Why camp comedy really suits Al Porter

Though only 22, the suave Tallaght man is already making an impact, writes Richard Fitzpatrick.

AL PORTER was born to entertain. All he needs are lights. “Open the fridge and I’ll do 20 minutes,” he says. Heralded as the new ‘king of camp’, Porter, although still only 22, has been a comic lead at the Olympia Theatre’s annual pantomime for a decade. He’s also done hit musicals,and is familiar from such TV shows as Republic of Telly and The Savage Eye.

“I come from a long line of soldiers in my family,” he says. “My father was a flight sergeant in the air corps. I wasn’t a particularly sporty child. We didn’t really know what to do with me.

“I was very loud. My parents decided they would send me to a drama class, at four years of age, to try and calm me down at the weekends, that it might tire me out for the rest of the week, but, if anything, it made the problem much worse.”

As he got more into it, his parents were forking out for him to do drama classes, musical theatre, dance, speech and drama. “By the time I was six, I was going to auditions, doing little parts in short films. One of my most fabulous acting performances — because I’ve never been a particularly good actor — is still doing the rounds in primary schools, which is a crisis-pregnancy video. As a young teenager, in the plot, I’m worried about whether I’ve gotten a girl pregnant. As you can tell, that would require a lot of acting on my part. It wasn’t very good casting.”

Porter is a throwback. He talks about “notices” rather than reviews of his gigs. He speaks about “engagements” in his diary, not bookings or gigs. So, too, his dress code; he doesn’t have the slacker look favoured by his peers on the stand-up circuit. He togs out in a suit and a tie, like something from the 1950s. He says half-jokingly that he gets mistaken on flights for an air steward.

Porter has only branched out to live stand-up in the last couple of years, but he’s built up enough of a following to command slots at the sizeable Vicar St venue in Dublin.

He went to university for a short spell after school, reading English and philosophy at Trinity College, but academic life wasn’t for him, not to mention the culture shock for a boy from Tallaght mixing it with the gilded youth on campus at Trinity. “A lot of the people I went to Trinity with had a lot more discretionary income than I had,” he says. “For whatever reasons, I was part of the lower social bracket, the squeezed middle who didn’t get a grant. I was struggling to get the books, and what have you.

“I didn’t get to go out with the other students as much. There was a bit of a divide. I would get questions off people that you weren’t expecting like, ‘Have you ever been stabbed?’. That’s not good opening conversation, when you’re trying to make new friends. Or: ‘Where are you from?’ ‘Tallaght.’ ‘Oh, isn’t it brilliant that you lost the accent.’ ‘No, not really — I don’t really regard it as a good thing’.

“I did fall in with two friends, and they later brought in a third girl; I now call them ‘the witches of Eastwick’. We used to go to nightclubs and these house parties. You know what house parties are like in your first year of college, and people are getting up to all sorts of things. I hated it. It made me very nervous. So I decided to skip that period of my life and just become an adult. I couldn’t wait to be a fully grown man in the real world, so I just quit college, cut my hair, stopped wearing baggy T-shirts, got into suits and ties,” he says.

• Al Porter is Yours is on March 6, and , March 21 at Vicar St, Dublin.