Lucy Porter pens new Radio 4 comedy

Lucy Porter is writing an historical feminist sitcom for Radio 4.

The Fair Intellectual Club will be a 'funnier' version of the comedian's Fringe play of the same name, about a group of teenage girls in early 18th Century Edinburgh who formed a secret society for intelligent discourse, where they can aspire to the same educational opportunities as men.

Porter told Chortle that it will 'essentially be a kind of flatshare sitcom but making use of the fact that it's the dawn of the Enlightenment.

'So it will feature key figures from that period in their youth – David Hume is going to be Wee David Hume, an annoying brat the girls get to know. And Monsieur Voltaire will come over to Scotland to the first time'.

Porter conceived the adaptation as a one-off. But Radio 4 comedy boss Caroline Raphael ordered six half-hour episodes, which will be recorded before the end of this year.

'Caroline Raphael came to see the play, liked it and saw the comic potential in the three characters,’ Porter explains. 'They love a period sitcom on Radio 4 don't they? So that's what we've ended up doing'.

In the stage play, which begins a mini-tour of Scotland and the Women of the World Festival in London and Cambridge this month, Caroline Deyga plays Thalia - a gossipy beauty with an English mother, who is snobbish about the Scottish. Jess Hardwick is Clio, a serious-minded mathematician. And Samara MacLaren plays Poly, a poet, betrothed to an elderly man she does not love.

The sitcom is being made by Absolutely Productions, the company behind Radio 4's forthcoming advertising sitcom Reluctant Persuaders and the Absolutely sketch group reunion for Sketchorama.

Cecilia Cunningham, Beatrice Bateson and Marjory Drummond founded the real-life Fair Intellectual Club in 1717 as a weekly meeting where nine teenage girls gave themselves the names of the classical muses and risked their good names and marriage prospects discussing literature, science and moral philosophy.

Little evidence of the club survives, beyond publication of one of the members' poetry in the Edinburgh Miscellany and a pamphlet, featuring the group's rules and constitution. However, there are some who believe the pamphlet to be a hoax.

The Fair Intellectual Club is Porter's playwrighting debut. And she already has plans for her next production – a romantic comedy about sectarianism set in Glasgow and Northern Ireland. As she has previously discussed in her stand-up, her Catholic father served in the RUC.

'I have a germ of an idea, but we'll see if that comes to fruition by August' she says.

By Jay Richardson

Published: 9 Feb 2015