Instead the Grumpy Old Woman and one
time Perrier Award winning comedienne gave her mainly female audience
an X-rated analysis of what its like to be middle aged and entering
the menopause. And so began a show which, although entitled Old Dog,
New Tricks, could just as easily have been called Bodily Functions.
In a set that was definitely not for the squeamish, no physical act
or scatological description was left unexplored as Eclair brought
gasps of shock and gales of laughter from her mainly female audience.
Identifying the men in the audience as
designated drivers brought along so that the women could get drunk,
Eclair talked about passing wind on the bus, passing wind whilst
having a massage and whether middle aged women should gang together
clutching their private parts to intimidate hoodies in the part of
south east London where she now lives.
Eclair hails from Lytham St Annes and
shared with her audience fond but entirely unrepeatable memories of
spending her formative years dispensing sexual favours to teenage
boys. Her parents still live in Lytham and were the subject of some
of her material but Geoff, her partner of 28 years, was the butt of
more jokes. We learnt that watching the Tour de France on TV he fell
off the sofa pretending to pedal along with the riders, whilst plans
for a Vegas wedding were abandoned because he couldn’t
differentiate between a serving spoon and a dessert spoon. Breakfast
in bed served by Geoff is also over rated (“wrong type of
marmalade”), as is oral sex.
The female obsession with removing body
hair, the wardrobe habits of female weather presenters (“I don’t
want my weather girl in a spangly top looking like she’s been
clubbing all night”) and the delights of the Per Una range of
clothing from M&S all received the Éclair treatment. This
grumpy old woman likes the self service section at her local
Sainsbury because it makes shoplifting easier, but feels her frequent
shopper status should entitle her to a VIP Nectar card and a free
glass of champagne. And she rather likes Booths – “it’s the
sort of place that, if you fainted while you were there, they’d
make sure your skirt was pulled down so that you looked decent.”
Eclair is a Northern lass with middle
class pretensions that have softened as she gets older: “I used to
arrive in a place hoping to score some Class A drugs. Now I hope
they’ve got a nice floral clock.” Few of her jokes could be
repeated in a family newspaper and Jenny Eclair is unlikely to be
offered the freedom of Lytham St Annes any time soon, but if she
toned down her act in order to do so, the fans who packed the Chorley
Little Theatre would not forgive her.
