Although Sarah Millican tackles such familiar themes as bras, knickers, her boyfriend, her parents, her vagina (which is no castle) and eating, she invests them with enough South Shields wit and pseudo-maternal warmth to set her apart from most comediennes. She engages well with a very lively audience, who howl with laughter at the drop of a hat. She is quick to distance herself from the B-movie 'Chatterbox', based around the conceit of a talking vagina (though this seemed too good an idea to miss for Pete Jonas in his new show 'Dark Side of the Poon'.) Millican has a lovely recurrent technique, oddly redolent of Graham Norton, where she will say something light and frothy with a smile, then subvert it with a lapidary joy-killer and a grimace. The repeated tropes of some comics can wear thin quickly, but this made me laugh more and more each time, perhaps because it allows Millican to build extra layers onto punchlines (the 'shitting red' being a prime example).This isn't a terribly ambitious set and, though she is in her element on the cosy everyday ground of biscuits and presents, I'd love to see Millican attempt something more serious or genuinely absurd. Her stuff on sex, for instance, is unexceptional: her claggy chatterbox, multitasking masturbation and a joke about Brad Pitt's cock all got huge laughs, especially from the female members of the audience, but Millican (if.comedy Best Newcomer 2008) is better than this. A personable, bright female comic with great timing, but some of the more run-of-the-mill material doesn't do her justice.
