Sarah Millican: “First gig was like court – and jury have decided you’re guilty”

Sarah Millican has spoken about her first ever stand-up gig, describing it as “like a court where the jury have decided you’re guilty.”

In her column for the Radio Times, Millican banged the drum for live comedy by taking readers back to where she found her feet – at The Dog and Parrot pub in Newcastle.

In a line that will relieve open spots up and down the country, Millican admitted: “I had no idea what I was doing.”

It was Kate Fox, a performance poet and sometime comic, who convinced Millican she had funny bones and quickly showed her the ropes of performance, including how to hold a microphone and how to speak.

From then on she was hooked.

Millican said: “The compere introduced me and I walked on stage to a sea of expectant faces.

“Not in a good way. Not like people at the cinema awaiting the forthcoming magic. More like in a court where the jury have decided you’re guilty and their annoyance at being there is only slightly offset by the fact they’re not at work. With one woman knitting on the end.

“My career was in their ambivalent, pint-clasping hands.”

She continued: “The first half of the set was delivered to complete silence. Like in a lift with a stranger. Or on a date. Then something happened. I told a story about my dad and the room erupted.

“Silence became a whoof of laughter and it was like someone had injected Dairy Milk into my face.”

After winning Best Newcomer in the 2008 Edinburgh Comedy Awards, Millican’s stock has risen exponentially.

A regular on TV panel shows like 8 Out Of 10 Cats and Mock The Week, the South Shields-born stand-up now has her own TV show, The Sarah Millican Television Programme.

Series two concluded on BBC2 last week, but a third series, due to be filmed in August, has already been commissioned.