‘Meet Chief Brody, who is settling in nicely. Though my slippers appear to be the enemy…’
By summer 2009 Sarah already had a wide and growing fan base. Not all of them could travel to Edinburgh to see her second Fringe run, Typical Woman, so they must have been pleased to hear a familiar voice on the television half way through August.
The busy comedian had somehow found the time to fit yet another TV appearance into her busy schedule. And it’s safe to say this one would be remembered as one of her favourites – as it involved things that were small and furry…
Sarah had always been a pet lover and often talked about her encounters with the animal kingdom on stage. ‘I sometimes get lonely, and I think I could do with an animal – a pet would be nice,’ she mused in one show. ‘If I could have any animal I would probably have a cat, but I can’t have a cat because my boyfriend’s allergic.’ She paused and her face fell in mock sadness…
It was a stage move Sarah had truly perfected, and she often employed it to great effect in her performances. Fresh-faced and innocent looking, you couldn’t help but feel for her in those silent moments. The audience was duly sympathetic…
‘So I can’t have a cat till we split up,’ Sarah continued, instantly brightening. ‘Most people don’t have something to look forward to at the end of a relationship – I can’t wait till he starts f***ing other women: “I’m off to the pet shop, sod off…”’
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 Tom 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.