Anyone For Tennis: Pauline Eyre – Hoot 1 at Hoots @ The Apex

Pauline Eyre was a Wimbledon line judge for 20 years and has very experienced eye right on the ball.  Standing at the top of a flight of stairs dressed in her official Wimbledon uniform, she greeted her audience queuing below by stepping right into character, giving very clear, jokey, line judge-y instructions about where we should all sit courtside.  Yep, she got us match-ready before we even got through the door.

An impressive individual is Pauline – one of those people who looks as if she’s got all her ducks in order.  She took time to greet and help organize the audience (a full house), instructing that we should all budge up to leave empty seats at the end of the aisles for latecomers, and then leaping to the back of the room to play her own introduction music – the Wimbledon TV theme tune, of course.  C’mon now, let’s get the energy up, clap along, yes, that’s it, here we go!   No doubt about it, this was someone in authority speaking and we felt as if we were in very safe hands.  We weren’t wrong.

There was much to love about this performance but one of Pauline’s master strokes was to share the structure of the material she was about to serve (see?  Even I’ve now got the ‘tennis bug’ – grrrrr, how she hates this term as tennis is her lifelong best friend, her ever-present companion, sssssshhh, her obsession).  She set her performance up into one of four parts – a warm-up followed by three sets, and it turns out that this worked like a charm.  For instance, it gave Pauline the opportunity to focus on hitting the beats in each section, to pause and catch a breath, and even to do a bit of physical comedy in the breaks between play – in moments of quiet.  It’s amazing how much fun it turned out to be to watch a women ‘pushing sixty’ sit by a bottle of Robinson’s Barley Water taping up the handle of her racquet/microphone after wiping the sweat from her brow with a towel.  

By the final set, the audience were ‘all in’ and so was Pauline as by this time she’d stripped off her uniform to reveal her latest true self – a county tennis player who was dressed in her gear and ready to play the best tennis of her life.

There were laughs aplenty in this show, juicy locker room secrets, naughty line judge-y anarchy and some subtle but powerful words of motivation.  Pauline’s someone who’s lived a life the audience could relate to – three kids, all sorts of jobs, all sorts of dreams, still moving forward, and now playing her best game, after easing up on her own self-talk, realizing that she should be as kind to herself as she would instinctively be to a doubles partner.  Nice. 

You don’t have to be a tennis fan to enjoy watching Pauline Eyre’s standup comedy, but it does help.  You don’t have to be someone of a similar age to find her humour relatable, but it does help.  Fortunately, this reviewer is both and as a consequence, this show was just nothing but sheer retro if-she-can-still-do-it-then-hell-so-can-I motivational joy.

Reviewer: Susan Cohen

Reviewed: 24^th August 2025

North West End UK Rating: