Lou Sanders on everything but her show ahead of Ramsgate tour date

Lou Sanders won’t tell me what her show is about. Not in a Robert de Niro, I’m an intimidating jerk kind of way, but more in an affable but, as she puts it, “really scatty” kind of way. 

“You’ll just have to come to see the show, won’t you?” the comic says when I ask what ageing joyfully - the one thing about her show I have to run with - looks like to her. “That's all the stuff I discuss in the show. I can't discuss it now.” 

“I hate the phrase ‘ageing joyfully’,” Lou continues, “because even I don't know how to use it. I think it sounds so twee and crap and it is such a kind of trite message. 

“If I talk about it…,” she trails off. “It’s better to come to the show.”

Yet she continues. “I just think when you were a kid, if it was snowing,” Lou goes on, in another effort to summarise her show, No Kissing in the Bingo Hall, “you'd think of all the fun ways you could use that snow. That snowball fight, sledging; you're just so excited. And then as you get to be an adult, if it's snowing, a lot of the time people go ‘oh, I've got to clean the ice off the car’ or they think of the problems rather than the opportunities.”

So perhaps the show is about retaining a sense of youthfulness in middle-life - Lou does, after all, have two trampolines at home. “It's not really about anything,” Lou interjects, cutting me off before I finish the question. “It’s just a comedy show and I'm exploring ageing. But there's no big point to it. It's just what I think of myself getting a bit older and trying to not take things seriously. 

“But even that - not taking things seriously - is a cliché,” she adds, cancelling herself out.  

“I guess it's about my experience with knocking on a bit and trying to…,” Lou falters. “You'd think by the end of the tour I'd have learned how to talk about the show and sell it. But no, I haven't.” 

Lou brings No Kissing in the Bingo Hall to the Granville Theatre in Ramsgate on Friday, September 19, for a live recording and the show’s final performance of its 46-night run. 

While it may not be about staying young in spirit, I still want to know about the trampolines. 

“I talk about that in the show,” Lou says, by way of discouraging the question - but I just want to know why. 

“Well, one for me, one for a friend,” she explains. “I don't want to be jumping around on the trampoline and my guests be thinking, ‘When is it my turn?’ So good news, we can bounce together.”

Despite not being enamored by the phrase ‘ageing joyfully’, Lou prefers it to ‘ageing gracefully’. 

“I don't like either of those words, really. Ageing gracefully - what if you've never had any grace in the first place? I don't have any grace so why am I going to get it suddenly in my 40s?

“But I don't like ageing joyfully as a one-line sell of the show, yet I still haven't come up with a better one. I guess it's just about trying to have a nice time and not becoming a boring cunt. It's hard to say that in one-line sell, but that is what [the show] is about. Trying not to become a boring cunt… Title much?”

The stand-up show comes off the back of Lou’s memoir, What’s That Lady Doing?, which regales her early years in Thanet and younger London days. 

The book traverses subject matter like rape, alcohol addiction, problematic sexual encounters and being in a band called the Geoff Leopards, flipping between the light and the dark with Lou’s frank and effervescent touch. Does NKITBH similarly dip in and out of heavy subject matters? 

“No, it doesn't because I haven't had heavy stuff happen so much,” Lou says, who adds that getting sober was instrumental to everything good in her life.

“But also that book was meant to be a sort of beacon of light, especially to younger women; sort of like a do's and don'ts guide really. Don't do some of the stuff I've done, but if you do, try and forgive yourself. 

“I also wanted to show that it's just quite normal - the number of Instagram messages I got from women saying, ‘Oh my God, I've had the exact same experiences and I thought it was just me.’

“I wanted to normalise [those experiences] because there's a trend for people being a victim and exploring their trauma, like trauma porn. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to be like, ‘no, we're all going to have a tapestry of good and bad things happen for us’. That's how we learn and that's how we grow.” 

While Lou has ideas for follow up books - a work of fiction and another “investigating spiritual things” because “my whole life is that sort of thing, may as well get paid for it” - it’s TV work the comic likes the most, having starred in numerous shows including Dancing on Ice, LOL: Last One Laughing UK and Taskmaster. 

“[TV] is the easiest because you’re in the room for a few hours and it's done - you're not really overthinking it and that's very fun,” she says. “I love doing TV, I love it. That's probably my favourite because it's just the easiest one to do - you have a laugh and you're working with people, you get to hang out with your friends and you get your makeup and hair done.

“Going on tour is more of a labour of love,” she adds. “You overthink more because you want it to be good; it's never finished and it’s never good enough. You’re on your own with it, aren’t you?” 

Regarding her upcoming performance in Ramsgate, Lou reveals she is “excited-slash-nervous”, having recently moved back to Thanet.

“You get a bit worried because you just need it to go well otherwise it's super embarrassing,” she explains. “You don't want to be next to someone in the sauna at Walpole Bay who went to the show and had a terrible time.”

Having grown up in Broadstairs before moving to London, Lou set up home in Margate last year, after considering a relocation to Brighton or opening up an animal sanctuary and being “totally self-sustainable” in Portugal - an idea Lou’s agent thought was “very bad”. 

Lou talks about her younger Thanet days on stage and in her memoir, a time when getting wasted was high on the list of things to do. Back in her old stomping ground, does Lou bump into people from her past often? 

“Yeah, but luckily no one can remember because we were all so munted [back then], apart from…” Lou trails off realising she had begun to talk about someone who didn’t want to be talked about. 

“There’s not too many ghosts [around] because they’ve either moved on, don’t remember me or are dead,” Lou says, deftly covering her tracks. “That's nice and bleak isn't it? They're dead, they're all dead. I killed them,” she jokes. 

For many, returning to the place they grew up in would be a hard no, but Lou says she has “never looked back.”

“I love it,” she says. “Got a big garden for the cats. I love being near the sea. I honestly think I was so ready for a change. 

“It felt really natural,” she goes on. “It wasn't depressing because I feel like a completely different person. If the old me moved back, I think I would feel depressed. But I was 18 when I left so I don't feel like that person at all anymore.”

After the tour, Lou says she will “step into the unknown”, before adding, “God, I’m being so annoying as an interviewee. I’m really sorry. There are a few things but I don’t know if I can talk about them.”

Lou does reveal however, that she has started writing a new show. I ask her what the new show is about.

“I don’t know yet,” she says. “I've only written 10 minutes.”

Lou Sanders brings No Kissing in the Bingo Hall to The Granville Theatre on Friday, September 19 at 7.30pm. Book tickets.