Sarah Millican

Sarah Jane Millican (née King) is an English comedian born on 29 May 1975. She is best known for her stand-up comedy shows, television series, and extensive appearances on radio and television panel shows. Among her major recognitions, she won the Best Newcomer comedy award at the 2008 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, received a British Comedy Award, won two Chortle Awards, and earned two BAFTA nominations. In February 2013, she was listed as one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom by Radio 4's Woman's Hour.

Millican was born and brought up in South Shields, England. Her parents are Valerie Prince and Philip D. King, who worked as a mining electrician. She attended Mortimer Comprehensive School, which later became Mortimer Community College. Before pursuing comedy, Millican worked as a civil servant at a jobcentre until she was 29 years old. After her 1997 marriage ended in divorce in 2004, she moved back in with her parents for two and a half years and began attending writing workshops at local theatres.

Drawing on her personal experiences for comedy material, Millican debuted her first Edinburgh Festival Fringe show, Sarah Millican's Not Nice, in 2008, winning the if.comedy award for Best Newcomer. Her 2010 Fringe show, Chatterbox, received a nomination for the main Edinburgh Comedy Award. During this period, she appeared as a panellist on television shows such as 8 Out of 10 Cats, Mock the Week, QI, Have I Got News for You, Would I Lie to You?, and Never Mind the Buzzcocks, alongside performances on Live at the Apollo and Michael McIntyre's Comedy Roadshow.

In 2010, Millican launched her BBC Radio 4 series, Sarah Millican's Support Group, which she wrote and hosted playing an agony aunt character, and she co-hosted the Radio 5 Live show 7 Day Sunday until 2011. She released a live DVD of Chatterbox in November 2011, which set a record in sales for a female stand-up comedian by selling 172,000 copies in just over one month. She followed this with her television series, The Sarah Millican Television Programme, which debuted in March 2012 on BBC Two and earned her two BAFTA Entertainment Performance nominations.

Millican has engaged in numerous multimedia projects. In September 2014, she founded Standard Issue, an online magazine for women, which launched a spinoff podcast in 2016. She became the eighth curator of BBC Radio 4's The Museum of Curiosity in 2015 and began hosting the comedy panel show Elephant in the Room for Radio 4 in 2019. In October 2017, she published her autobiography, How to Be Champion. Her television work has included hosting during Comic Relief 2015, appearing on Deal or No Deal, and competing in season 14 of Taskmaster in 2022.

Millican continues to perform stand-up comedy globally and produce online content. She launched a YouTube channel in November 2019 featuring stand-up clips, show interviews, and her lockdown reading series, How to Be Champion Storytime. Following her Control Enthusiast tour in 2018, she toured her sixth stand-up show, Bobby Dazzler, in 2021, later releasing a live recording in February 2023. She announced her tour, Late Bloomer, running from September 2023 to October 2024. In her personal life, she married comedian Gary Delaney in December 2013.