Sarah Roberts Credits A Little Princess for Standup Career
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- Sarah Roberts won her first open-mic competition at 28, quit her job the next day, and has been doing standup consistently for five years, framing delusion as a professional survival tool.
- The 1995 A Little Princess film adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel shaped Roberts at age eight; she nearly shares a name with protagonist Sara, who uses belief in imagined worlds to withstand a cruel headmistress.
- Roberts anchors her philosophy in Sara's line 'Believe in something just to make it seem real?' and applies it to M6 service-station nights after bombing to stag-do crowds and to a 'meaningless nine-to-five' of sending emails.
- Roberts re-reads Sara as 'not just a fantasist — she's a standup comedian,' arguing that fantasy is strategy rather than escapism and that her fantasies helped prepare her for 'a bigger, more exciting life.'
- The essay doubles as promotion for Roberts' show Scary Movie 7 at Monkey Barrel 2, Edinburgh, running through 30 August, and closes with a solicitation for readers' own cultural-awakening stories at the Guardian.
Why it matters: The piece is framed as a personal essay about a childhood film but functions as both an Edinburgh Fringe show plug for Sarah Roberts and a reader-engagement vehicle — the closing paragraph invites Guardian readers to email their own cultural-awakening stories, turning the memoir into a solicited follow-up series.
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