Sarah MIllican - How To Be Champion

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Funny and powerful

I enjoyed How To be Champion.  I like Sarah Millican's stand-up, and this, too, is funny (of course), human and thoughtful.

It may be worth beginning with a warning that there is a lot of very frank and intimate talk about sex and bodily functions of all kinds, often using what the TV continuity people would warn us is Very Strong Language.  Personally I find this refreshing and often very funny, but if it's not your thing then this definitely isn't a book for you.

It is a book for me, though.  I liked the account of her growing up and becoming a comedian; it's easy to read, it made me smile and sometimes laugh out loud.  There is also some sage advice based on her experiences, many of which are very recognisable to a lot of us.  However, the book really came alive for me in its last hundred pages or so, with some excellent, extended passages about the treatment of women by the media and social media, the difficulty of being a celebrity and how people feel free to say all manner of hurtful things ("If you're famous, people think you're not a real person") and so on.  Well, it's obvious from this that she is a real person, and a very fine one at that.  These are angry, witty and powerful pieces which are spot-on in their analysis and which everyone should read.  It is this which sets the book well above the run-of-the-mill celebrity autobiography for me.

Alongside this are some very funny takes on less world-changing aspects of everyday life.  As an example, having found a tin of marrowfat peas in her cupoard: "I'm quite new to peas.  They were one of the things I definitely didn’t like as a child without ever having tried them.  Turns out they're really nice, though.  I only dabble in garden peas. I've heard they are a gateway pea."  And the book ends with a wonderful extended riff on baking a cake, with a real recipe in there, too.

Overall, this gets 4.5 stars from me, but I've rounded it up because I thought the later sections were so good.  Oh, and she says early on in a slightly despairing tone about the shallowness of young men, "There are men who find wit sexy…"   You're right, Sarah – some of us do.  And more power to you.