Sarah Millican--The Queen of Comedy

by Tina Campanella

  Once the audience had finally stopped laughing, she went on to tell them about how being one of her childhood pets could at times be a little bit dangerous. ‘I always loved them a little bit too much,’ she said menacingly. ‘There’s a name for people like me – it’s hamster squeezer.’

  ‘I love them so much,’ she said, wrinkling her face up. ‘Have you ever stroked a dog so much you can see the whites of its eyes? And then when you stroke along its back, its little back legs buckle under the pressure? I do worry about my boyfriend… Because I love him so much…’

  Along the same lines, she has also admitted to quite a peculiar fetish – gorilla fancying. In an interview with Brighton magazine L7, she said: ‘I did see a gorilla at Chester Zoo that I quite fancied. I like a hairy man! It just gave me a look and I thought: “It’s been a long time since anybody’s looked at me like that.” I went back recently and it was still there. Not married yet. No ring on its finger!’

  It wasn’t the only time she has talked about her passion for gorillas – or hairy men either, for that matter. Her love for the jungle beasts pops up from time to time in her current stand-up routines even now.

  I’ve already mentioned that when Sarah was freshly divorced, one of her colleagues regularly sent her funny animal pics to make her laugh. Fast-forward seven years and nothing has changed – she still loves to ogle cute creatures in clothes. The only difference is that now she receives the pics from her fans, and she has her own website to display them all on.

  The best photos in her collection come from the author Neil Gaiman, who has a friend who works in a zoo. ‘Occasionally he’ll stick a hat on an animal that he shouldn’t and take a quick photo and send it to me,’ she says. So what’s the most exotically dressed animal she has on film? The answer is a rhino in a panama hat. Amazing.

  When she was in Australia in 2009, she described her favourite day out as being a trip to the aquarium, where she met a Pomeranian dog. ‘We saw pot-bellied sea horses,’ she wrote on her myspace blog. ‘The blurb said the males have bellies to attract the women. What a lovely world to live in. We also saw divers feed massive stingrays and elbowed some kids out of the way too. We paid more than they did.

  ‘Then we bought giant burgers and ate them by the sea. A woman came along with a tiny fluffy dog, which we played with for 45 minutes. Every time a woman walked past or sat down, she was immediately captivated by the little dog and oohed and aaahed along with us. It made me think, if only wars were instigated by women… Peace would easily be restored by a six-week-old Pomeranian with a chew toy.’

  So when the opportunity came up to join the cast of a brand new animal-based comedy show, it’s easy to see why Sarah was happy to say yes.

  Walk on the Wild Side has been described as a reinvention of Johnny Morris’s classic show Animal Magic – but it’s a lot cheekier, and therefore a lot funnier. Combining the beauty of raw natural history footage with the talents of some of Britain’s best entertainers, the innovative show was set to be an instant hit.

  Essentially a comedy sketch show, it dubbed comedy voiceovers to classic footage of some of our favourite furry and scaly friends. If you’ve ever trawled YouTube looking for talking animals (come on, admit it) this would definitely be the programme for you. A world of penguins with the X Factor and meerkats auditioning for The Apprentice, the show was written by comics Jason Manford, Isy Suttie, Jon Richardson, Steve Edge and Gavin Webster, while the filming was provided by the BBC’s Natural History Unit.

  It gave a humorous voice to all manner of members of the animal kingdom, and imaginatively conjured up the banality of their day-to-day lives. Highlights included a group of acapella sharks entertaining submarine pilots, a teenage polar bear losing her phone and a cockney fruit-selling peacock.

  ‘I just do my accent in everything,’ she laughed in a special behind the scenes feature. ‘There are some other members of the cast who are amazing and do loads of different accents, and I’ve got, er, this voice, and I’ve got a quite good Joanna Lumley voice. It doesn’t even sound like her, it’s just posh. And I can do the noise of a horn honking. That’s my repertoire. So when I go in and they say, “You’re gonna be a Geordie pigeon”, that’s what I am. I can’t do many accents…’

  Despite her (arguably) limited skills, Sarah played a variety of characters. In one episode she played a trapped starfish, being rescued by the CRCRs – the coral reef crustacean rescue. In another she played a bored and yawning hippo – ‘Ooh, sorry, I am listening, tell me more about your kids?’

  Amongst others, she’s been a timid owl, frightened of her scary new neighbour, and one half of a British bird couple on holiday in Spain – complaining about everything, including the Germans and their towels. Sarah enjoyed the experience, which involved working in a London sound studio with the other comedians and was a welcome dose of good fun.

  She was half way through her Typical Woman show in Edinburgh when Walk on the Wild Side began to air on BBC One. So along with the rave reviews she was getting at the Fringe, Sarah could claim a host of extra plaudits for her work on the animal show.

  ‘It shouldn’t work but it does,’ wrote the Radio Times. ‘You take natural history films, put silly voices over the animals and edit it into sketches. With input from the likes of Jason Manford, the result is the kind of thoroughly, joyously daft comedy that is custom-made for adults and children to enjoy together, TV Burp style, on a Saturday evening.’

  ‘Critics may claim it’s another example of lowest-common-denominator humour, in the manner of ITV1’s Animals Do the Funniest Things, yet it’s hard not to smile at the sight of a weight-obsessed panda and a hip hop-loving badger,’ said The Daily Telegraph.

  But all that animal madness didn’t begin to quench her desire for a pet of her own. Appearing on Room 101 with Frank Skinner three years later, she tried to send ‘cats who ignore me’ into the infamous room of no return. ‘I’d really like to have a pet but I don’t have that sort of lifestyle so I can’t have an animal, so I have to rely on other people’s animals,’ she said. ‘Stroking strangers’ cats, that sort of thing. I’ll be driving along and if I see a bonnie looking cat I will pull in and go and try and find the cat. But they can be little buggers in that they just hide or they ignore me or they go right underneath a car. Not my car, it wouldn’t be so bad if they did that. I’d get a hatch fitted so I could just drag them straight in. But they hide right in the centre where your arm can’t reach. You go all the way round and your arm can’t reach.’

  Six months after Room 101, Sarah finally got herself a pet of her own – and no, Gary didn’t have to break up with her first! Her new housemate was an adorable small ginger kitten. Sarah named him Chief Brody after the character in Jaws, and began posting his exploits on Twitter and her own webpage almost instantly.

  ‘I used to spend a lot of time looking at cat videos on the Internet,’ she told Female First, soon after welcoming the Chief to his new home. ‘It’s like YouTube have sent me an email asking if I’m alright because I haven’t been on in ages. I just love him so much and I put one picture up and it got re-tweeted about 500 times and I was there saying “Oh my God, loads of my followers love cats too!”’

  Chief Brody has fast become famous in his own right, and now has his own Twitter hashtag. Sarah even gets complaints if the flow of Brody pics ever stops.

  Sarah is not alone in her public display of love for her cat. Presenter Dawn Porter has a beautiful Siamese cat called Lilu, who goes everywhere with her – even on international flights. Fearne Cotton regularly posts videos of her cats Keloy and Tallulah on her official website and Twitter feed – including one where she does an amusing Discovery Channel impression to try and hunt them down.

  Ricky Gervais was given his cat, Ollie, by best pal Jonathan Ross, and openly admits to absolutely adoring him. (The cat, not Jonathan. Well, maybe Jonathan too…) Ollie gets a lot of camera time and is always posing for pics, which Gervais shares with his fans. But heartthrob T
om Fletcher from the band McFly definitely claims the title of top celeb feline enthusiast – he has three cats, Marvin, Leia and Aurora and has even written a song about them: The Sleepy Cats Song.

  I wonder if Sarah can sing…

  CHAPTER 14

  Your Favourite Aunty

  ‘I would like help with my style but nobody seems willing to take me on…’

  When Sarah returned home from her second Fringe run, she immediately fell into what had by now become her yearly routine. She took some time off to rest, and then began to work on her material for the following year’s festival.

  But in December she was invited to perform on BBC One’s Live at the Apollo with Jack Dee. Filmed at the enormous Hammersmith Apollo, in west London, the stand-up extravaganza is famous for showcasing a wide variety of new comedy talent.

  Sarah had already shown she could command a large audience when she had joined Michael McIntyre earlier in the year for his Comedy Roadshow. And although she has admitted she struggled with nerves in her early days – ‘I used to be so nervous I couldn’t eat for four or five hours before a gig’ – there was no trace of nerves when she walked on stage at the Apollo, wearing a pretty dress and boots.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, smiling confidently. ‘How exciting is this?’ She was obviously excited herself, and it soon proved infectious for the audience.

  But showing off a shorter haircut than ever before, Sarah was clearly undergoing something of an image transformation. Gone were the girl-next-door flowing locks and baggy jeans that had marked her early years on the circuit.

  Back then she had performed solely at small venues, where she relied on a certain level of intimacy with the audience to make her show work. Part of that intimacy came from her non-threatening appearance, and in fact, it was well thought out. ‘One reason I would never want to be attractive on stage, is that women have a tendency to judge you a bit more than men,’ she has said. ‘I wear dresses over jeans because I want to look feminine but not too girly and certainly not too vulnerable. I’m all about the empowerment of women, but you’ve got to be really careful in comedy. You can’t just shove the word feminism out there, because then everybody goes “oh no, she’s going to burn her bra!”’

  Her down-to-earth look had certainly made her style of comedy even more shocking. She had frequently been described as one of the bluest female comics around, and delighted in the accolade. ‘People don’t expect it because I’m not coming out in a basque and a whip, I’m coming out in a flowery dress – not that it was ever my intention to go “I’ll dress in a flowery dress, they won’t expect me to talk about rape!”’

  Whether intentional or not, her ‘look’ has worked well for her. But now that she was appearing more and more on larger stages and on television, she began to make subtle changes to her clothes and hair. It was a natural development, which had begun in Australia, where she had walked the red carpet and attended her first wave of star-studded events.

  As much as she would never change herself to fit in with anyone’s preconceptions of a ‘typical woman’, she must have wanted to appear stronger and more polished to reflect her blossoming position as a headlining act. And although comedians have never been judged on their looks, whether subconsciously or not, she began dressing the part. Over the next six months she would go from brown hair to striking blonde, resulting in a much bolder look. Her clothes would get brighter in colour, replacing the simple black tops she usually wore for her television appearances.

  Sarah now says that she sees herself as a kind of role model for women overlooked because they’re not super-skinny, glamorous or young. ‘There is something liberating and defiant about going on stage and saying you are 36 and 13 stone,’ she said in a 2012 Radio Times interview. ‘I feel like it’s my responsibility not to lose weight, to be honest. I’m a bright, successful woman who isn’t stick thin. It’s like the old films that say marriage and babies are the happy ending. A lot of people think that being skinny is the happy ending, and it’s not. Being happy is the happy ending.’

  In one of her 2010 shows she recounted a story she had recently read in the news about a celebrity who had ‘ballooned’ to a size 12. ‘Ballooned? I’d give my right arm to be a size 12. In fact, my right arm might be a size 12!’

  It’s a way of asserting her ‘one-of-us’ credentials. Complaining about her weight and her appetite, as she so often does on stage, makes her reassuringly normal to her audience – and proud of it.

  ‘I’m just me,’ she told Dominic Cavendish for The Independent in 2010. ‘A polished version of me, of course, I have to make sure to write jokes, I’m not an idiot. What people identify with is that I’m a bit like your sister, or your mam, or your auntie. I’m just normal. I fly so many flags. I fly a flag for women. For the working class. For those who didn’t go to university. For the north east and the north in general. And for women of a certain age. If one person starts to follow their dream at 29 because they’ve seen it’s possible, then that’s ace.’

  It’s a lot of pressure to put on herself. It’s almost as if she feels that if she stops being that person – if she follows the standard celebrity route of weight loss, stylist and wardrobe overhaul – she’ll be letting people down.

  She wouldn’t be able to crack the self-deprecating true-life jokes we all relate to – about the time she had to be cut out of a dress in Monsoon for example, or when the supermarket self-checkout tried to weigh her stomach when it was resting on the scales. ‘My muffin top is now a muffin shelf,’ she has famously quipped.

  She has definitely moved on in confidence since she bemoaned her weight in her Australian diary in 2009.When Veronica Lee interviewed her for the Arts Desk in 2011, she wrote: ‘When she mentions in passing she’s a size 16 she makes it clear she’s happy about it.’

  But Sarah still feels odd about becoming something of a sex symbol for men. ‘I get people saying I’m “weirdly sexy”,’ she told TV Magazine in 2011. ‘Or: “You’re my secret crush.” Why secret? Though it’s nice when blokes fancy me – it means they actually fancy a normal looking woman. I look a similar shape to somebody you’d bump into in Asda. Other women off the telly look hungry and cold – whereas I am full and warm.’

  Yet again, Sarah wasn’t doing herself justice. Because when Janice Turner interviewed her in 2012, she commented: ‘Off-stage in jeans, boots and beanie hat, Millican looks younger and trendier.’

  But despite now being happy with her weight, it’s clear she still feels somewhat insecure about her image – perhaps reinforcing further that fact that she is, after all, a typical woman. Wearing a bright red patterned dress, she appeared on The Jonathan Ross Show in 2012, along with fellow guest and celebrity stylist Gok Wan. When she walked on stage she was wolf-whistled and gave a little giggle. But when Ross jokingly asked her if she would like some style tips from Gok Wan, she suddenly turned shy. ‘I would like some help with my style but nobody seems willing to take me on,’ she told him.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Jonathan said, obviously surprised. ‘That’s a nice outfit, I like that with the leggings under the top, it’s nice.’

  What Sarah said next was very revealing. ‘I describe it as funky nana, because if you saw a nana dressed like this you’d think oh, she looks pretty good. But maybe on a 36-year-old it’s not so good.’

  Jonathan laughed and instantly lightened the conversation. ‘That’s perfectly good, that’s given me an idea – you should bring out a clothing line called Funky Nana!’

  ‘Do you think?’ she smiled. ‘Just loadsa cardies and slippers and nothing in-between, just let the air get round.’

  It seemed that even when her career was going so well, she still saw herself as a work in progress. ‘I think I need to upgrade a little bit, like I don’t go to designer shops and things like that,’ she told Ross. ‘Instead of going, like maybe in the past I would have gone into Dorothy Perkins and bought one top, now maybe I might buy two and some earrings to match.’

&
nbsp; Sarah also admitted she still felt intimidated by what she called ‘posh shops’. But she has still made a conscious effort to work on her style, however uncomfortable it made her.

  And the first sign that this transformation was taking place was on stage in 2009 at The Hammersmith Apollo. She looked pretty and youthful, yet still ultimately approachable. She made the audience laugh with tales of her parents’ helpful approach to flat hunting, and how she prefers living alone to sharing with a boyfriend – ‘The sex is better – I don’t bother with foreplay.’

  She mused on why she could never find any Valentine cards to reflect her relationship status. ‘Even though I’m in a relationship I think of myself as independent… They’re all one extreme or the other – they’re either sex buddy or soulmate, there’s no in-between. Where are the cards for the practical woman in love? Something that says, ‘I love you, we’re having a great time, but if we split up, I’ll probably be okay.’

  And she made everyone feel a little bit uncomfortable with a story about sharing self-portraits of her lady bits with a friend…

  For the next half an hour she had the audience in the palm of her hand. She returned to Manchester happy with how the night had gone.

  Christmas was approaching, and soon after, a brand new year would start – bringing with it more opportunities for awards and accolades. So instead of cosying up with her favourite hot water bottle and slippers over the festive break, she knuckled down to her writing. Because as well as writing her new stand-up show, she was working hard on another project…

  CHAPTER 15

  Sarah Millican’s Support Group