‘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.’
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…