Sarah deals with hecklers in the best way possible – by quickly firing back a funny response before saving the moment as a humorous anecdote. It’s a mark of her natural comedic talent, and a very good skill to have on stage, where you never know what’s going to happen next.
In 2006, Sarah went up to Edinburgh again, this time for The Big Value Show, a ‘gang-show’ type comedy set, featuring a compilation of performers. It was a low-pressure event, mainly because of the range of acts being showcased. Millican appeared with north eastern shuffling oddball Seymour Mace, as well as Jack O’Kane and Derek Johnson, and was well-received.
She also joined Michael Redmond for his popular Sunday Service show, which also featured John Ross, Will Richards, Ricky Sparkles and Dionne Shaw.
A review in The Herald described her as ‘one of the hottest new things in stand-up’ and wrote: ‘Sarah Millican is making divorce work. The gently spoken Geordie delivers tender comedy about returning to her parents’ house, the truth about curtains and, erm, hating children, rape and killing dogs. It’s lovely stuff and won her the Amused Moose new comedy trophy as well as a fistful of bridesmaid gongs, including runner-up spots in 2005’s Funny Women, So You Think You’re Funny and the BBC New Comedy Awards.’
It was a good opportunity to see how the famous Fringe Festival worked, before she would eventually jump in with both feet two years later. It was also around this time that she began to host her own comedy courses.
In 2006, Stephanie Merritt, a journalist for The Observer, went on holiday to Spain, where she stayed in an idyllic country farmhouse to learn how to perform stand-up comedy. Her tutor was Sarah Millican, and after spending a week with the serious teacher, Merritt could see that Sarah was definitely on her way to bigger things.
It’s interesting to note at this point that Sarah was confident enough with what she had learnt about the industry so far to feel like she could herself command a comedy class.
Merritt wrote of the experience: ‘It was impossible not to warm to this frank, no-nonsense Geordie with her slightly mumsy manner and filthy mouth, but spending a week under her stern tutelage made me realise that comedy was something she took very, very seriously.
‘The message she gave us most insistently was that if you want to be good, you have to be prepared to put in the leg work. Write every day, gig every day, travel halfway across the country to perform an open-mic spot if you have to, but always remember that in comedy, you only improve by doing it and learning from your mistakes. I remember thinking at the time that someone so incredibly driven was bound to go far, if only through sheer bloody-minded determination.’
Sarah was picking up confidence and finally gaining recognition. Her name was popping up regularly in local newspaper reviews and the industry was definitely getting excited about her arrival.
Her act was also developing. As well as her earlier material, which was mainly focused on her divorce and coping with its aftermath, she had begun branching out into other areas. She began to include identifiable topics such as home furnishings, families and observations about her childhood, and she had begun to pepper her act with outrageous extras like sex, rape and dog murder.
Significantly, she was also starting to discuss dating and the differences between men and women. Sarah had begun to get out in the dating world again, and it was around this time that she would meet her new boyfriend, Gary Delaney.
CHAPTER 7
When Sarah Met Gary…
‘I’m a whole person. I never want to be part of a couple in that “my other half” sort of way. Without him I am also a person. I love him with all of my heart, but I’m not nothing without him.’
When Sarah first met Gary Delaney, she was intensely focused on bettering her act and gaining widespread recognition. She was still a relative newbie, forging her own path on the comedy circuit, and she was still living with her parents.
It had been a few years since Andrew had broken Sarah’s heart, but the effects on her desire for a relationship had been long lasting.
Sarah was wary. Where once she had been a naïve young girl, with a set of highly romanticised ideals of love and marriage, now she was cautious. Although she held no animosity towards Andrew, and would never regret the years she spent married to him, she was determined that she would never let anyone break her heart so completely again. ‘I’ve always, in previous relationships, had a habit of melting into a couple,’ she says.
This was not a mistake she would make again. Her success in stand-up had also begun to cement in her the notion that she didn’t have to settle for anything. Looking back on her marriage, she saw that for a while she had been a bit of a ‘doormat’. Now she was living a very independent life. She was doing exactly what she wanted to do, when she wanted to do it, and it felt liberating.
After her traumatic break-up, one of the things that she feared the most was that she would now have to have sex with someone new.
Sarah had always had a pretty relaxed take on sex. But being dumped felt like she had just been made redundant from a job she loved, and every new sexual encounter that followed felt like a nerve-wracking interview. She told The Sun in November 2012: ‘I thought, “Oh no, they’ll do it differently. It’ll be in a different order to normal and he might want to do this first and that last, and I’ve never done it like that before. It’s all going to be new and horrific and I won’t know how dark they like it. They might even want to be spontaneous.” It was all so terrifying.’
Sarah had entered her marriage with the firm opinion that once she said her vows it was for life, and when that fundamental belief was destroyed she had to re-evaluate her whole definition of love and relationships. She says: ‘When you’re newly single you start to see sex as having to go for a job interview. You can’t just do it anymore. You’ve got to present the best version of you so that you get the job.’
Throughout her twenties, Sarah was still finding out who she was. Now entering her thirties, she was a changed woman and valued her new, independent lifestyle. There had been a time when she wouldn’t have walked into a pub on her own. Now she was entertaining their patrons nightly with her witticisms.
Her sense of adventure had been awakened, but a new relationship was still unchartered territory. Besides, with so much of her set being about the fall-out from a broken relationship, it must have been easy to worry that potential suitors might be quickly frightened off once they saw her show…
But from the very beginning, Sarah could see that Gary Delaney was different.
Gary had been on the comedy circuit for a lot longer than Sarah and was already well-known for his dark one-liners. Born in 1973, he was two years older than Sarah, and first surfaced on the comedy circuit in the mid-nineties – around the same time as Sarah was falling in love with her first husband and settling down to married life.
Gary cut his comedy teeth while working on the sound desk in a London comedy club. As he explained to comedy website Gigglebeats: ‘That was my apprenticeship. A lot of guys came up from being on the sound desk or being on the door and putting out the chairs and that sort of stuff, then watching a lot of comedy and learning about it. Eventually you start to think you can do better.’
Financial journalist Martin Lewis was also part of the scene, before he went on to found his popular website www.moneysavingexpert.com – and Gary started his comedy career by writing jokes for him. The pair had gone to university together at the London School of Economics, where Martin was the president of the student union, and Gary was in charge of student entertainment. Gary had founded the university’s Chuckle Club, a comedy venue on campus that now draws a huge audience, primarily consisting of non-students.
The pair had remained friends. ‘There was a club that he and I used to go to,’ Gary recalls. ‘And Martin decided to give stand-up a go, so I helped him write his jokes. Then he would deliver them and I’d be at the back of the room thinking “none of you know, but you’re laughing at my jokes”. That I quite enjoyed.�
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Martin describes Gary as one of the naturally funniest people he’s ever met and recalls their years at LSE together fondly. ‘At uni he was always the funny one,’ he wrote on his blog in 2006. ‘Yet I was always more confident with a microphone, hence why I did the comedy and he wrote. My “comedy career” was great fun, but by no means my calling, though it did teach me a huge amount. Yet in the end, real talent will out, and Gary put his nerves behind him and has ended up a superb comic.’
In fact, the moment that Gary first ended up on stage was a result of a bet between the two friends. ‘I wrote him this joke about nurses, which was how I started,’ Gary told Gigglebeats. ‘I said: “Do this joke, it’s the best joke I’ve ever written, they’re going to love it.” He did it a couple of times and he told me that the nurses joke wasn’t very funny. Then of course, I was like, “you’re doing it wrong!” I ended up doing it sort of to prove a point, and it was a bit of a drunken bet as well. He ended up betting me 20 quid I wouldn’t have the nerve to do it, and I finally did it. I got up and people laughed and I enjoyed it and carried on, and that was that.’
Gary did his first gig on Valentine’s Day 1997, but only did a handful of other gigs throughout the course of that year, before deciding to give it up.
It would be three years before he would get on stage again. ‘It took me years to get up the nerve to do my first gig, after that it took as long again to realise it could be a career, rather than just a hobby,’ he says.
His was a very different approach to his eventual partner Sarah, who entered the comedy world as if she had been fired out of a cannon. Gary started slowly and eventually discovered that his talent lay in the clever one-liners he was so adept at writing.
Unlike Sarah, Gary never did a comedy course. He learnt by watching live stand-up and admits his first few years were difficult. ‘I was kind of deluded and better in my head than I was on stage. That really helped. I was uber deadpan, which is all very well when it’s going well, but the lack of flexibility and energy can leave you dying a lot.’
Gary found stand-up a lot more difficult than Sarah did and struggled during his early years gigging. He also experienced the bad side of stand-up a lot more regularly than Sarah ever did and was subjected to a lot of heckling. But Gary’s hecklers generally ended up feeling the sharp edge of his wit, and most ended up worse off than him.
For example, at a gig in Sutton Coldfield, Gary broke from his routine and turned his attention to an audience member who’d shouted out ‘gay Jew’ at him. ‘Not only is it woefully inaccurate,’ says Gary of that time, ‘but the best thing about it is the knuckledragger who shouted it out didn’t seem to realise that neither of those two words is actually an insult. I asked him why he thought I was a gay Jew and he said it was because I wore glasses. I then said bad things about his mum. He replied that she was dead. I asked if she died of embarrassment after giving birth to him, and observed that it was good she was dead as that meant she couldn’t produce any more versions of him. After that it just got offensive.’
The stand-up stage is a vulnerable place. Much like a wounded animal will attack, comedians will get defensive if audiences try to humiliate them on stage – where they generally feel they’re on the verge of humiliating themselves anyway. But there were funny moments during his early years as well, like when a dwarf sneaked behind him on stage and tried to sell the audience earrings. Gary applauded him.
While Gary had got over his stage nerves, he still much preferred writing gags to performing them, so he began to forge a career out of scripting one-liners for famous comedians and TV panel show presenters.
Gary has written for the likes of 8 Out of 10 Cats, Jason Manford’s Comedy Rocks and Russell Howard’s Good News, but he has also appeared on comedy panel shows himself, including Dave’s One Night Stand, alongside his comedy hero Ardal O’Hanlon and established funny lady Josie Long.
‘TV has an incredible demand for gags, usually topical,’ he told Gigglebeats. ‘There tends to be a few of us in a room writing those. Loads of telly shows want gags because usually it’s for when the host comes out and does some jokes at the top, or as an opening monologue.’
Gary and Sarah have completely different comedy styles, and both have a deep respect for what the other does. ‘I’d rather be able to write a good gag than act everyday things out in a likeable manner to a full stadium,’ he says, describing exactly the style that Sarah has become so accomplished at.
But they have the same views on making it as a comedian, and the same work ethic. ‘I like acts that work really hard. My main advice is always work hard. Write every day. Gig every night. You will get better. Most comics are lazy. Every day you are working harder than them you are pulling ahead of them. I started out with many people more talented than me. Most are gone now. The 10 or so open mikers who I started out with who worked the hardest are the ones who made a living out of it, not the most naturally talented 10.’
They also have the same dirty and dark sense of humour. One of Gary’s best-known gags is: ‘I filled my Escort with diesel. She died.’ It’s one you can definitely imagine Sarah laughing at.
I myself was lucky enough to see Gary Delaney perform a set for the Monkey Business Comedy Club in north London, in January 2013. The venue was an upstairs room in the famous Belsize Park pub the Sir Richard Steeles, and Gary was the headlining comedian.
He arrived late in the evening, but just in time to see the tail end of the very odd act that preceded him. Standing at the back of the darkened room, he could hear the audience’s hushed disappointment. After four very funny performances, this act was bombing, badly, which was not good news for Gary, who would have to follow them.
A comedy sketch involving a woman riding her ‘son’ like a horse, it was sadly not liked by the crowd – and as a result the room was cold when Gary’s name was announced. He bounded onto the stage and in a matter of seconds, proved to everyone why he is such a well-respected, constantly indemand comedian.
‘I hate it when you watch the act before you and you realise they’re doing exactly what you planned to do for your set,’ he said cheekily. ‘I’ll have to miss out that bit I guess,’ he added. The audience erupted into fits of laughter and all at once he had them on his side and ready to laugh at his jokes.
He was commanding but refreshingly down-to-earth. As he delivered a steady stream of expertly crafted gags, he frequently paused to laugh at his own jokes, many of which were at his own expense. His bespectacled presence was similar to Sarah’s – calm and encouraging. People were laughing with him, not at him, and it was clear he was a seasoned pro, despite his misgivings about his live performances.
The half-hour set passed in a flash and spiky-haired Gary sauntered off stage, leaving the audience – which numbered approximately 70 – wiping their eyes and clapping appreciatively.
Gary believes that the comedy circuit is a lot more professional now than it was when he first began plying his comic trade, and on the whole he’s glad that this is the case. He claims that audiences are less patient, and harder to please than in the nineties ‘when they laughed at any old crap really’, but that standards are a lot higher now and comedians command more respect.
It was against this background that Sarah and Gary met, discovered a mutual professional respect, and eventually fell in love.
But Sarah was nervous about their relationship. Gary was a regular on the comedy circuit while Sarah was just beginning to make a name for herself. In her mind, dating a fellow comedian – and a talented one at that – could have been fatal for her career. So for a long time they kept their fledgling relationship under wraps.
‘When we started going out we didn’t tell anybody for ages,’ she told The Guardian in October 2012. ‘Because I didn’t want anybody to think he was writing my jokes, because he wasn’t. I was doing it all myself.’
Sarah had worked so hard to hone her set and her material, but most importantly she was proud of her independence, and
was not about to lose this by having herself defined as one half of a comedy couple.
So is it competitive, being in the same line of work as the one you love? Sarah is adamant that it isn’t, although she has clearly had the more mainstream success of the pair. ‘It’s just like having a funny friend. It’s never competitive. It’s like, would two people who work in shops come home and say: “I sold more handbags than you”? No they wouldn’t, because they get in from work and say: “Oh I’m so glad I’ve finished work. Let’s put the telly on and get the tea going”.’
Starting to share her life with another man did impact on her material. Comedians largely rely on life experiences for their inspiration and sharing a life might mean sharing the spoils of a life lived together. But Sarah insists there are no arguments over their ‘funny bits’. She says: ‘He does one-liners, his is all based on wordplay, so if anything funny happens between us, I get it!’
So while Sarah used aspects of her boyfriend’s personality and quirks in her sets, Gary didn’t at all. ‘He’s never told anything on stage that is based on his life,’ she says.
As time passed, they grew closer, despite the physical distance between them. Gary lived in Birmingham, while Sarah lived 80 miles away on her own in Manchester – and although they’d been together for over six years, it was an arrangement she was happy with.
After such a whirlwind first marriage swallowed her identity whole and left her something of a broken woman, she didn’t want to let that happen again. ‘It feels important now to retain my sense of self,’ she says. ‘I’m a pretty normal well-rounded person and so is he and we happen to go out and we’re in love. But we’re not the same thing. I think part of the reason my marriage melted away was because I changed from being feisty to being dowdy, and I lost my passion.’
Sarah Millican--The Queen of Comedy Page 6