Lucy’s comical Northern roots

With a hilarious cutting wit that belies first impressions of a sweet and inoffensive girlie girl, comic Lucy Porter had a small but perfectly formed (much like Lucy herself) audience in the palm of her hand at the Dukes in Lancaster.

She’s travelling the UK with a show previewed to great acclaim at the Fringe in Edinburgh this summer.

Although born and raised in Croydon, Lucy has never felt like a southerner. With a Northern Irish dad who was a Roman Catholic member of the RUC, himself very much in the minority, and a mum from the Midlands relocated to London, Lucy struggled to get a grip on where she was from spiritually as she grew up.

She moved north to study at Manchester University and at last thought she’d found where she was from. She even tried pretending she was from the North until being found out in a live radio interview.

A show that is a love letter to the North is always going to go down well when played in northern venues, but it would be interesting to discover how it’s received in the south.

Croydon in particular doesn’t come out of it well. No wonder Lucy was desperate to find somewhere else she could claim as home.

In a laugh-a-second act, Lucy tells how she was guided north by a love for Morrissey and The Smiths. In an anecdote that balances humour with discomfort she described being warned about the octopus tendencies of a famous radio DJ and how indeed his hands wandered.

Then how she high fived the producer who’d warned her about the DJ after the event. It is testament to her skill as a comedian that she makes this side splittingly funny without dismissing the wrongness of such actions.

Well worth catching if you can.