REVIEW – Devizes Arts Festival – Lucy Porter + Support @ Corn Exchange  6th June 2024

Funny You Should Say That

Andy Fawthrop

And finally it was time to see the girl we’ve all been seeing on the poster for the past few months! 

Last night Devizes Arts Festival presented its comedy big-hitter, the radio and TV star Lucy Porter.  And D-Town responded with another packed audience.

Lucy Porter is a stand-up comedian, and a regular face and voice on TV and radio panel shows. She loves a good quiz show, appearing on a Pointless Celebrity Special with Ed Byrne and being victorious on Celebrity Mastermind. She’s also appeared in QI, Live at the Apollo, Room 101 and heard on BBC Radio 4’s News Quiz.

She handled the start of the first half last night by telling us (perhaps unwisely) that she’d never been to D-Town before, and therefore felt justified in playing back to us some of the research she’d managed to dig up.  This was fairly gentle, if predictable, shtick – poking fun at our “posh” neighbours in Marlborough, relating the Moonrakers story, and throwing in various remarks about the K&A canal, the Caen Hill Flight and something she referred to as the “canoe marathon”.  It was amusing, but not really hitting the target.  Once she put her notes down and started to extemporise a little more, the audience thawed considerably, and the evening began to improve.  Her key task here was to warm the audience up for her chosen support act, and to flag the themes she’d be covering in the second half.

So it was time to welcome Sharon Wanjohi to the stage.  She’s an up and coming stand-up comedian with a varied act ranging from shock to absurd comedy, and has already appeared at a number of festivals and on TV.  She’s clearly still learning her craft, but last night she managed to win over an audience that was slightly nervous of someone they weren’t expecting.

Her self-deprecating style, covering themes of personal awakening, both spiritual and sexual, gradually began to hit home.  Asking if there were any black people in the audience, indeed whether being black was even legal in D-Town, began to bring the laughs.  And her interaction with a certain audience member about being lesbian was truly hilarious.  Her set was slightly rambling and disconnected, funny but not hilarious.  But there was no doubting the great reception she received in response to her warm, and sometimes personal, story-telling, and her relaxed easy-going style.  I’d definitely file her under the “one to watch” category.

And then, finally, after a very long interval, we finally had the star of the show.  Wearing a changed top (“sparkly on top, comfy below” as she put it), we were treated to a master-class in gentle, apparently rambling associative comedy.  Picking up on the obvious demographic of the audience, she homed in on one audience member who was clearly younger than the rest, and making great show of “explaining” some of the gags and references (just in case no-one got the point).  She also picked up with Sharon Wanjohi’s interlocutor from the first half, a tactic that worked extremely well.

She hit some obvious targets for a Radio 4 audience – the menopause, the male mid-life crisis, the desire to retire, increasing health issues.  But she played these well, riffing on her hypochondriac relationship with her GP Margaret (the cancerous spot thast turned out to be Nutella), about doing R2 singalongs with the guys painting her house, and on her thoughts about the “development” of Paul Hollywood.  There was a wonderful pastiche of The Sound Of Music and, right at the end, a great punchline about paint involving the chorus of “Relax”.  There were plenty of anecdotes relating to her own general laziness, her long-standing drinking pals, and her tendency to be impulsive.  Her story of just “winging it” on a mistaken appearance with Melvyn Bragg was superb.

It was, for the most part, very clean and straight-forward stuff.  There was nothing that could be considered “edgy”, there was nothing political, and there was (amazingly) no swearing.  As such, it probably kept most of the audience in their comfort zone for most of the time, but it was no less hilarious for all of that.

Overall, it was a good night’s entertainment, although I expect there’ll be a LOT of people waking up on Friday morning realising that they now knew what a Gold Star Lesbian is.  Go figure!

There’s more information on Lucy at www.lucyporter.co.uk/

Another great night at the Arts Festival, and thanks (yet again) to DAF for bringing such top-notch entertainment to our little town. 

The Devizes Arts Festival continues until Sunday 16^th June at various venues around the town. 

Tickets can be booked at Devizes Books or online at www.devizesartsfestival.org.uk 

---