Lucy Porter: Wake Up Call - Salisbury Arts Centre

We’ve hired a skip to change our lives. Unfortunately, we’re both hoarders and so have a house full of junk. Ever seen those programmes where Stacey Solomon visits some weird couple living in a thinly-disguised indoor landfill site, and ruthlessly shows them how to throw stuff away? Well, that’s us and that’s the plan. Unfortunately, Stacey hasn’t arrived and there’s too much “hold on to that, it might come in useful” going on.

Lucy Porter doesn’t admit to being a hoarder, but she admits to having had a bit of a midlife crisis and needing to change her life, and she brought her show Wake Up Call to Salisbury Arts Centre on Saturday, June 17, to tell us about it.

Now, like me, you may have only a passing acquaintance with Lucy’s comedy and, she says, that’s the way she likes it – low-level celebrity status, “just sufficient almost to sell out an old church in Salisbury”.  She’s not pushing boundaries or breaking paradigms, not out to shock and, mercifully, has no wokeist agenda - she knows her demographic and seems happy to be a middle-aged comedienne entertaining middle-aged folk. 

The first half of the show introduces us to the characters in her life and spins gentle, humorous anecdotes around them. She tells of an elderly friend who thinks she – Lucy - is Susan Calman, and how she’s decided to ignore the obvious dissimilarities with a Scottish lesbian and just go along with it for the sake of friendship. What’s more, she now makes it her goal to talk to elderly people who, as she puts it, “have been radicalised by the Daily Mail”, so she’s clearly a busy lady! 

Then there are her old school friends, her doctor, her husband - it’s all pleasantly chucklesome, but you do begin to wonder where it’s actually going.

Well, in the second half, it gets there: her midlife crisis – a series of panic attacks brought on by failed auditions, too much cheese, too little exercise and ADHD - and the characters from the first half fall into place to complete a cleverly-constructed narrative arc of comedy. It’s funny and kind-hearted, with a message encouraging us to take control of our lives and make changes for the better.

And has Lucy’s advice inspired us in our own life-enhancing decluttering?  Well, possibly - we’ve decided to hold on to it because it might come in useful.