Review: Sarah Millican – The Biography of the Funniest Woman in Britain
Before the deluge of celeb autobiographies launched for the Christmas market (available soon in a charity shop near you), this unauthorised biography of Sarah Millican sneaked on to the market.
Tabloid journalist Tina Campanella has seemingly gathered together every print and broadcast interview Sarah Millican has ever given to circumnavigate her lack of access to the subject.
Everything from Lauren Laverne on BBC’s The Culture Show, to The Guardian, to Giggle Beats ‘ own interview with her partner, Gary Delaney, is used, although there is a sense that she’s clasping at straws when she draws upon user comments from a Tim Minchin fan site.
She must be kicking herself that the book was published shortly before Millican’s episode of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? was broadcast.
To be fair, while unauthorised biographies can be easily criticised as cheap cash-ins, Campanella has done a reasonable job of assembling snippets of biographical information into a cohesive, chronological volume, in the absence of Millican’s (inevitable) autobiography.
The book outlines her parents’ background, including her father’s trade union background and the impact of the Miner’s Strike upon the family. The account might be romanticised, but Millican comes across well, happily making do so as not to be a burden on her family.
Campanella has pleasantly acknowledged other players in Millican’s rise, such as performance poet Kate Fox’s stand up course at Newcastle’s Live Theatre, and it’s nice to see a few local pubs credited for hosting open spots during which Millican honed her craft..
Campanella generally does a reasonable job of attributing her sources, in phrases such as ‘she told The Guardian’ this, and ‘she told an Independent journalist’ that.
Some snippets of information refer to unspecified journalists from unspecified publications, which seems unsettling for the reader, and also the interviewer who produced the original work.
There are a couple of minor mistakes (such as the incorrect locations of pubs), and it is often impossible to ascertain if these are the oversight of Campanella or the original journalist.
Some judicious editing would have prevented unnecessary fillers, such as a section about Tom Allen (inspired, no doubt, by PR guff during an Australian comedy festival), and a tenuous potted history of Oxbridge comedy to support the point that many Edinburgh Comedy Award winners are Oxbridge educated, in contrast to Millican, who hadn’t attended any university when she won Best Newcomer in Edinburgh.
Potentially a fair point (bypassing the fact that Perrier winners such as Skinner and Coogan were not Oxbridge educated), but the section soon outstays its welcome.
Similarly, a section on “Sarah’s top tips” – snippets of advice to stand ups – could have benefitted from additional typesetting to separate it from the main text, because here it looks rather lumped on at the end of a chapter.
Only Millican herself can completely assess this volume’s accuracy, although there doesn’t appear to be anything that would trouble the lawyers.
For what it is, Campanella has actually done a pretty decent job in producing a decent, readable biography of one of the most successful comedians to come out of the North East in recent years.
Sarah Millican – The Biography of the Funniest Woman in Britain, by Tina Campanella, is published by John Blake, and is available now.
