Hull comedian Lucy Beaumont on Meet the Richardson's and why she might go into politics

Ahead of the third and final leg of her highly successful stand-up tour, Lucy Beaumont still finds herself in moments of self-doubt. “I still just can't believe that people want to come out and watch me,” she says. “In your head, you just think: why? It's mad but it’s such an honour.”

The comedian from Hull, now based in Sheffield, has had an incredibly busy few years. On top of touring the country with stand up, she starred in and co-wrote the acclaimed sitcom-cum-mockumentary Meet The Richardsons, as well as co-writing the Channel 4 series Hullraisers. She also launched a new podcast with fellow comedian Sam Campbell and has appeared on a variety of TV shows, perhaps most notably being Taskmaster.

“I like to do about five or six things at once,” she says. “I've got ADHD, so my idea of hell is a really relaxed, happy life where I do one thing at a time. I'd go insane. I'm a nightmare, really. Completely dysfunctional.”

Beaumont then slides into an anecdote to perfectly display this kind of behaviour that leads her down random roads. “I had a deadline for a script and it was late,” she begins. “And then instead of doing that I was on Twitter trying to get in touch with Deborah Meaden to see if I could get on Dragon's Den because I had created an invention and was getting a university and a plastics company to create a prototype. All in public, while I was late delivering a script. I can't help it but I just create chaos. But that does work really well for comedy.”

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Beaumont draws heavily from this chaos for her stand-up material, telling tales from her personal life – such a misguided booking of an overly young butler in the buff for a friend’s 40th – or and leaning into her very northern and idiosyncratic upbringing in Hull with her mum. Beaumont’s mother, Gill Adams, is a real character; the Hull-based playwright is a hilarious and unpredictable presence in Meet the Richardsons. “When I'm with my mum, we always say we can't have a normal day out,” she explains. “It's kind of like our catchphrase. I feel like I'm living in a sitcom sometimes. Comedy just finds me. I'll go for a walk and I'll end up meeting somebody bizarre and then I'll end up going to help them with something and then I'll fall down somewhere or something.” Even when she’s alone in a room with nothing to do, Beaumont seems to find a way to turn it into something unique. Her decision to see if she could fit herself into her own suitcase while bored in the Taskmaster dressing room being one such key example.

While TV has been her staple work for years, with Meet the Richardsons running for five series’ before ending in 2024 (Beaumont and her husband and co-star Jon Richardson announced they were separating earlier this year) she seems to be relishing doing stand-up at the moment. “Nothing comes close to it,” she says. “In TV, the money is good so you get sucked in but with stand-up you feel like you're actually being creative. Which you don't so much if you just have an appearance on a really produced show. There's an artistry to stand up, and I do feel like I'm an artist, so it's the one time you're actually feeling like you're useful. It feels like you've done something. It’s so immediate and because audiences all have different personalities, it doesn't feel like you're doing the same show every night.” However, while Beaumont may now be touring the UK and selling out dates, even having to add extra shows due to demand in some cities, it wasn’t always as plain sailing.

“I think the audience feel like they know me now,” she says. “Which is lovely. You don't have that in the early days because you're really proving yourself. It's a bit of a lion's pit. Now it feels like they are coming ready to laugh and I don't have to try and force it out of them. It's not like Saturday night in Grimsby used to be.”

In her earlier years of stand-up, Beaumont won The BBC New Comedy Award and the Chortle Award for Best Newcomer but it was a slog to get there. She was working as a cleaner at Hull University for a period before embarking on her journey.

“I was cleaning at the University that I had a degree from,” she says. “And I just felt this isn't what I'm meant to do. So I gave up everything. I had a really nice life in Hull and I literally just left, with a bin liner full of stuff, and walked out the door and moved to London. I had no money for a year. I didn't eat, I never went anywhere, didn't see friends, and I couldn't get back up North to do anything. I was just obsessed with trying to get more gigs and build up my 20-minute set. It was all I could think about. I thought, if I could get good, it could change my life.”

Beaumont has become somewhat synonymous with Hull, as she has been a relentless champion of it, while proudly embracing her dialect, as well as featuring it heavily in much of her work across both scripted and live comedy. Although you get the sense that she’s maybe looking to reel that back a bit now. “I've always wanted to just put it on the map,” she says. “And say: this is a really interesting city that's got real cultural and historical roots, that has got its complete own character and personality. But I think I need to stop speaking about it as much now. I feel like I talk about it all the time.”

Outside of comedy, Beaumont is an avid charity worker and an impassioned advocate for a number of causes. She’s written about lack of opportunities for working class people in the arts and has also campaigned around a number of causes related to child welfare inequality, something she experienced first-hand in her years working in teaching before acting and comedy took hold. “I did work in prisons, with child refugees, victims of domestic abuse and in behavioural units,” she says. “I've had all this training, and so while a lot of it is just shouting into the abyss on social media, I sort of know what I'm talking about.

“Personally, I want comedy that makes you laugh,” she says. “I would be really annoyed with myself if I ever did a show and then half of it was a serious bit. My material is simply: what can make people laugh the most in 90 minutes.” However, she does hold serious convictions in her views. “I probably will get into politics,” she says. “I'd like to be a councillor. Maybe in Hull, Blackpool or north Halifax. Somewhere where I feel like there's work to be done. Maybe the comedy is almost like an ego thing because I'm not ready to leave it. I've still got a lot of things I want to get out of my system and then I'll maybe get a real job.”

At this point, it seems the future is genuinely wide open for Beaumont. “I know what I'm doing until May and then I don't,” she says. “I've always got something in the pipeline but whether it'll come off, we'll see, and there's always someone behind you waiting in the shadows who's going to take your place.” Although one suspects it won’t be long before Beaumont stumbles into more chaos to spin into something funny.

For Yorkshire dates visit lucybeaumont.co.uk