11:54pm Wednesday 20th February 2008
Valentine's Day may have been and gone, but comic Lucy Porter still finds herself pondering: What exactly is this thing called love?
Her show, Lucy Porter's Love-In, enjoyed a critically acclaimed and sell-out residency at last year's Edinburgh Festival and now she's bringing it to Leeds.
A self-confessed love addict, Lucy is going cold turkey' just long enough to try and wrestle control of her life back from her misty-eyed impulses.
Jungian psychoanalyst Robert Johnson describes romantic love as "the single greatest energy system in the Western psyche", but, asks Lucy, is the quest to find the one' really the greatest goal we can aspire to?
Is romantic love more important than family love, platonic love or religious love? The ancient Greeks had many words for different types of love, but then, says Lucy, the ancient Greeks also invented central heating and the hula hoop, so they clearly had plenty of time on their hands.
The diminutive comic starred in six-part BBC Radio 2 series The Powder Room. She also crops up on Parsons and Naylor's Pull Out Sections and the Radcliffe and Maconie show on Radio 2.