Amy Hetherington: Proud as Punch.

Who says ‘proud as punch’ nowadays?  It’s an old-fashioned term that I hadn’t heard anyone say for years.  But Amy Hetherington’s show - that will have you laughing from one end to the other - is, well, a little old-fashioned too.  It’s about family, kids, and sharp-eyed, left field observation of people and life,

Amy’s a kind of warm, bubbly (can I say that?), loud, life-of-the-party woman who can see the humour in whatever life throws at her. While she can be startlingly graphic and frank in the details, her show is about her hometown – Darwin – about her stolid, practical if literal-minded engineer husband (the Robot), grey nomads who have ‘all the time in the world’, Amy’s little daughter, toilet training and its complications, sex after birth, and trying to have a pee while wearing a jumpsuit. 

Amy might love Darwin and is proud to come from there – but she has reservations.  The unchanging heat, the way everybody knows you, including the cops - who might be your cousins – and the contrast with the rest of Australia.  She scans her Melbourne audience early in her show and notes that we all have teeth.   She hasn’t been here since 2019 and that was before she became a Mum... Life has changed and so has she.

She tells us about her wedding, disrupted by her mother-in-law who was shocked to learn that Amy and the Robot were in bed together only five days after they met...  Amy corrects that straight off for everyone’s benefit.  But the contrast between the honest ribald and genuine ‘family values’ is sweet and touching.  Amy’s own Mum asked constantly when Amy was going to give her a grandchild.  When Amy announced her pregnancy, Mum promptly moved up from Albany... 

There’s some funny graphic detail about her little daughter at childcare missing the toilet bowl with a very big poo – and proudly calling in the other kids to show it off.  But what an embarrassment at Water World when the PA system announces a ‘Code Brown’...  It’s that kind of show. 

There’s a kind of rough and ready frontier flavour to this show – and it’s quite delightful.  Amy welcomes us at the door, handing out jelly snakes and once she’s up and running, the energy and the laughs don’t stop.  She tells us she’s not on radio or TV – this is it, so please tell our friends.  She should be on the radio and the TV because she’s just so funny in a totally unaffected, unself-conscious way.  We walk out of her show as cheerful as she is.

Michael Brindley