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the taunts.

      ‘I remember thinking that there must be something more that I can do, a better way to retaliate,’ Sarah recalled in an interview, years later. ‘But my mam said they’ll stop when they’re not getting the reaction they want. She was absolutely right.’

      Sarah was again defiant in the face of her tormentors. And to this day she still holds a grudge. Now a household name, she often gets friend requests on social networking site Facebook from the very people who used to make her life a misery.

      ‘You get a friend request and it’s quite satisfying being able to reject them,’ she told one newspaper recently. ‘I didn’t like you at school, I’m not going to like you now. I hold massive grudges. I’m really good at grudges.’

      At the time, her father was her inspiration for coping with the bullies. Sarah acknowledges that she gets a lot of her positivity and drive from the former engineer, who would tackle the bullies who followed his daughter home and constantly encouraged her to work hard, despite the teasing that her tenacious attitude to schoolwork brought her.

      Sarah – a chatty and pleasant child at home, so different to her quiet nature at school – tried to hide the bullying from her parents.

      One of only two children in her year who wore glasses, she got called names every day, particularly ‘Norma No Mates’ and ‘Speccy Four Eyes’. The name-calling hurts to this day. When one interviewer for the Guardian joked last year that he preferred Norma No Mates, because Speccy Four Eyes ‘wasn’t that personal’, Sarah got very defensive.

      ‘Don’t tell me what’s hurtful when I’m seven. How do you know what’s hurtful for me?’

      The interviewer tried to diffuse the situation by saying that he’d meant it as a joke, but Sarah didn’t take it that way. It’s clear that being bullied at school is not something she will ever forget. But it has become a part of what defines her. Sarah is a strong and capable woman, who turns negative experiences into good ones by seeing the funny side of them.

      Hers is a very personal kind of comedy, which is why so many of us identify with her stories and jokes. But we all know, deep down, that they are real. And for her to really share these experiences she has to feel them all over again – which must still hurt to some degree.

      As a child Sarah quietly ignored the bullies, until her sister couldn’t stand to see it any more. Her father recalls: ‘It was her sister, Victoria, who told us. There was a girl who’d grab her arm and scrape a playing card down it, till the skin flayed off. What hurt most was that she’s the sort of bairn who’d do anything for anyone. But some mistake kindness for softness, and she’s not soft. I went through everything that she went through and eventually you learn to stand up for yourself.’

      When Philip learned what was happening to his youngest, he took matters into his own hands. At the time Sarah wrote in her diary that her dad had ‘put the fear of God’ into one particular girl. She was a few years older than Sarah and used to follow her home from school regularly, muttering nasty things under her breath. For the young Sarah it was traumatic and finally she pointed the girl out to her dad. ‘He told her it was harassment and that he would ring the police. It worked,’ she says.

      Philip’s actions inspired her to go one step further and stick up for others like herself. He remembers Sarah coming home one day grinning from ear to ear. ‘I remember her telling me that the teacher had asked her to pick the netball team, and she picked everyone who’d never been picked before – the fat ones, skinny ones, short-sighted ones… She said: “Dad, we got hammered 26 nil, but it was the best day of our lives.”’

      When she grew up Sarah wanted to be either a pixie or a stripper – because she thought they’d both be glamorous dancing roles. But her first real ambition was to be a vet, because of her love for animals. As a child she nicknamed herself ‘The Hamster Squeezer’, because she had a tendency to hug her pets that little bit too hard.

      In her teens she went for work experience at a veterinary hospital, where she genuinely thought she would spend her time handing out medicine to sick pets. ‘It was horrific,’ she has since said. ‘I thought you just stroked rabbits, you know, gave them tablets. Then they said, “Do you want to sit in on some operations?”’

      Watching someone’s treasured pet go under the surgeon’s knife put paid to Sarah’s veterinary ambitions, as the reality of a vet’s job was revealed in all its gory glory.

      Sarah was – in her own words – a late developer, and boys weren’t a big part of her teenage years. ‘I liked boys,’ she told the Scotland Herald in 2010. ‘But they didn’t really like me. And the boys who did like me, I didn’t like. One boy bit off his wart and showed me it. Somebody leaned over and said: “He loves you”. That’s apparently why he did it. It had an impact. I’m not sure it was the impact he was looking for.’

      And Sarah did her best to throw off any advances that did come her way. ‘I’d get asked out for drinks but I thought if a boy buys you a drink you had to have sex with him and I wasn’t going to do that, so I made bloody sure I had a drink of my own,’ she explains. ‘I had a slightly ice maiden quality, which I liked, because I don’t think you ever meet anybody you’re truly meant to be with in a lairy nightclub when everyone’s hammered, you can’t hear what anybody’s saying and the only thing you’ve got in common is you’re both in the same location.’

      It was a wise observation for one so young, but it did mean that her experience of dating was limited – a fact that would bring her heartache in the years to come.

      She recalls one disastrous occasion when she brought a boyfriend home to meet the family. The story she tells about that time is teeming with exactly the kind of black comedy that Sarah insists comes from her parents.

      ‘My mam has a picture of Marilyn Monroe dated 1953, and – as if it’s the most normal thing to say in this situation – she turns to him and says, “That’s the year I got polio.”’

      The family actually celebrated that anniversary in 2003, with a cake with ‘50’ piped on it. Confused diners at the restaurant they were in thought it was her mum’s 50th birthday. As Millican herself says: ‘And she wonders where I get my dark humour from…’

      In an attempt to bring her shy daughter out of her shell, Sarah’s mother got her a Saturday job at the local WH Smith, where she carried out her duties as diligently as her schoolwork. Blossoming into a creative and intelligent woman, Sarah wanted to go to university, but knew that her family’s finances wouldn’t stretch to such a big expense.

      When the strikes were over, Philip had gone back to work at the mines, but the family had continued to struggle financially. Millican didn’t complain. ‘I knew that the only way they could afford for me to go was if I stayed at home, and I knew part of university was to make beans on toast in a bedsit and have parties. My dad was working seven days a week and I didn’t want to put any more pressure on him.’

      Sarah saw her family as a close-knit team, and as part of this special group there was no room for selfishness. If something that she wanted would make life difficult for the rest of her family, then she would simply stop wanting it.

      From the tender age of 15 Sarah knew that she wanted to work in the media in some way. When someone unhelpfully pointed out that she needed a degree for that kind of career, she just ignored them. So after her A levels, Sarah did a course in film and television production as a way of keeping up her creative interests – but with no thought of putting herself in front of the camera. She tried to get into television production in nearby Newcastle, but there were few jobs, so she was unsuccessful. Then followed a stream of unfulfilling roles in jobs that couldn’t even begin to challenge the clever comic-to-be.

      She worked in a call centre, and then as a producer for audio books. She is still amused by the title of one Mills and Boon book she recorded in the course of her work: Once Upon A Mattress.

      ‘It seemed to happen that we always read sex scenes on a Sunday morning,’ she has

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