Irish comedian Mary Bourke on eking out humour from being a carer for her husband 

When Mary Bourke's husband suffered a massive stroke, she was thrust into role of full-time carer. Her subsequent documentary series for the BBC is laced with black humour about the situation 

Mary Bourke tells her own story and looks at the plight of carers in her five-part BBC radio documentary, Who Cares? 

Mary Bourke is an Irish comedian living in London. In 2020, during a covid pandemic lockdown, her husband Simon Clayton, also a comedian, suffered a massive stroke. It propelled Bourke into becoming his carer. Her life changed in a million ways from that moment. One of the things she noticed was the need to manage people’s emotions around her, what she describes as “emotional labour”.

“Everybody wants a happy story,” she says on stage. “No one necessarily wants the truth. I’ll be at a party. A comedian will come up to me. He’ll be very nervous because he realises that he’s on the cusp of a tricky conversation.