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Culture Watch: Looking For Me Friend

Paulus the Cabaret Geek returns to the stage with his celebration of The Music of Victoria Wood.

Gaydar

03 Aug 2025 — 5 min read

Returning to the stage for a UK tour, Looking For Me Friend: The Music of Victoria Wood is a nostalgic musical comedy presented by Paulus the Cabaret Geek.

Looking For Me Friend invites devoted fans to relive Wood’s comedic and musical work which Paulus intertwines with his own childhood memories.

In the show, Paulus is accompanied on piano by Michael Roulston.

Paulus on How To Date Men

For our podcast, How To Date Men, we caught up with Paulus for a behind-the-scenes look at the show.

In the conversation, we talk favourite characters, growing up in the 80s, and our need for nostalgia.

Listen to the episode

This is the fifth year that you've been touring Looking For Me Friend. You've said that this is the final tour. Why is this the right time to bring the show to a close?

The 10th anniversary of Victoria's passing will be in April next year. So yeah, we're going to be on the road from September this year up until April, just a few days really after that anniversary. I think probably six years is long enough to do anything for, but it'll go in a box. I'm not setting light to it.

Do you need to be a big fan of Victoria Wood's work to enjoy this show?

I thought you did, at the beginning. But no, apparently not. I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that there is a core demographic of audience for my show - that is women of 45 and older and gay men of around 50 and older. But when you get to meet 23 and 24-year-olds after the show who say, I found a TikTok trend a few years ago, and then we saw your trailer, and now I'm going home to watch everything I can about this woman to find out everything about her. That's really, really special. And people coming along with their kids as well - like 10 or 12-year-old kids and they're beaming their faces off - and I'm thinking, you can't have understood a single word I just said, because you won't know who Thatcher was or what the Poll Tax was or anything, But they're still beaming away like I was when I first saw her when I was 10.

What do you feel that Victoria Wood's cultural relevance is today?

I ask on stage in this show, what would she make of the state of things right now? What haven't we heard Victoria's take on? And there's loads of things, a decade on like air fryers or K-pop or Cardi B, it doesn't matter. There's so many things and this is a very nostalgic piece. We haven't changed the words of a single song.

We are in the world of the sort of 80s slash 90s, we are almost entirely Thatcher-led in that era. And for myself and Michael, my piano player - both gay guys growing up in the south of England during that time - this work is really, really key to who we ended up being friends with to whom we wanted to hang out with and whether or not you ended up in bed with them.

It's the same for us all - we feel like that about finding our friends, finding our tribe, people that speak to us.

I think this is about the legacy that she's left behind. And the legacy she's left behind, other than the body of work, of course, is the community that still on a daily basis are supporting one another and loving one another and telling stupid jokes to one another to get through whatever madness the world might be asking us to cope with today.

Throughout the show, you're weaving your personal story. How has performing the show shaped or evolved your perspective on your early years?

I have my own keen awareness of what she meant to me as a teenage boy who was a little bit lost and a little bit other. And if we hark back to seeing Victoria on television in the mid 80s, she would have been wearing a man's shirt, man's tie, man's jacket, trousers. You would never see her in a skirt or a dress unless she was playing a character. And she's got spiky hair, which I had at the time I was watching her.

And you would say now if somebody came on television like that, that she was queer or androgynous or making some sort of comment. Whether she was or not, that wasn't overt and it wasn't ever unpacked. And I suppose what I've learned doing this show is that we all feel other sometimes. We all feel left out. We all feel sidelined. And I think that's who Victoria spoke to.

Do you have a favourite sketch or character created by Victoria?

I am spending quite a lot of time at the moment with Kitty, Patricia Routledge's Kitty. And there's a bunch really of these sort of clean front-step, whispering over the fence sort of well-to-do but very gossipy women. I'm very tuned in the moment to those characters - they are often blunt, bitingly, scathingly honest, but there is warmth.

You are going to put this show on pause at the end of this tour - what next for Paulus?

One of the reasons I'm focusing on Kitty and Marjorie and Joan and everyone is because there's a sequel. We have begun work on the long joked about sequel to Looking For Me Friend.

What do hope that people feel when they come to see Looking For Me Friend?

I think that all of us are craving a little bit of nostalgia right now and being able to do whatever we can to just step out of real life and go, all right, well, we'll cope with that again tomorrow. And I think we are unashamedly celebrating what has gone before and some things that we miss.