There is not a lot of Lucy Porter. She gave her height on BBC Radio 4 as four feet eleven inches – but one of the funniest comedians around, she has a magnificent singing voice and a personality that soars.
Her gig at Cambridge Junction on Friday, January 17 is the third date on a tour running until April. It’s called No Regrets. How strange for someone so successful to base a show – as she says on: “Disastrous dates, professional calamities, ruined friendships and parenting fails.”
When did she have time for all that? She’s been a journalist (on Big Issue in The North of England), she was a researcher for Granada Television. Then came the Edinburgh Festival, countless other stand-up tours, being a regular on radio and tv panel shows and a part in EastEnders.
She grew up in the London Borough of Croydon. Well, we all did that but most of us have been forgiven. (I went to the same school as the model Kate Moss. Except I had to fail my eleven-plus to get in.
By the time young Moss went there, it was a comprehensive and they had started teaching people things. It does Latin now – and the house prices around have gone up accordingly.) Miss Porter went to Wallington High School for Girls, which is a different kettle of fish – and then the University of Manchester.
She says: “Though I love my life, and I know how happy and lucky I am, I still think there’s things that I might have done differently. You don’t help the next generation of people by glossing over the things you’ve done wrong.”
She says the show’s themes of guilt and shame are “a sort of Catholic thing. It’s like going to confession every night in a different arts centre.”
Is it a “Catholic Thing” or could it be a Jewish thing – or an Indian thing or a Nigerian thing or a thing that children got from their parents growing up in the 1970s when children sat at their school desks instead of hurling them around the room?
The regretful Miss Porter does admit she has had some amazing career highlights. She won Celebrity Mastermind. “Becoming Champion of Champions is probably my finest moment because I’m obsessed with quizzing. My dad was a big quiz fan, and I talk about that in the show as well.”
Then she actually says: (Put your cup down if you are holding a hot drink)
“Some of my biggest regrets are questions I got wrong in game shows.”
We will forgive you. Lucy. You don’t even need the ten Hail Marys.
The idea for this show came after a journalist asked Lucy if she had any regrets.
She says: “I launched into this massive list immediately. I was like: I regret not standing up to the bullies at school. I regret dropping my French GCSE. I really regret not having been more ambitious in my career. I regret the sort of things I said to my mum and dad.
She recalls: “I went on for ages and the journalist stopped me and said: ‘No one else has ever answered this question. I’ve asked everyone and they always say: I don’t really have any regrets because every choice I’ve made and every path I’ve taken has led me to be the person I am today, and I feel so grateful and blessed.’
“That made me gag slightly because I thought: I know we all need to practise gratitude and be happy within ourselves and I’m way more like that in my fifties than I ever have been before. But no regrets? Really?”
Lucy’s Porter’s No Regrets Show is at Cambridge Junction on Friday, January 17 then touring until April. See online for details.
