Kerry Godliman: 'We're cracking up on stage for your entertainment'

"Growing up, all the comics I liked might as well have lived on the moon," Kerry Godliman confides over tea at Dulwich Picture Gallery.

"They were dead American men like Bill Hicks and Lenny Bruce. Amazing, but they had nothing in common with me. I didn't want to be a dead American man," she deadpans. As a ballsy west London teenager, she just wanted to make her dad laugh – "but I couldn't find a stand-up college, so I went to drama school".

At Rose Bruford, she studied Ibsen and Brecht but lacked self-discipline. "I'd get pulled up for mucking about with the iambic pentameter." Inevitably she was cast as bawdy maids rather than leads.

She got small roles in Miranda, Extras and Getting On, and replaced Olivia Colman in the National Theatre's production of England People Very Nice. But she's frank about the rejection.Frustrated, she took a course on stand-up at London's City Lit and started getting gigs. Her one-woman show, Wonder Woman, won rave reviews at Edinburgh in 2011.Then Ricky Gervais changed her life when he cast her as care home manager Hannah in his comedy, Derek. She stole the show with her portrait of unaffected goodness. Now, she's got her own Radio 4 show, Kerry's List. "It's a scratch-and-sniff collage of my life; there's a bit of sitcom, surreal sketches and me doing stand-up."

As for the title – all women have a ridiculous to-do list in their heads, she explains. "Relax. Do yoga. Be nutritionally aware. Distress cupboards. Breathe… Quite grandiose things can be juxtaposed against doing the Hoovering."

The feminist in her knows it's mad: "There's a constant bombardment about what we ought to be doing to be the perfect wife and mother, have the perfect career. If we took all the advice we get from the media literally, we'd have a breakdown."

But she admits: "There are things going on in the world that depress the hell out of me, but if I can control my list, it anchors me. As they say: you eat an elephant one bite at a time." Her early autobiographical material included riffs on women and money, and why being single makes you feral. "If you are perfect, comedy doesn't work. Comedy only works on dysfunction. We're cracking up on stage for your entertainment."

Today, at 38, she is happily married to actor Ben Abell with two children – Elsie, six, and Frank, three – and lives in south London. They juggle childcare – which provided material for Kerry's List (Ben plays her husband). Children are anarchic, she sighs. "They're not interested in your to-do list and fantasy of a perfect life."

Initially, she worried about using her family in stand-up. Domesticity isn't very rock'n'roll. But she loves the way cult US stand-up Louis CK talks about his kids. "It's legitimised it. He's not dead yet, but he is an American man!"

When she's not performing, she spends a lot of time in the soft-play areas of south London parks. "They're the bleakest places. No one talks to each other. I'm amazed more people don't take a bottle of wine."

Kerry's List starts 29 April, Radio 4, 11.30am