Judith Lucy.
 When most of us lose our jobs, we tend to get depressed and just drink a lot, but not Judith Lucy. Well, actually she did that too. But she also channelled her disappointment into a new stand-up show called 'I Failed', and it premieres at the Fringe.
"My personal life has actually been going quite well," explains Lucy as she discusses the inspiration for her new show. "What luck that the radio should turn into such a disaster."
Lucy had been doing a breakfast radio show for Austereo, until the ratings started to decline and she was shifted about a bit before getting sacked.
"I also will admit that I was possibly not the right person for the job," she says of her "nightmarish year" on the show. "They moved us to National Drive [time], which we [Lucy, Peter Helliar and Karen Cook] thought was going quite well until six months in they sacked us, which would seem to indicate things hadn't been going quite as well as we thought.
"The story that links the show together is what happened to me on the radio, but within that I talk about everything from getting my gall-bladder removed, to getting engaged, to colonic irrigation," she explains, later describing the last as "the most humiliating forty-five minutes that I've ever spent in my life."
"There's absolutely nothing funny about positive outlooks," she tells me when I mention her humour might be a wee bit negative. "Thankfully, shit things keep happening and I keep being able to make cash out of them."
Lucy is very light-hearted, in her dry, deadpan sort of way as she talks about these "shit things" that keep happening to her, but making jokes about it all does take a bit of effort.
"If you had asked me to get up on stage, say, the week after I'd been sacked, and talk about it, I suspect I would either have been drunk out of my mind, or weeping, quite possibly both."
The old saying goes that when God shuts a door, he opens a window, so it's natural to ask which window Judith Lucy plans to hurl herself through next.
"I've done a few interviews for this show already, not that many though, and that question keeps getting asked. And I keep saying: I don't know. The world premiere's in Adelaide - 'World Premiere'... like I'm going to do it in Africa and Egypt - and then I'll take it around the rest of the country which will take me to about mid August, and then, really, pardon my French, but who the fuck knows?"
Keeping her plans a little bit loose?
"That's one way to look at oncoming unemployment."
Henry Nicholls
 | Judith Lucy's WORLD PREMIERE of 'I Failed' is in the Great Hall (Freemasons Hall, North Terrace) on Sun 26 Feb, as part of the Fringe. |
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