Francesca Martinez

Overview

Francesca Martinez will tell you she's wobbly. She started her career on the (only recently-cancelled) teen classic Grange Hill, has performed with QI favourite Jo Brand, and been on Extras and Spicks and Specks. She makes her living as a standup these days. She's coming to Sydney, running her only local gig out of Parramatta's monthly Laugh Garage at the Riverside Theatre. Wobbliness is her name for cerebal palsy — a kind of paralysis, which often causes spasms as well — which she pillories as much as anything else in her act. On Grange Hill, she was one of the first disabled actors to get a big, regular part on UK television.

Living with cerebral palsy is difficult, but stand-up is hard. She worked hard in the middle of the last decade, doing gigs to the point of exhaustion in 2004. Coming back from an enforced hiatus, she hopped straight back into the comedy circuit and onto the stage of the gargantuan Edinburgh Fringe. With a routine heavy with filth and swearing, it's a surprise the press focuses so much on her wobbliness instead of her talent. Balanced or otherwise, she's funny as.

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