AS comedienne Fiona O’Loughlin enters her ninth one-woman show, to be performed next week at UC’s The Chuckle Hut, there’s one thing that panicks her; her audience is getting younger.

“It’s gotten younger, by about 40 per cent,” she says. “I asked my son ‘why are so many of you [generation y] coming to my shows?’

“And he said ‘ because you’re the lady version of Homer Simpson’.”

And although many may be offended by that comment, Fiona “loves it”. Best known as a comedic mother-of-five from Alice Springs, Fiona made a recent appearance on the small screen as the first “apprentice” to be fired in the “Celebrity Apprentice”, starring alongside David Hasselhoff, Tania Zaetta and eventual winner Ian “Dicko” Dickson.

The show was also where rumours started that her recent move to Melbourne from central Australia was a result of a marriage split; however, she says it’s not so.

“He doesn’t want to leave Alice Springs and I don’t want to live there,” she says. “We’re not at war – life’s just complicated.”

Fiona’s career hasn’t been one without controversy, the recovering alcoholic copped a flogging for saying Bindi Irwin was “a little bit creepy” during an episode of “Spicks and Specks” in 2010. Only a year before, she collapsed on stage during a show in Brisbane which she refers to as the “Brisbane Fiasco”.

But what came from those experiences was her memoir “Me of the Never Never” and her show “On a Wing and a Prayer”, the “heaviest” show Fiona says she has done and probably the funniest.

“What am I going to do next? I’ve really lightened it up,” she says, as she reflects on turning 49 this July.

“I am very inspired by older women, edgy older women.”

Among the “edgy older women” includes comediennes Whoopie Goldberg, Joan Rivers, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders.

“I feel so blessed being in this career,” she says. “I have so many friends who are turning 50 and they say you become invisible.

“I’ll be damned if I become invisible.”

In her show at The Chuckle Hut, she’s currently preparing a “hybrid” of her past work, with she says she’ll be “telling a story” about her time in Canberra – a city she says she loves to visit.

“I always remember the very first time I came to Canberra,” she says as she describes the first time she left her home town of  Warooka, on the Yorke Peninsula in SA.

“When we were kids, my family drove from ‘windy  Warooka’ to Canberra because dad’s sister was recieving an Order of Australia medal. It’s a wonderful memory.”

Fiona O’Loughlin, The Chuckle Hut, Zierholz @ UC, University of Canberra, with Cam Knight and Ben Darsow on Friday, June 15. Bookings to uclive.com.au and moshtix.com.au