This woman can make you more attractive! - an interview with Deborah Frances-White

This woman can make you more attractive! - an interview with Deborah Frances-White

04 November, 2010
by: Emma

Emma McAlpine chats to comedian, motivational speaker and screenwriter Deborah Frances-White about her hit show How to Get Almost Anyone to Want to Sleep With You.

I’m in the Camden Bar and Grill talking to Deborah Frances-White about her show How To Get Almost Anyone To Want to Sleep With You, when a man approaches our table fixing me with a look of the utmost urgency.

“Can I have a word in private please? It’s important.”

Bewildered but nevertheless intrigued, I oblige him and step outside.

“I’m working on a script for a film and I’d like you to star in it.”

“But I’m not an actress,” I point out.

“That doesn’t matter.”

“What’s it about?”

“I can’t tell you that at this stage. Or who’s in it. Alright it’s Johnny Depp. Can I have your number?”

It soon becomes quite clear that this man is a) a liar and b) a total creep. Still, just from speaking to Deborah for an hour, I have been hit on. The woman is clearly onto something.

A former improv specialist (she still teaches it through her training company The Spontaneity Shop), she made the move into stand-up comedy a few years ago. “I wanted to do something with quality control that I wouldn’t have to throw away after one gig.” In 2007, she practically invented a new sub-genre of comedy with a show that was somewhere between stand-up and self-help. “How To Get Almost Anyone to Want to Sleep With You is first and foremost a comedy show but it also teaches you how to attract people. It shows women how to think differently and men how to behave differently.”

Performing it at all over the world, Deborah has become comedy’s cupid, receiving frequent correspondence from audience members telling her how her show has helped them. “The first time I ever did it was in New York and I got an email from a guy on Facebook saying ‘I haven’t had a girlfriend in five years and now two weeks after your show, I have one.’”

“So what sort of tips could you give me?” I ask her, keen to learn all her dating wisdom.

“Well I always tell women to wear a hat. I wear one and at least five times a day a man will say to me “nice hat”, which I read as ‘nice tits’ but they obviously can’t say that to my face. The hat says ‘I do not fear attention’ and it gives men permission to flirt without feeling sleazy or fake. You don’t know how many men fancy you until you wear a hat; then you really start to understand your numbers a bit more."

Speaking to Deborah, it is obvious how outgoing and self-assured she is (even if she does admit she's wearing a Trilby today to cover up her flat hair). I can’t imagine her ever worrying about what men think of her, but she reveals a rather interesting part of her personal history which left her doing just that.

“When I was a teenager, my family joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses and I had to stop debating and drop out of the high school musical. I knocked on people’s doors telling people that what they believed was wrong. I used to try and be funny to break up the tedium which the elders hated! I think that definitely contributed to me getting into comedy. After several years being a Jehovah’s Witness I wanted to do something fun. I don’t ever want to bore people again.

“I also didn’t feel sexy being in the Witnesses. You have to dress in a certain way and boys want to be with someone submissive, which I clearly wasn’t, so I never got asked out.”

Having spent years feeling unattractive, she finally realised what she’d been missing in 2006 at the Edinburgh Festival.

“I had a poster in Edinburgh for a show about mobile phones and I was leaning against one in a confident pose and this poster had convinced men I was sexy. They would come over to me and say ‘I really like your poster, you look really sexy’ and no matter how much I tried to brush it off, they wouldn’t let it deter them because they already had this sexy image of me in their head.

“So I recommend that girls – put a really sexy picture of yourself up in your neighbourhood cafe saying ‘I’ve lost my cat’ or something and then sit near it and see what happens! It’s very little to do with looks and everything to do with how you rate yourself. Women are sexy and women who know they’re sexy are sexier.”

A lot of what she says makes sense. Confidence is after all, a highly attractive human trait, as long as it doesn’t spill over into arrogance. Yet, a lot of her thoughts on the way we can change our behaviour to make ourselves more attractive probably won’t have occurred to a lot of people.

“I spoke to this gorgeous blond 20-year-old at the Festival. I said ‘Isn’t it weird how men will just come up to you and ask to sleep with you here and she said ‘No, no one’s even offered to buy me a drink.’ That’s when I realised I was clearly exuding something she was not. I wish I’d known all this when I was 21!”

Talking to Deborah is fun. After an hour or so in her company, I’ve laughed plenty and feel like I’ve gained some very useful dating knowledge. And I’ve been asked to be in a movie with Johnny Depp. We both leave the Camden Bar and Grill giggling and whispering like school girls. “See what happens when you're with me?" she says.

Deborah Frances-White's How To Get Almost Anyone To Want To Sleep With You is at Assembly Hall until the 27th August

Emma