What Judith did next...

For more than 30 years Judith Lucy has been making us laugh by candidly relating her stories of life’s disappointments, failures and hard-won triumphs. But, as Tiffany Dunk finds, there is a sensitive side to the ballsy comic as she embarks on a brand new journey.

- Judith Lucy

A lab? A wet market? Denise Scott has an alternative theory as to how the COVID-19 pandemic originated. According to the seasoned comedian, Studio 10 roving correspondent and one-time Dancing With The Stars contestant, she believes there is an unlikely person yet to be investigated for their role in the global crisis – her friend and frequent collaborator Judith Lucy. The timing of Judith’s new ABC podcast Overwhelmed and Dying is suspicious, Denise muses, arriving just as we’re all pondering what is truly important in life and hyper-conscious of our eventual, inevitable demise. “I’m not saying she brought the pandemic on to help her podcast but… you know, she is a bit of a marketing guru,” Denise chuckles. “The timing is quite phenomenal. Then again, Judith Lucy’s timing is always impeccable.”

Overwhelmed and Dying was conceived at a time when Judith was not only struggling with the state of the world, but also attempting to work through three huge life events – the death of her beloved brother, Niall, the onset of early menopause and a spectacularly failed relationship – that had left her wondering, “What is the point of it all?”

“I was realising,” she says now of her lightbulb moment, “that my life was screwed and so was the world. It was this very weird combination of being possessed by a sense of urgency and wanting to go and do something about both of those things, and then feeling completely paralysed at the same time.” So she enlisted a multitude of experts and dived into a vast range of experiences to find answers to the big questions that she – and, she discovered, many eager listeners – were seeking enlightenment on.