very convenient – for other people – for Tania to disappear.’

Sally Coyle, Lacy’s best friend from high school

An accurate answer might look something like this: after Lacy was fired by the ABC in 1990 for staging an on-air strike during a live broadcast, she turned to heroin and, later, alcohol. There were damaging ­rumours. Mental health challenges. Colleagues who dismissed her as “batshit crazy”. An infant son who required major surgeries. And a stint in Los Angeles that saw her come tantalisingly close to a deal with a major Hollywood studio, until the project collapsed amid a bitter dispute.

“It was very convenient – for other people – for Tania to disappear,” says Sally Coyle, her best friend from high school. “People don’t know her story.”

Lacy, wrapping herself in a fleece blanket as she ­nestles into her leather sofa, says she’ll wear some ­responsibility for what happened, not least because she had a drug addiction and an undiagnosed mental ­illness. “But ultimately, I was a smart-arse – a female smart-arse,” she says. “I was clever and different and a rule-breaker; that’s why viewers liked me.”

Her male bosses, on the other hand, tended to view her as an irritant. “I wish I knew why, because I’m just someone doing a job,” she says before catching herself. “Well, I was doing a job. But not any more.”

Born in 1965 in Singapore, where her father, Brian, worked in military intelligence, Lacy spent her early years in the Queensland city of Toowoomba. When her mother, Joan, says that her daughter excelled at school, I know this is not a hollow parental boast. A few weeks earlier, I’d asked Lacy to supply a list of career and ­personal milestones. She approaches the task in the manner of the overachieving cartoon character, Lisa Simpson, submitting several tightly written, immaculately punctuated documents. The one time she makes a typo in a text message, she immediately corrects herself. Joan says that as devoted as her daughter was to her studies, she was even more disciplined with her dancing. “She’d practise in the kitchen, holding on to the bar on the oven door,” she says. “She’d beg her ­father to allow her to be homeschooled so she could do ballet full-time. She used to drive us crazy.”

At 12, Lacy got her wish when she was accepted into the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA); by then her family was living in Melbourne’s outer eastern suburbs. But a remark from an assessor during her entrance examination – “she’s so talented, it’s just such a shame about her body” – convinced her the college had made a mistake. Fearing the humiliation of being sent home on her first day, she declined the offer.

After completing high school, Lacy successfully ­auditioned for the VCA’s tertiary program, where she ­excelled at ballet. But in the middle of her second year, a drunken teacher grabbed her leg and lifted her without permission, while failing to support her body, as she attempted a split leap. Lacy crashed to the studio floor, shredding two ligaments in her left knee. The pain was excruciating but the VCA’s response at the time was worse. Despite surgery and intensive rehabilitation, her injury left her unable to sustain the demands of classical ballet. She expected ongoing support; instead, the college gave her an out-of-court settlement with no admission of liability – and a failing mark for the year. As her tight friendship group proceeded to their third year, she dropped out to become a dance instructor.

In an awful coincidence, Lacy and I are discussing this very topic over the phone, on a rainy Monday morning, when I hear an almighty thump, then a series of strangulated moans. She had slipped and fallen on the steps outside her house, breaking two vertebrae. While I bellow futile offers of assistance into my smartphone, her husband summons an ambulance. Four minutes later, she texts me, joking that my article will have “an interesting ending now that I’m a paraplegic”. Although she was spared a permanent ­disability, she acknowledges the accident ripped open some emotional scars. Ever since that ­inebriated teacher dropped her, she’s been afraid of stepping ­forward and hurting herself. “I believe our bodies have some kind of memory,” she tells me from her hospital bed, “and that fear came out while we were talking.”

After 21-year-old Lacy quit the VCA in dismay, she made a name for herself as a fashion choreographer, creating highly stylised parades for hot young designers and major labels. She also became a dancer on ABC’s Countdown, where host Molly Meldrum caught her impersonating him in front of the studio audience. He thought she had spunk, so he invited her to open the show. At Countdown, Lacy met a Mushroom Records executive who hired her to choreograph the video for Kylie Minogue’s debut single, a cover of The Loco-Motion. The two-day shoot, involving ozone-depleting quantities of hairspray, was a blast. Lacy, who appears prominently in the clip, hit it off with the singer, who used to visit her in her tiny ­bedsit. As Minogue’s career took off, Lacy’s took an unexpected turn. In 1987, the ABC axed Countdown, tasking executive producer Grant Rule with creating a new music series. Impressed by Lacy’s quick wit, he hired her as a founding cast member of The Factory.

With little oversight from management – thanks to The Factory’s Saturday-morning timeslot – Lacy began writing, producing and editing her own comedic sketches. Among her most fondly remembered ­creations are the lecherous Carlos, inspired by an ex-boyfriend; Pixie Snotley, a vacuous entertainment reporter; and Annette the Librarian, a sweetly vulnerable dork. As she told The Age in 1997, “Annette is the character who is most like me, because of her perceptions of herself: unattractive, shy, klutzy but intelligent.”

For the comedian-podcaster Meshel Laurie, Lacy’s skits were a revelation. Each week, she’d record The Factory, rewatch Lacy’s segments “a hundred times”, then perform them for her school friends. “She transformed my teenage life,” Laurie says.

Lacy’s unconventional interviews for The Factory and Countdown Revolution, in which she aimed to reveal a different side of her subjects through good-natured joshing, were also popular. Then-prime minister Bob Hawke played along, as did Minogue and pop star Cyndi Lauper, who’d picked up a nasty bug while ­touring Australia. “Any projectile vomiting?” Lacy asked the singer, handing her a bucket.

“She’d relentlessly take the piss out of the situation she was in, rather than the people she was with,” says veteran television producer Bruce Kane, whom Lacy hired as a writer on Countdown Revolution. “Mostly, it was open-ended because she was so good at ad-libbing. She was playing around with the form of television.”

Although the ABC’s publicity department did nothing to promote her – focusing its efforts on The Factory’s co-anchors, Andrew Daddo and Alex Papps – interview requests began rolling in. As Lacy’s star rose, she took to sticking her photo between the hosts’ headshots in the ABC’s foyer, instantly doubling the number of ­female faces on display. Inevitably, a staff member would yank it down, leaving newsreader Mary Delahunty adrift in a sea of blokes.

When Lacy started on The Factory, she earned $200 a week; barely more than the minimum wage, which her bosses blamed on budget constraints. But as she cemented her position as the show’s breakout star, management found some spare cash down the back of the couch – enough to quintuple her salary. Around this time, she noticed colleagues began averting their gaze or blanking her when she said hello.

Years later, she discovered why: a co-worker learnt that her married producer had given her a lift home, so he presumed they were having an affair. It wasn’t true, not least because the producer “had a beer belly and BO that could clear a studio”, while Lacy, young and famous, had no shortage of suitors. Even so, her reputation took a hit.

While The Factory gave Lacy a public profile, Countdown Revolution made her a household name. Created by Meldrum for the national broadcaster in 1989, the ambitious music show aired five nights a week at 6.30pm. Upon its debut, it was a mess, with a cast so large that viewers struggled to remember their names. When it was rejigged in 1990, Lacy and Neighbours star Mark Little were made co-hosts. According to producers, the series would be bold, irreverent and anarchic.

To understand why Countdown Revolution – and its controversial axing – was such a big deal, it’s worth considering how broadly famous Lacy was at the time. As I dig through her old press clippings, I see her on the cover of Dare, an achingly hip fashion magazine – and on the front of the blokey Australasian Post, a barbershop staple. There are hundreds of articles about her in broadsheets and tabloids, posters in TV Hits and Smash Hits, and profiles in titles as diverse as Rolling Stone, Cleo, New Idea and the arty Black+White, for which she posed nude. (This was in 1995, before women were ­routinely waxed to within an inch of prepubescence.)

When I ask Lacy how fame affected her, she bats away my attempts to locate a downside. “Life is just better when you’re famous, although people won’t admit that,” she says. “As someone who was incredibly insecure, it was very affirming.”

Behind the scenes at Countdown Revolution, however, tensions were rising. At one point, Little tried to set fire to a New Kids on the Block CD, telling viewers it was “shit”. ABC’s executives were incensed. Lacy believes Aunty’s old guard were accustomed to Meldrum playing nice with powerful record companies. “The very thing that ABC hired us to do, which was to be honest, turned out to be the exact thing they didn’t want,” she says.

So Lacy and Little hatched a plan: in June 1990, they decided to take industrial action on a Friday – by this stage, the only day of the week the show was still airing live – inviting a union representative to support their on-air strike. Little opened the episode by scrunching up the runsheet, while Lacy waved a placard that proclaimed: “TV IS A LIE”. Then she urged viewers to jam the ABC’s switchboards in protest. A few seconds later, the control room cut the live feed and replaced it with music videos. “The irony is that it was the best show we ever did,” Lacy says. “It had the energy and fighting spirit they’d been telling us they wanted all along.” Management took a different view, frogmarching the pair from the building before faxing pro-forma termination letters to their agents.

At first, Lacy thought it would blow over, reasoning that the protest was no more egregious than her previous stunts: storming a newspaper office in search of Rupert Murdoch, for instance, or crashing the Logies, which infuriated the organisers. As the tabloids ­castigated her over the Countdown Revolution saga, ­colleagues began keeping their distance and interview requests dried up. After another “refresh”, the series limped along for a few months before getting the chop.

For many, a public savaging like Lacy’s might prompt a retreat from the limelight. But the then 24-year-old had a unique problem: she was notorious for being fired, yet bereft of a platform from which she could defend herself. “That’s when I noticed that my reputation began entering the room two minutes before I did,” she says. “When you’re no longer famous, it’s much harder to be the author of your own story.”

Crippled by depression, Lacy sought relief in drugs. Her first shot of heroin was bliss but soon, the best she could hope for was temporary relief from her agonising withdrawals. Within months, her savings evaporated. “I probably put a whole house up my arm,” she says. “But at least I was thin! It’s funny how many people told me I looked terrific, even though I was down to 47 kilos and feeling so sick.” Over three months, she checked herself into rehab seven times, ­fibbing to loved ones about her mysterious absences. As the heroin left her system, she’d thrash about in her bed, sweating, shaking and vomiting. During her final admission, she confessed everything to her parents as a means of holding herself accountable. This did the trick, and she never touched the stuff again.

Being on unemployment benefits and moving back to her family home was demoralising enough. But she also had to contend with snide judgments from ­industry peers – many of whom she’d never met – who called her “psycho”, ­“troubled” and “batshit crazy” behind her back.

“A male artist is allowed to be expressive and wild and make mistakes,” says musician Paul Kelly, who became friends with Lacy in the early 1990s. “But when a woman does it, she gets called ‘difficult’.”

Meshel Laurie agrees. “Male comedians have their little breakdowns and they’re treated like precious ­artistic geniuses,” she says, adding that men’s obsessiveness about their work is viewed as excellence, while in women it’s considered overbearing. “Women are made to feel replaceable at all times, so there’s no room for messiness.”

Not long after Lacy was fired, producer Simon Burton, who had worked with her on a promotional video, offered her a desk in his St Kilda office in Melbourne to work on her own projects. He assumed her attendance would be patchy. “But she proved me entirely wrong,” he says, “turning up early every day and working with quiet determination.” Eager to rebuild her career, Lacy sought work in commercial television, appearing on dozens of programs across the Seven, Nine and Ten networks. She was asked to be irreverent and unpredictable but when it came to the crunch, she was ordered to tone it down. “I’d see women walk into Channel Nine with brown hair and come out blonde,” she says. “The women who were doing well in commercial TV had already gone through that gentrification process.”

Back then, Australia’s free-to-air TV stations were ruled by five white, male network CEOs who dictated what we watched – and when. “They had absolute power,” Lacy says. “If you tried to challenge them, they’d quickly put you back in your place.”

It’s no surprise the commercial networks didn’t know what to do with her. They hired her because ­viewers loved her; they just didn’t understand why. After all, how do you categorise a performer who conducts vox-pops about Australians’ enduring obsession with denim (she really does hate jeans), but who also styles herself as Nana Mouskouri for a sketch called “In Bed With Nana”, a parody of the documentary In Bed With Madonna? It’s hard to explain why Lacy – dressed as the beloved Greek singer while satirising Madonna’s towering ego – is so ­hilarious; she just is. In many ways, she was Generation X incarnate: offbeat, quirky and whip-smart.

Lacy maintains she was never driven by a desire to get her mug on the telly. What motivated her was the overwhelming reaction from “outsiders”: the lonely gay boys in country towns, and the women who told her she made them believe they could do anything. “Part of my distress about this industry,” she says, “is the reluctance to acknowledge that I had an impact.“

Paul Kelly says that in spite of Lacy’s many setbacks, “she doesn’t just curl up in a corner; if she gets blocked in one way, she just finds something else to do.”

In the mid-1990s, for instance, Lacy embraced live theatre and movies, winning best actress awards for the short films Pussy Got Your Tongue?, Tangerine Dream and Titsiana Booberini. With three acting prizes under her belt, she moved to Los Angeles in 2000 in pursuit of what seemed to be a golden opportunity. Instead, it ­devolved into a rancorous, protracted dispute, inflicting wounds that are yet to fully heal. “I refuse to talk about it,” she says. “Emotionally, I’m not prepared to keep ­putting myself in that painful position.”

But at a personal level, her time in LA resembled the opening scenes of a romantic movie. In the spring of 2000, in a crowded bar, she met a handsome German named Ole Sturm, a video specialist working on the second Mission: Impossible film. “I liked the fact he was a man, not a boy,” she says. Within six months, they were married.

In 2005, the couple welcomed their son, Per, who was born with a cleft lip and ­palate. At 10 weeks, he had surgery on his lip to help him feed; at 10 months, he had a major operation on his palate. He’s had two further procedures since. “During his first surgery, I was ­holding him as they gave him the anaesthetic and he just went limp,” Lacy says. “I just wasn’t ready for that, so I burst into tears.”

When Per was 10, they moved to Berlin so he could learn German and connect with his father’s heritage. But as COVID plunged the city into lockdowns, the family shifted to Cairns, so Per could pursue his love of fishing, camping and bike-riding. Now, he’s studying international relations at university. In 2024, they moved to Melbourne so Lacy could help care for her elderly parents.

Sturm says that after 25 years, their marriage is stronger than ever. Throughout our interview, he frets about saying the wrong thing, worried that he’ll fail to communicate just how much he adores – and admires – his wife. “We’ve had our rough patches, and I know I’m not an easy person to live with, but we’ve stuck by each other,” he says. “Even though we have our issues, we’ve learnt to work through them.”

In the early 2000s, Lacy began enjoying the occasional drink – until it became a problem. “Compared to heroin, though, quitting alcohol was playtime,” she says. In 2008, she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. It was a relief to have an explanation for her intense emotions, impulsive behaviour and ­occasional mood swings. “She can feel abandoned very easily,” Sturm says. “When she decides she’s going to look after you, but that care is not reciprocated, it hurts her deeply.”

Yet even at the height of her career, she received no support at work during her darkest moments. When a colleague has cancer, we know what to do: we drop off food and visit them in hospital. But depression in the workplace can be much harder to deal with, especially if it’s not – as Lacy puts it – the “tidy, manageable, ‘I take my meds and meditate’ kind”. Her depression, she says, is messier, leaving her vulnerable to burning bridges while trying to save herself from drowning. And it’s rarely helped by corporate “awareness-raising” mental-health programs.

In her 40s, she decided that acting “normal” might make her life easier, so she began wearing beige, doing Pilates and smiling a lot in meetings. Then she shared a story with her colleagues about being stoned for three days on poppy-seed tea. “Oh right,” she realised. “I’m still me.” This marked the end of her brief attempt at being “a sourdough mum”.

Now, there’s a defiance in the way Lacy talks about her mental health. She wants others to understand that while her disorder might explain some things about her, it doesn’t explain everything. Sometimes, she says, people are just arseholes. They lie, cheat and spread cruel rumours. They comment mercilessly on girls’ bodies. They punish clever, funny women by under­mining them. And, she notes, whenever such people are challenged, they resort to a time-honoured defence: they blame the “crazy lady”.

No wonder Lacy is turning her back on the entertainment industry. To support herself while studying law, she works about 30 hours a week as a flight attendant for Jetstar (notwithstanding her current ­period of convalescence as she recovers from her broken back). Somehow, she also finds time for her other great passions: cooking, gardening and interior decoration. “As a lawyer, I want to fight for women who don’t get heard because I know what that feels like,” she says. “I know this sounds daft, but I also wanted to do a law degree to test if I was clever.”

As the light begins to fade, and my voice recorder alerts me to its dying battery, I ask Lacy if she truly appreciates the success she’s made of her life: ­maintaining a strong marriage and enduring friendships, raising a kind and thoughtful son, and her many professional accomplishments. She says yes, but there’s a flatness in her voice.

Her father tells me that she tends to beat herself up about what she hasn’t achieved, while her husband ­observes that she doesn’t allow herself to revel in her successes. “I think she understands her achievements at an intellectual level,” Sturm says. “It would be good for her to accept that she’s done all these amazing things; she should feel good about herself.”

When I press Lacy on whether she’d ever work in entertainment again, she shakes her head. “But I’ll never say never,” she says.

Sally Coyle believes television needs more performers like Lacy. “Her adventurousness and energy were exactly what was needed, but it was so short-lived,” she says. “She would have matured into an amazing ­performer, and I think we lost a great talent.”

In July, Lacy celebrated her 60th birthday with her family and her dearest friends. It was a chance to take stock of the good things in her life – including the fact she has been clean and sober for 23 years – while acknowledging the harms she suffered along the way. She began sharing her story on social media in a series of posts.

There would be no TED Talk, Netflix documentary or comeback tour. She rebuilt her life, she explains, simply by showing up, day after day. Yet she believes that people still see a woman who fell apart and never got her shine back (unlike her male peers, who are treated as oracles mere months after conquering their addictions). “There’s a difference between bitterness and clarity,” Lacy says. “Bitterness says, ‘I want revenge.’ Clarity says, ‘I want truth.’ All I’m saying is, ‘This happened. It hurt. And I survived anyway.’ ”

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