I wasn't popular at school. I was always the one who handed in their homework on time that everyone hated. So maybe the promoters like me, and the kids, aka the comedians, think, 'Oh, she's a big swat, she's always working, she doesn't drink, she's dead boring.'

I never dreamt of going on stage apart from being Mary in the school play, and I wasn't very good at that. They said I wasn't very good at cuddling Baby Jesus, because Baby Jesus had pen on it. It was a really old, nasty baby doll. I wouldn't cuddle it. Even at five, I was a nasty little bugger.

I'd always written but never performed. I'd written short plays and got a column in the local paper. My first comedy spot was in a really rough pub in Newcastle where they all sat with their arms folded, like 'come on, then'. There's something really nice about making people feel like they're normal. When they laughed, I know that they'd done it too, so I felt normal.

I got divorced, dumped quite dramatically out of the blue, no idea it was going to happen. So I had days when I wanted to cry all day, and days when it was the total opposite, when you just feel you can do anything. If someone said, 'Do you want to perform a heart operation?', I would have said, 'You'll have to get us a couple of books out of the library, and I haven't got a white coat, but I'm sure I could give it a go.'

I'm not going to break up a relationship just to have material for a new show, but that said, this time next year, we might be having a very different conversation.

Subject-wise, you can joke about everything, but it's about attitude. You can write a joke about racism, but you can't be racist. It has to be more funny than it is offensive, and it has to be even more funny than it would be in a normal joke to override the offensiveness.

Someone once said that I look like a primary school teacher, with the mouth of a biker. I quite like that. It wouldn't really work the other way around, looking like a biker and talking like a primary school teacher, would it?

Comedian Sarah Millican, voted Best Newcomer at last year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival, plays two shows at Kilkenny's Cat Laughs Festival tonight www.carlsbergcatlaughs.com