The idea of two women getting their tops off for laughs is definitely a test for UK audiences. Viv Hardwick talks to Emma Powell and Bev Killick.

FACED with the prospect of appearing halfnaked professionally on stage, I suspect most women would be dashing off to see a personal trainer and definitely going on a crash diet. Not Australians Emma Powell and Bev Killick who play bare-breasted Busting Out! strictly for laughs... love handles, middle-aged spread and gravity-stricken boobs and all.

“This whole show is about growing old... although we’re not old, but we’re letting nature take its course. I know what the pressures are but this isn’t about looking beautiful it’s more about being natural and looking like ourselves and having the audience identify with us,” explains stand-up comedian Killick, who is looking forward to visiting Consett, York and Whitley Bay over the next week.

“I’ve had enough of a lifetime with boobs to be able to do this.

So the jokes about tit tape and how you put on a bra are the result of letting it all hang out. I never ever thought twice about doing the show when I was offered the chance. I tried to find some embarrassment and it just did not exist,” she adds, even though the biggest nightmare most of us Brits suffer is the thought of losing our clothes in public.

Killick feels that women from down-under have an advantage over those in the UK because they don’t mind talking about their bodies. She’s aware that the first half of the show often shocks on-lookers… “but it’s shock with no horror and tinged with the belief that we’re not really going to take our tops off,” she says.

Creator of the show – which began in 2005 as D-Cuppetry – Emma Powell and Killick did seek medical advice to ensure that some of the antics they get up to aren’t causing any damage, apart from the odd bruise. Powell’s decision to replace tit tape with gaffer tape in one of the funniest and most eye-watering parts of the show must surely hurt?

“I’ve been doing this for years and I was actually told about gaffer tape being used by a woman with a backless dress in Mamma Mia who said ‘no, no, no don’t wear the things you get from the bra shop, just use gaffer tape’,” she says.

Powell started out in touring shows and has done everything from Les Miserables and Mamma Mia to creating her own musical called Dumped as well as Busting Out! She laughs uproariously after getting advice from one woman who said “you’ve got a wonderful voice, you really should do something with that one day”.

The performer is keener on doing her own work than constantly appearing as a character role elsewhere “because it means I can do what I want and I always wanted to do a cabaret that talked about boobs”.

That’s quite a turnaround for a woman who admits she’s never dared go topless on a beach before writing Busting Out!

“I was in the shower one day and I heard this clapping sound as though my left breast was giving me a round of applause.

That started an idea about boobs and I wondered ‘what if I could do more and, if so, could we get away with it?’ and we did,” Powell says.

She also feels that becoming a mum makes you view breasts differently and with less reverence.

“This is a celebration and not sexual in any way shape or form. It’s intended as comedy,”

says Powell who is an E and Killick a DD.

“But every bra manufacturer seems to be different and the size I am is what they tell me I am,” she jokes.

I feel I know the two women quite well already, having witnessed the act at Darlington Civic Theatre, and breathed a definite sigh of relief when 43- year-old Killick decided not to “invite” me up on stage to try on a bra out of the very small male contingent in the audience.

“We managed with the volunteer we got, and we’ve had a lot worse,” she laughs.

As a mere male, I feel outside the appeal of “the sisterhood”

which Powell and Killick tune into early in their act and immediately seem to win over an element of the audience.

“You are in the Sisterhood now,” laughs Killick and admits that at Darlington, for the first time in four years, she nearly whipped her top off too early, before she and Powell had got the audience used to laughing about the subject.

“That’s never happened before and it nearly developed into a wrestling match between me and Emma and I’m still not sure what went wrong. It definitely wasn’t rehearsed,”

Killick jests.

■ Busting Out!, tomorrow, Empire Theatre, Consett, 01207-218-171 leisureworksonline.co.uk Monday, York Grand Opera House, 01904-678-700 grandoperahouseyork.org.uk Next Thursday, Whitley Bay Playhouse, 0844-277-2771 playhousewhitleybay.co.uk