Kiri Pritchard-McLean has spoken on stage before about her interest in helping young people – including in her 2017 show, Appropriate Adult, in which she talked about being a mentor to a vulnerable youngster. In Peacock, her latest touring show which I saw as part of the inaugural Brighton Dome Comedy Festival, she talks about how she and her partner, Dan, came to be foster carers.
There are, the comic informs us, more than 100,000 children in the care system in the UK. It's a subject that in less assured hands could be dull, preachy or an exercise in virtue-signalling – she gets a lot of mileage out of the last mentioned – but Pritchard-McLean, a wonderfully sweary, sardonic and self-deprecating comic, ladens the story with gags.
She starts by filling in background details for anyone new to her story; as a child she had a vague notion of eventually having children, but by her thirties pretty much knew she didn't want to be a biological mother – perhaps in part as a response to those women who start almost every sentence “Speaking as a mother...” who get a gloriously funny kicking here.
But Pritchard-McLean makes it clear that she massively admires mothers (single mums particularly) and also social workers – with whom she has had a lot of dealings during the fostering process – who are duly praised, though not before the comic has got a lot of laughs out of them too.
The core of the show is Pritchard-McLean talking about the lengthy and emotionally gruelling process that all would-be foster carers have to go through. But the comedy is mined here, too – the mandatory first aid training, the elderly vicar in an assessment role who looked at the comic's material on YouTube – as well as the jeopardy of appearing before a panel of social workers who would decide if she and Dan were made of the right stuff. Of course we know there'll be a happy ending but by then we've been through the emotional wringer too.
As with previous shows, Pritchard-McLean skilfully melds personal anecdotes with incisive social commentary. This is an evening full of laughs, proving that serious subjects can be very funny indeed.
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