There are seven signs of ageing, according to a well-known moisturiser brand – but Sarah Millican gives them very short shrift. Here instead are Millican’s own seven signs, none to do with skincare and most mainlining her trademark brand of vulgarity and intimate body comedy. Amid the merriment as the 47-year-old tells us about her experience of haemorrhoids, loose stools and farting through folds of flesh, there’s no point protesting that another sign of ageing, arguably, is the evolution of one’s taste and sensibility. Millican seems immune to that: this show offers precisely the combination of domestic, corporeal and sex comedy she’s always delivered on stage. The body may be ageing, but her comic craft exists in perfect stasis.
Perfect, for some, may be the operative word: there’s no denying Millican can turn a joke, and does so as skilfully here as ever. Particularly in the second half, where that signs-of-ageing routine tees up her most concentrated sequence of carnal humour. Here we find her critiquing the terms used to sell sanitary towels, with reference to the experience of using them – and painting rococo word pictures (Saving Private Ryan is evoked) of the carnage unleashed on the toilet bowl by her particularly heavy flow. Here too a smear test routine, as our host finds herself perplexed when the question is posed: “what size speculum are you?”
None of this feels unfamiliar: the comedy of genital and rectal examinations is quite the staple among middle-aged standups. But Millican brings real vitality to it, and the occasional baroque flourish to her language and imagery combines to great effect with her geordie bluntness. And, while it won’t seem cutting-edge to regular comedy-goers, there may still be a transgressive and liberating quality to Millican’s gleeful openness about the unruly female body and its appetites – for food, among other things, as she describes her recent dalliance with dieting. It lasted three days and foundered on two special-offer Belgian buns.
The show’s first half, and its ending, are less compelling, as Millican plays out to some low-wattage anecdotes about diarrhoea and slicing off her fingertip with a mandolin. Earlier, she steps on stage to a backdrop of a government grippingly in meltdown (of which she makes not the slightest mention), and proceeds to recall a recent visit to the optician, and some children’s parties she went to in the 1980s. She recaps her pandemic experience, too, when she attempted the Couch to 5K running plan (selecting her own voice as her trainer) and took up yoga. It’s genial enough, but does not exactly induce a frenzy of excitement in her crowd – as demonstrated when Millican solicits moments of lockdown madness from her audience, and is greeted with total silence in response.
She’s not fazed by that; she seems quite content to keep her audience at arm’s length. It’s not that her everywoman persona is feigned – but you detect a certain steel behind the I’m-just-like-you shtick. None of which will matter to those who come, by the score, to hear Millican expound on her smelly pyjamas, or horse’s cocks, or the affinities between wanking and mashing potatoes. On such subjects, there are few who are funnier – even if the formulaic similarity between one Millican show and the next suggests a comic who may be ageing, but isn’t changing a jot.
