It’s a nuanced Wonderful from poet Harry Baker in Worthing

And so Wonderful became the name of his third nationwide solo tour which brings him to Worthing Pavilion Atrium on July 9 and Brighton Komedia on July 24.

“I realised that in four or five of my more recent poems the word wonderful had kept coming up, and my first thought was that after my last show had been more reflective, coming out of the lockdowns and Covid and talking about my own personal mental health journey, this should be a show that was just a big fun show celebrating all the good things. But life has a way of derailing these things. The show is much more mixed and vulnerable, just as it always has been. But I wanted to keep the title because when you think about what makes life wonderful it is the fact of sharing things with each other and the people that we meet and the fact that we can share with them. This is about poems that are full of fun but it's also about the things that are raw and vulnerable. And because these are the experiences that give us a sense of being connected with each other, I've kept the joyful title even if the show has changed.

“There is a lot of hardship and darkness in the world and I had wanted to be the beam of joy that shone through it and there is value in that but I do think it feels more genuine to be more real and to talk about everything. In terms of the last show it was my mental health journey about being in lockdown and not being able to perform and that performing was so much who I am that when I couldn't be creative then I couldn't have that level of optimism and hope. It was about me giving myself permission not to be all sunshine and so I went into therapy which I found really helpful. I had got to the point where I needed to be heard and to be able to vocalise this stuff and to see it from another perspective. I just started seeing a counsellor and she was brilliant. She gave me a questionnaire to fill in before I started and she said that I gave the longest answers she had ever had! I had this desperate need for someone to understand what I was going through and I did find that I was understood and I learned that I'm not the only person who was thinking these things. To be vulnerable at first feels scary and it was quite a departure from who I had pictured myself to be but now I know it is better to share these things because it's just so much more real.

“For the first time ever I have been to more funerals than weddings in the last year. I have hit the age where everyone around me is either having babies or talking about having babies or definitely not having babies and found out first hand how complicated and painful that can be. And yet I am more fascinated and amazed by the world around me than ever before. From the transformational power of documenting moments of everyday joy to the undeniable raw energy of performing a garage song about Greta Thunberg, I am learning more than ever that life can indeed be incredibly hard sometimes, but that doesn’t make it any less incredible. If anything it is the darkness that helps us to appreciate the light, just as it is the puddles that help us to appreciate the wellies.”