Failing with flair

Judith Lucy hopes she never does a show about marriage.

The comedian, who has turned such life traumas as discovering she was adopted, the death of her parents and being sacked from her radio career into darkly hilarious and incisive one-woman shows, says she will know her life is really in a mess if she ever does a show about marriage.

Lucy has been engaged to her long-time boyfriend Colin for two years, and is still trying to find a time when the pair can get married. In the meantime, she is touring the country with her latest show, I Failed!, which opens in Sydney on 18 July.

I would be quite thrilled if there wasn’t a show on it, actually, Lucy drawls in her trademark tones.

If I do end up doing a show about marriage, it will mean some really shit things have happened, and I would like things to go smoothly for a change.

We were meant to do it at the end of my first year of doing commercial radio, but I spent so much time crying we couldn’t. Then we were going to do it at the end of last year, and I got sacked. Now there’s some talk of it happening at the end of this year.

If it does ever happen, don’t be surprised if the reception is at Nando’s or McDonald’s.

With her own dilemmas about locking in a wedding day, Lucy also has a message about the current debate over gay marriage.

Look, if you have the time to make it happen, knock yourself out, get out there and tie the knot, she enthuses. I can’t understand for the life of me why it is an issue at all. It is positively churlish.

The same could also be said about Lucy’s experiences while working for a major radio network, which are the subject of I Failed! The show details the bizarre and boorish behind-the-scenes experiences of hosting a morning radio show on a commercial radio network.

After 18 months, having already been demoted to an afternoon shift, Lucy was sacked.

I Failed! is a brutal, honest title, and that exclamation mark is meant to be that I failed in a happy, joyous, slightly unhinged way.

I think for people in the media, it might fascinate them to hear about the ins and outs of the world of commercial radio but, for the majority of people, it would bore them senseless and wind up as a whinge-fest.

So I decided to tell of the more extreme cases and the stories I could make funny, as well as the other humiliating things that happened during that time.

One such story is about a suggested radio promotion involving giving away the semen of singer Guy Sebastian so a female listener could impregnate herself.

Another is about the scathing email Lucy received from a radio boss, telling her never to refer to Marlon Brando again as no one knew who he was.

We had stuff like that on a daily basis, Lucy recalls. To say there is an attitude of the lowest common denominator and people are idiots is somewhat of an understatement.

As for venturing back into the world of radio, Lucy says she can’t imagine that day dawning -“ ever. The temple curtain would have to be ripped in twain before I went down that path again.

But ABC radio? Hello! Or even community radio. Getting a friend to push me around in a wheelbarrow while I speak into a loudspeaker also has some appeal.

I Failed! opens 18 July at The Everest Theatre, Seymour Centre. Bookings on 9351 7940 or at the Ticketek website.