Popular stand-up Lucy Porter heads to Ilkley with new show Wake Up Call

Porter has been on the comedy circuit for a couple of decades now and is a well-loved figure with a loyal audience. She also appears regularly on TV comedy panel shows such as Mock the Week, Have I got New for You and Would I Lie to You and her voice will be familiar to Radio 4 listeners – she can often be heard on The News Quiz, The Now Show and Just a Minute. In addition to her television and radio work, Porter is also an actor, podcaster and voiceover artist, however, stand-up remains her first love. “I am someone who gets bored very easily, so I need to mix it up, but stand-up is the reason I get up in the morning,” she says. “You can write something in the afternoon and try it out in front of an audience that night – I love the immediacy of that.”

Wake-Up Call, which had a hugely successful run at the Edinburgh Fringe last summer, is as the title suggests about different kinds of revelations, realisations and epiphanies. It covers a whole range of themes, from pressure washers to the novels of Jean Rhys, bin collection schedules to the Scottish Enlightenment. Along the way, Porter also touches on grief, love, loss, anxiety and regret, as well as offering advice on midlife crisis management. There is a lot going on – all of it very relatable.

“The show is a kind of catharsis for me and for my audience,” says Porter. “My audience has grown up with me, so we are kind of at the same point in our lives. It is quite hard being middle-aged, I think, because you are neither one thing nor the other and it is a bit of an adjustment period.”

She says that the show was partly inspired by the kind of conversations she had been having with friends who, like her, are dealing with the various pressures of midlife. “I was thinking about what we would all moan about when we are chatting over drinks and that gets used as material. When it was my 50th birthday recently, one of my oldest friends came to see the show and she was quite horrified by what I had stolen, but it has to be pretty true to life for people to be able to relate to it.”

Porter’s main aim, of course, is to bring a bit of lightness, laughter and joy to her audiences, goodness knows we need it, but she doesn’t shy away from tackling tricky subjects. “With a light touch and a sense of humour I think you can talk about pretty much anything,” she says. “I don’t consciously avoid politics, and it’s almost impossible not to talk about it at the moment, but there are other things I’m more interested in exploring. It is about finding a balance – you want to be contemporary but not preachy.”

Porter is a keen student of comedy history, and she loves a quiz – her popular podcast Fingers on Buzzers celebrates all things related to quiz shows – and she recently had a couple of successes in that area herself, bringing home a Pointless trophy and, even more impressively, becoming the Celebrity Mastermind Champion of Champions. Her specialist subject was Victoria Wood.

“Winning that was the high point of my life so far, apart of course from the birth of my two beautiful children and my wonderful wedding day,” she says, laughing. “Victoria Wood was a huge inspiration for me – when I was growing up there were so few women doing what she was doing.” Wood certainly was a pioneer, helping to pave the way for others and to lay to rest the idea that women can’t be funny. “What is refreshing is, thankfully, that doesn’t seem to be a debate anymore, but that wasn’t the case when I started out,” says Porter. “Obviously there is still work to be done, but now we have people like Sara Pascoe, Katherine Ryan, Sarah Millican and others – for young women watching comedy now, there are lots of role models to inspire them.” Porter herself being one of them, of course. “It’s good to see different voices represented,” she says. “Change had to come and I’m so pleased it has.”

Lucy Porter will be appearing at The King’s Hall, Ilkley on February 16. Tickets bradford-theatres.co.uk