Geordie chatterbox Sarah Millican – the best comedienne on the circuit for our money – is coming to Bristol. Joe Spurgeon grabs a word.

Sarah Millican is having another good year. Having only tip-toed towards an open mic for the first time five years ago, the South Shields lass with the soft-toned, sing-song voice has risen rapidly into the comedy consciousness. She scooped the Edinburgh Festival’s Best Newcomer award in 2008 (previous winners: Harry Hill, The Mighty Boosh, Dara O’Briain, Michael McIntyre), leveraging her divorce for deliciously blue bon mots (masturbation, bad sex, gorilla fantasises), all cheerfully dispatched with a mischievous Geordie wink and an unthreateningly mumsy affectation. This year, her latest show, ‘Chatterbox’, is further distilled: Millican doing what she does best, the uncensored everywoman talking thirteen-to-the-dozen about whatever she wants, dissecting sex as readily as she’ll deconstruct doughnuts. Rightfully, in her last year of eligibility before going theatre-size, she got nominated for Edinburgh 2010’s top gong, Best Comedy Show. Her reward? A whopping 92-date, six-month tour up and down the country. And back again. Unsurprisingly, she’s taking a holiday first.

“I typed ‘log cabins with hot tubs’ – and it came back with Devon. So off I go. In fact, right now, I’m in the middle of drying me smalls – and they’re not as small as I’d like!… But yeah, Edinburgh takes it out of ya, it’s ridiculous, it’s just a festival, but I was with a couple of other comics on the last night and we’re all dead spotty and everyone looked so ill, like we’d been in a concentration camp for the last month.”

Softened by the nomination, presumably? “Yeah, it feels like it’s been a progression – like I’ve done me GCSEs, and now I’ve just passed me A-levels – in clown school!...I saw Russell Kane’s [winning] show, and it was far and away the best thing I’ve seen this year and probably one of the top three things I’ve seen ever. He is always consistently brilliant, but this show was just something else. If he hadn’t have won, there’d have been an uproar.”

It’s genuine admiration and, you suspect, part and parcel of Millican’s overpowering charm (heck, when she’s not calling us ‘love’, she even addresses Venue by our first name). Add to this butter-wouldn’t-melt delivery, sympathetic self-deprecation and those on-stage “comfortable clothes” (“Because I’ve got a flowery top on, I can get away with a lot”) and you’ve a perfect foil for her unexpectedly lewd gags, which, although occasionally short on breadth perhaps – shagging, cakes and wobbly weight worries are hardly unfamiliar – are plenty big on craft, arriving on waves of purple punchlines.

“I need one [punchline] every 20 seconds. I have a high gag-rate… I just want people to get their money’s worth – if you go and see something that’s interesting, great, but it’s not the Edinburgh ‘Interesting’ Festival, and you’re not in an ‘interesting’ club, it’s a comedy club, you need to be made to laugh.

“Micky Flanagan said to me you have to be bold in Edinburgh, and he’s absolutely right. You can’t go up and think ‘I’m just going to do a quiet hour and see how it goes’, you’ve got to go all guns blazing and face the fact that it might go horribly wrong, you might get bad reviews, and that’s why you have to work hard at it.”

Not that bad reviews are something Millican’s had to endure much. “That’s because I work my arse off, Joe! I’ve had six days off this year! [People’s reactions] aren’t always in your hands, the only thing that you can control is how good your show is – people might not like it, but even then, if you’ve done a piece of work that’s brilliant and is as good as it can be and people still don’t like it, it’s not nearly as bad as when people don’t like something you know could’ve been better. You hear these stories though – ‘oh, I just wrote it on the train on the way up’… I hope you didn’t because if you did I want to kill you! A four-star review for something you wrote on the train? I hope the train journey was at least six months long…”

Sarah’s next six months will be spent touring an enhanced ‘Chatterbox’ show, marrying the best bits from Edinburgh with some fresh-out-the-can material. All of it, though, will be pure observational stand-up. No flyer-friendly ‘themes’ here: “Themes have their place at Edinburgh. I decided to not have one, because what normally happens is that comics just crow-bar material into it. Either don’t have a theme, or have a theme and stick to it. I mostly got four stars this year, but I did get one three and a half, which said it would’ve been a four if I had had a theme. They wanted it tied up neatly at the end – it’s not bloody ‘Murder She Wrote’!

“But I’m really looking forward to it [the tour]… the thought of walking into a theatre and knowing they’re there for you… At Edinburgh people might go up to see Rhod Gilbert or Jimmy Carr and drop by you, but when it’s a tour, it’s a proper night out for people, maybe their only one that week, maybe that month the way the country is, and it feels so good when people laugh and you think, ‘Good. You’ve had a bloody good night out.’ I remember when I got divorced, I managed to get some last-minute tickets to see the wonderful Linda Smith. I was having a horrible time, moving back in with my family, crying every day, and for two whole hours I forgot all the shit that was going on. Nobody’s life can not be improved by an hour or two or proper belly laughing.”

In interviews and on stage, a line has been drawn under Millican’s divorce – the catalyst for her signing up to a Gateshead performance workshop in 2004 and the springboard for her bittersweet 2008 show, ‘Sarah Millican’s Not Nice’. She has a new boyfriend (who’ll lend himself to a gag or two on tour) and though much of the new material draws on the chronic mundanities of daily life, there’s still plenty to surprise the odd granny expecting a sweary-free Night at the Apollo. “I try to get a balance. I make sure I don’t just work. You talk to any comic and as soon as they start working too hard, the only funny stories they have are like: ‘hey, you know when you’re in a Travelodge for the third time in a week?’ and the audience go ‘no’; and ‘you know when you’re on the road all the time?’, ‘no’; and ‘you know when you’re at a gig?’, ‘er, no.’ Everyone should have a work/life balance anyway, it shouldn’t just be for material purposes – you have to a have a normal life for your own sake too!”

SARAH MILLICAN PLAYED THE TOBACCO FACTORY, BRISTOL ON FRI 3 AND SAT 4 OCT. HER ‘CHATTERBOX’ DVD WILL BE OUT LATE NEXT YEAR. FFI: WWW.SARAHMILLICAN.CO.UK
 

JUST DESSERTS

Go to Sarah’s website and there are puddings. Hundreds of them.

“I think fetish is a strong word… obsession? Reason to live? Whenever I eat a pudding, I take photos of them and pop them on my website. There was one that somebody made for me – it’s the one that looks like a gingerbread man – and she had iced boobs and a fanny on it and gave it to me in Leicester. Normally, I never eat things people give me – but I was driving home late at night and I was starving and I thought, well, if I’m going to die, I might as well die eating something that’s got iced boobs on it…

“The whole thing started when I used to work for this company producing audiobooks and I took a photo of a pudding from a do we had in the Dorchester, sort of our Oscars bash. I was desperately trying to be posh with Timothy West over there, and Liam Neeson over there, and me in me hired dress and Primark shoes and I was doing really well. At dinner, I wasn’t asking people what the food was, I was just eating it. Then they brought the pudding out. It was these sealed balls of different coloured, different flavoured sorbet with a chocolate paintbrush and a brandy snap palette and it was so beautiful and I just sighed: “oooooo” and the mask fell. Everyone knew I was common.”
 

Copyright Venue Publishing 2010

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