If it’s true that male stand ups do gags, female stand ups do anecdote, it really doesn’t matter. As Lucy Porter illustrated on her fourteenth visit to the Black Box for a packed Out to Lunch festival event, she is the queen of the lengthy anecdote. And it really really doesn’t matter that she’s now like her mum whom she thought took ages to get to the point, the journey vaut le detour. No regrets is the title and she flunked French O level so I'm entitled to a bit of le francais.
What makes Porter’s evening sing is the generosity, humour obviously and sharp naughtiness. She eschewed the most famous regret or no regrets song in her opening playlist, My Way, because of an antipathy to the great Frank Sinatra whose portrait incidentally featured in her Northern Irish father’s uber Catholic picture collection on the living room wall. Which was topped, of course, with the Virgin Mary.
She came on sporting a spangled top and her cloak of regrets. An ironic quilt made, she tells us, of bits of outfits ordered online at two a.m, after a couple of Proseccos, and the garment features material from no fewer than four jumpsuits. Ah, jumpsuits, I had a bright pink and turquoise number when young. The problem was the pit stops, of course, which Porter discourses on with characteristic snigger triggering detail.
There were serious and even sentimental moments. The section on holidaying in Pevensey Bay (know it well, we rented a cottage there) was droll with the Porters in their caravan park, leaving the angry dad at the site bar for the duration. Apparently on the way home, they sometimes started out transporting the wrong angry man.
Not a smutty set overall, and quite thought provoking in the section on Lucy Porter’s regrets about not standing up to bullies at school, Porter could give Frankie Boyle a run for his money here and there. In the Sinatra section, she threw out reward chocs to audience members who knew who ol’ Blue Eyes was married to. It was also fun to learn Frank Sinatra gave himself the nickname. Well, the great, lascivious Ava Gardner was one partner and apparently when asked why she’d married the scrawny, one hundred and nineteen pound crooner, came back with ; Well, nineteen pounds of it is cock. You can’t really follow that.
Jane Hardy
Photo by Bernadette McAllister
