Lucy Porter’s punchlines are good. They are clever and they delighted her audience at Cambridge Junction. But she can take a while to build up to them.
Her show No Regrets has a long exposition about how it came to be. The journalist who asked her in an interview his standard question of had she any regrets was surprised when she gave him a comprehensive list.
All his other famous interviewees had said they couldn’t possibly regret anything because every decision they had made and their entire lives up to this point had led them to the glorious state of undiluted happiness they had reached today.
That’s sickening says Lucy and takes us through her multitude of regrets in a series of anecdotes.
They make the show a cross between an evening at the Women’s Institute and a session in a psychiatrist’s chair. She wears a quilt she made out of jump suits she regrets buying. There is an extended session on jump suits.
She tells us about her dad. He worked long hours in a job he loathed. “He was the angry man who came on holiday with us.”
It was always the same holiday – a campsite at Pevensey Bay on the South Coast. On arrival, her dad would sit at the bar with the other fathers, none of them speaking to each other. That was his roost for the duration.
At the end of the holiday, they would collect him to drive them back.
We hear about the girl bullies at her school, the male bully who was a boss during her stint on breakfast television, her poker session with Leonardo DiCaprio, her gig at Caesar’s Palace in Los Vegas.
She phoned home in distress. “It was the only time my dad said more than: ‘I’ll pass you to your mother.” He told her she didn’t have to stay there; she could come home.
Jokes are absent in today’s stand-up. Comedians talk about themselves. Radio programmes are similar. Woman’s Hour is almost entirely people boasting or moaning, usually doing both at once. Mostly they have written a book about it – the veracity of which no one has checked.
Lucy Porter’s stories feel real. Now 51, she references the food of her childhood in the 1980s and the atmosphere of Croydon in Surrey where she grew up. It all feels genuine and a lot of it is funny.
Possibly the wait for the laugh is worth it.
Lucy Porter No Regrets is touring until April 2025.
