Don't be surprised if you need a marriage guidance counsellor after seeing Sarah Millican. She tells Chitra Ramaswamy how a painful divorce uncovered the sharpest of funny bones.
SARAH MILLICAN has been described as "a young Thora Hird", likened to Victoria Wood, and there is a trace of Mrs Merton in there too. The 33-year-old northerner looks very sweet, very unassuming, homely even. But beneath that pretty floral shirt beat
s a heart darker than Newcastle Brown Ale.
The name of Millican's debut stand-up show at the Fringe warns us that she is not nice. I can confirm this to be absolutely true, having spent a delightful afternoon (in a wicked way, of course) with Millican in her native Newcastle.
"A woman came to see me at a gig and said she dumped her boyfriend after seeing my show," she says in a thick Geordie accent, looking pleased with herself. "Part of me thought, 'Well if he was a shit, good.' But what if he was nice? Or The One? Then I'd have to say, 'Look at what you've done! You're going to be lonely for the rest of your life.'"
Millican giggles mischievously. "If I can release one woman into the wild every show then I've done a good job."
Millican's show, you see, is about her divorce and all the questions she asked herself in the tear-filled aftermath when, at the age of 30, she had to move back in with her parents. "Do I want kids? Will anyone find me attractive again? Do I believe in The One? And if so, am I done now?" She asks her audience questions, too. "Generally, people under 25 say they believe in forever and I think, bless… you think you're in love but it's not going to last." And does she tell them that? "Yeah, I have to," she says. "It's my duty to share my wealth of sorrow with young women."
This is Millican's first one-hour show and she is super-confident about it. "I think I'm ready and I've got a solid 55 minutes of jokes I like to tell," she says. "You have to start off with what you think is funny and I think my show is funny."
She did, after all, win Best Breakthrough Act at the 2006 North West Comedy Awards, an Amused Moose, and has been a runner-up for plenty of newcomer awards. And in company, Millican is indeed very funny, in a dry, dark but still somehow uplifting way. In fact, naughtiness aside, she is actually very nice.
We meet in Newcastle's Live Theatre, where she previewed her show and where she used to hang out after her divorce, writing plays and attending workshops. She had written for many years, but it was someone at this theatre who finally broke it to Millican that she was craving stand-up. At that point she had never even been to a comedy club. "I wanted to do something that basically I hadn't seen," she laughs. "The first gig I went to, I was on the bill."
For the initial half of a five-minute set, all was stoney silence. Then she told a joke about her dad. "It got a massive laugh," she recalls. "It's still in the show. My dad is the sweetest man alive but he is quite tactless. After I moved back in with them I was crying in a heap on the floor. He said, 'Oh you're bound to be upset. You've lost everything.' Then he paused and added, 'You've got nothing left.'" Everything that she says in her routine is true, she adds.
Millican stresses that it isn't all tears and bitterness. In fact, the show's central message is positive: she never would have started in comedy if she hadn't got divorced. The break-up spurred her on from working at a Job Centre and in the civil service ("like a big jar of jam – you fall into it and can't get back out") to stand-up.
"I'd still be on the sofa watching seven hours of telly and wondering why I was going nowhere in a job I hated," she says. "I actually used to try and get knocked over on the way to work. But something happens when all the plans that you've got with another person go. It's terrifying but also liberating because you can do whatever you want. It's a partnership and you don't want to be a cow. Mind you, I tried to be nice and that didn't work either. Maybe I should have turned into a bitch."
The split from her husband of seven years came as a shock. "He'd given up smoking and I thought he was just being a bit tetchy," she says. I sense a painful punchline might be coming. "But who knew he just didn't want me any more? Loads of people ask how many of our seven years were happy, and I always say seven… until the day he told me we weren't." But she has channelled much of her agonising into the show, is now in a relationship with a fellow comedian, and says the only thing missing in her life is a cat. But if she got one she might "explode with happiness".
What does her ex-husband make of her career change, and the fact that he features in it? "I haven't seen him for years," she admits. "But I did see him once outside Tesco's. I asked him, 'Is there anything you'd rather I didn't talk about?' He said, 'If it's funny, use it.'" She doesn't worry about him coming to her gigs because he has promised not to. "If he did, I'd just point him out. It would be quite nice to go, 'You know that man I'm talking about? There he is! Watch him run!'"
She doesn't find being a funny woman in a male environment hard to deal with and takes a very no-nonsense approach to hecklers. "Someone shouted out recently that I've got a fat arse. I just said, 'No, I really haven't.' It completely deflated him. He expected me to be some pathetic, impressionable girl but I'm 33, I have mirrors, and I know my arse is pretty good. It's not always the sharpest pixies who heckle, bless them. But I don't think it's any harder for women. It's hard if you're not very good."
Her parents are incredibly supportive and come to her shows. "They know when they say something to me and see the look on my face that I'm going to write about it. I'm usually crying at that moment because they're being horrible. My mam still thinks I'm really rude, but she doesn't realise that she's where I get it from. My dad's the storyteller. The whole family is quite funny and they say I'm the only one who gets paid for it."
During her Fringe run, Millican is considering asking audiences what to do with her wedding dress and then acting out the most popular choice at the end of the month.
"Sometimes the audience come out with hilarious things," she says. "A bloke the other day shouted out 'giant shuttlecock!' I'll probably just go with that and play a game of badminton with my wedding dress." v
Sarah Millican's Not Nice, Pleasance Courtyard, (0131-556 6550), until August 25, 7.15pm www.sarahmillican.co.uk
The full article contains 1250 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
