Sarah Millican: Chatterbox

100487 original

Sarah Millican’s award-winning 2008 Edinburgh show Sarah Millican’s Not Nice dealt specifically with divorce after having been encouraged onto the stage by her therapist who found her sessions amusing. This year's offering Chatterbox is lighter in tone and more expansive in its topics, covering subjects including living alone, her current partner’s idiosyncrasies and eating cakes.

Millican manages to pull off being both amusing and upbeat: her misanthropic side still comes out but there is a sort of infectious cheekiness about it. Her funniest and most touching material concerns her family and more specifically her relationship with her parents who turn to her for explanations of modern phenomena such as "teabagging" and advice on why having 69 in your skype ID is not a particularly good idea.

Her audience interaction is similarly joyful as she has an obvious rapport with her fans. Some have even brought her chocolate since they know she has a sweet tooth. It transpires she has also brought chocolate for us. But the show isn’t as cutesy as this tuck shop interlude might suggest. She speaks refreshingly bluntly about her sex life and the potential dangers for a woman who wants to share a bath with tropical fish.

Overall, Millican shows that she is a talented enough observational comedian to find humour in the positive as well as the negative.