Stand Up, Weather Girl!

If you were to question the relevance of feminist sexual expression in 21st century, then ‘Stand Up, Weather Girl’ by the multifaceted BBC weather reporter and comic Sam Fraser can provide you with an answer; it’s as controversial and as important a requisition now as it was in the past.

Before Fraser entered her spotlight in the dimly lit, compact theatre above The Temple bar, there was an almost instantaneous sense of intimacy established by the secured environment alone; the accompanied blaring sounds of Blondie and the Pet Shop Boys arousing anticipation and the audiences optimistic murmurs coating the small room. And when our host did arrive, an electric conjunction of alliance and charisma engulfed the entirety of her small audience: having enough glistening charm within the first five minutes of her introduction to evoke feelings of familiarity with even the most foreign of strangers.

She begins by humorously interrogating ethics of somatic conventionality, professing to her onlookers that her promotional image for the public event is unaltered. This would be the first of various courageous, yet casually articulated revelations during the one hour set with immense self-awareness on both her individually, and the institutions around her. With authentic agency, Fraser directs between working class adolescence and contemporary womanhood, personal and professional, successfully accentuating how they motion between one another as animated concepts. She opens discussions on the historical fetishisation of the weather girl, the voyeuristic nature of the media, the male gaze, coming of age enlightenment and pornography amongst other topics.

Her delightfully crude character full of obscene references to sex and female physicality is somewhat signature of her act in total honest exhibition; she possesses a dejection to the prohibitions primarily initiated by the taboos of misogynistic etiquette, emphasising dialogue on how comprehension and raw expression can work in tandem, rather than as separate or faulty traits. Fraser notes how femininity is expected to fit the patriarchal aesthetics of the past and the reigning digital age; through such, she triggers a tangent of socially conscious comedy intersecting women and sexuality, highly relatable to her receptive mixed gendered, mixed generation audience, to whom she rarely breaks contact; proving the more how substantial the atmospheric connection between performer and spectator is.

If her unfiltered, thought provoking satirical appeal were to teach chauvinists anything, it’s that weather women aren’t pseudo intelligent ‘bimbos’ whose currency is determined by the length of a skirt; rather, with profound inspiration, Sam Fraser broadcasts how she can be complex, funny, absurd and triumphant through her permission alone.