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We’ve scarcely been to St Albans during the year we’ve lived in the countryside, but we’ve been three times in the last five days. Tonight we were going to see Sarah Millican in a sauna hot St Albans arena. The only other show I’ve seen here (apart from my own) has been Bing! So Sarah had a lot to do if she was going to beat that.
I don’t want to spoil any friendships so won’t reveal which show was best. Bing seems nice on telly, but he has a temper on him.
Sarah and her tour manager and support act came round for Sunday lunch on their way to the venue, so we got to hang out with the stars (I invited Bing and Flop last month, but they were apparently too busy) and feed them slightly burned roast potatoes. Sarah is one of the hardest working stand-ups in the country and incredibly driven. Her tour is at least three times longer than my last one and is continuing until December. It’s very impressive how dedicated she is, but then she is selling out all over the country, which must help. You know, I imagine.
We really enjoyed the show, as did the sweltering crowd. Sarah had told me that she’d had the same wearily obvious heckle from men two nights in a row when she was talking about bra fittings. She didn’t tell me what the heckle was and I promised that I would do my best to make it a hat-trick. But when it got to that point in the show, I couldn’t think what the obvious heckle could be. It turned out to be so route one that my genius and inventive comedic brain was unable to construct it, even ironically. But the bra-fitting audience participation section showed that you don’t need to have experienced something for observational comedy to be funny. In fact often not having experienced makes it all the more amusing and fascinating. I hadn’t given much thought to bra-fitting before (my expertise was taking them off - you know what I am saying, right? - I had to be able to do it quick in case my mum came upstairs when I was wearing hers and parading in front of the mirror. When I was 28 years old), so this was a revelation of unexpected nightmares. Comedians like Sarah might not be the darling of all the snooty reviewers, but she is a brilliant comedian, who not only had a beautiful turn of phrase, but is able to make filthy and offensive ideas, palatable to an audience of “regular†people. In spite of her success and presumably wealth, she still comes across as honest, down-to-earth and believably “one of us†on stage, because, I think, she absolutely is that in real life.
Lots of laughter from this crowd in conditions where laughter is harder to elicit and though the show is largely about being funny, there was a welcome and heartfelt section about body image, but having made her excellent point, Sarah didn’t dwell on it and was back to doing her job.
She’s got a long way to go on this tour and I don’t envy her. In fact I still feel no compunction to get back on stage, though my next gig is now a little closer than 24th September as I am doing a benefit for Scope at the Union Chapel on 20th September. I will be so rusty that I might not even be able to speak, but the line-up is already impressive, with Russell Howard announced.
Details here.
