Fast-rising comic Alison Spittle has been through plenty in her life, behind the scenes of a career which has seen her become a regular co-host of the enormously popular ‘Guilty Feminist’ podcast as well as finding mainstream success with BBC Sounds’ ‘Wheel Of Misfortune’, a project she created herself. Her complex PTSD forms some of the basis of this brand new tour, fresh from a critically lauded run at the Edinburgh Fringe (a selection of her rave reviews are below). Luckily, though, there’s also soup.
Alison’s enthusiasm for soup is at such a level that she was invited to join a WhatsApp group devoted to the subject (she is frustrated that it isn’t called WhatSoup, but there’s nothing we can do about that). It’s one of the nicer corners of the internet, and Alison is a person devoted to nice corners: the show also touches upon her balcony/refuge in a rented London flat, where she cultivates fruit and vegetables with, to be fair, mixed results. But many of the escapes we seek for our mental health are less reliable, and – among other things – the industry of ‘self-care’, the scam of face masks, and the misery of hen parties come under her sweet-but-vicious spotlight.
Few comics combine the innocuous with the psychologically probing quite as distinctively as this joyous, unusual performer, whom Impatient is delighted to send on her biggest UK tour to date. The need for distraction is an ongoing theme in Alison’s comedy: for the rest of us, there could hardly be a more pleasant distraction from life’s horrors than to watch her at work.
Book Alison Spittle at The Lowry
