- Now, let me tell you a story now, if I may.
Most comedians finish work at sort of 10:30, 11:00
and invariably will drive home wherever possible
so getting in at maybe 12:00 or 1:00 or 2:00.
Me personally, when I get home
in order to get the adrenaline out of my system
so I can sleep at all, I will do one of two things.
I'm not a drinker so I'll either have a bath
or I'll watch a bit of telly.
And normally one of those two things will work.
Every now and again though they don't work
and I can't sleep at all.
It's rare, I'm lucky like that, but it does happen.
The last time it happened to any degree
was February last year.
I got in from work, I did the usual things, no success.
I did the worst thing you can possibly do
when you can't sleep which is go on the internet
'cause it properly wakes you up, doesn't it?
But I had sort of abandoned the idea of sleep
and I was happily clicking from website to website.
Now, 2:30 is a normal time for me to go to bed.
When it starts to get to 3:00, 3:30 I start to feel tired
and I suppose just a bit lonely, I suppose
and a little bit like I'm the only person awake in the world
and I know that my tired brain just thinks
that my rested brain would never allow.
Now, if we go back to the beginning of the story,
I mentioned that I got divorced.
I got married first time at 22 and divorced at 29.
I suppose getting married at 22 is quite young,
but I was very much swept off my feet.
I think the main reason I said yes to going out with him
in the first place was the fact that he wrote me a poem.
Nobody had written me a poem before,
nobody has written me a poem since.
I don't really know much about poetry,
but I know that this was just lovely.
He'd handwritten it, he gave it to me on a sheet of paper
and I read it and I just fell.
I remember folding really small and I put it in my purse,
and every time I had a shitty day at work
I'd get on the bus to go home and I'd get my poem out
and I'd read it to myself and I'd think,
somebody feels this way about me
to have written this about me.
I'm not having a shitty day anymore.
Now, a little after five years I lost it.
To this day I have no idea where it went
and I was distraught it meant so much to me,
but after a while after I'd calmed down I thought,
I wonder if I've memorised it
from all of those times of reading it to myself.
So I got a sheet of paper and a pen
and sure enough it all came out.
And I folded it up small
and I put it back in my purse where it belonged.
Now, if we scoot ahead to February last year,
it's 3:30 AM, I'm tired, and I'm on the internet.
And I just thought, we've been divorced nine years.
That was a lovely poem.
I bet he's given it to somebody else.
(audience laughing)
I bet it's on a blog.
I bet some skinny 22-year-old fucking bitch
has got it as her Facebook status.
(audience laughing)
So I picked a line from it and I googled it
and there were 305,000 examples of the poem.
(audience laughing)
It wasn't my poem, it wasn't his poem.
It was written by Samuel Coleridge.
(audience laughing)
No wonder it was fucking good. (audience laughing)
But I felt sort of broken
like my heart had been broken all over again.
I felt hurt and a little bit stupid.
I didn't really know what to do with this new information.
So I texted my fella on the off chance
that he was still awake and he was, thank God,
and he rang and he said, "What's up?"
And I told him the whole thing.
And my fella's a very sensible man
and he had a little think and he said,
"Just because that was a lie
doesn't mean the rest was a lie."
And I thought, that's pretty good
so I hung up from him, but I still wasn't happy.
It was still whirling around in my head.
What was starting to happen that I didn't like
was it was starting to colour my idea of my ex-husband.
It was starting to make me think of him as a bad person,
and he wasn't a bad person.
We split up relatively amicably.
He just stopped loving me, which is very sad
and hard for me to understand
given the fact that I'm awesome.
(audience laughing)
(audience applauding) (audience cheering)
Good, I'm glad you agree. (audience laughing)
But it felt to me like he was a ball of clear water
with a drop of blue dye about to go in
and colour the whole thing,
and I didn't think that was fair on him.
And I was thinking, I wonder if I can come up
with another example of something similar,
somebody who is inherently good but has done one bad thing
but you still think of them as a good person.
And I racked my brains and I could think of no one.
I did, however, think of an example of the opposite,
someone who is inherently bad, but had done one good thing
but I still thought of them as a bad person.
And that person was Margaret Thatcher.
(audience laughing)
Now, I understand the concept
of not speaking ill of the dead, but I also understand
that I told this story for the first time
while she was still alive.
And coming from a mining background,
I will not allow her to ruin my show
(audience applauding) (audience cheering)
the way she ruined the lives of my dad and his friends.
Now, one thing you might not know about Margaret Thatcher
is that she was partly responsible
for the invention of Mr. Whippy ice cream.
She studied science at university.
She was one of a team of scientists who invented the machine
that puts the air through the ice cream
to create Mr. Whippy ice cream.
So for all of the atrocities that I believe she committed
(audience laughing)
Mr. Whippy ice cream's still pretty fucking nice, isn't it?
(audience laughing)
But it felt to me very much like she was still a ball
of blue dye with a drop of clear water
hovering above the surface.
And I went to bed and I slept like a baby.
And I woke up the next morning and I still felt okay.
And I thought, I'm gonna ring my dad.
Now, my dad is an exceptional listener.
My dad is my second port of call always after my fella
if I have anything troubling me.
And I told him the whole thing and he listened very quietly.
And I said, "So do you see how I've worked it out
that none of us are 100% good or bad?
We're all a mixture of the two."
He said, "Yes, I can see what you've done."
I said, "Did you know about the ice cream thing?"
He said, "No, I didn't."
I said, "So how does that make you feel now?"
And he went quiet.
It couldn't have been for minutes.
It must have only been for seconds,
but it felt like a long time.
And he went, "You really want to know how I feel?"
I said, "I think it would help me, Dad."
He went quiet again and he went,
"You're not allowed Mr. Whippy anymore!"
(audience laughing) (audience applauding)
In the space of about six hours I'd lost my poem
and Mr. Whippy for life. (audience laughing)
I didn't tell him that Osama Bin Laden invented Midget Gems.
(audience laughing)
He didn't, there's people over there going, "Did he?
He didn't, he didn't. (audience laughing)
Hello, I'm Sarah Millican,
and thanks very much for watching my videos.
I'm going on tour
with a brand-new show called Bobby Dazzler.
For all the information about where I'm going and when,
go to sarahmillican.co.uk, thanks!