Susan Calman: Tall Tales – comic’s first tour in 10 years is raw and riotous

Tall Tales is Susan Calman’s first new standup set for 10 years, designed to show us the real Susan behind the cuddly personality we see on TV. Given that was the premise of her 2016 touring show too, it’s clear that a decade away has done little to develop – but also nothing to diminish – the Glaswegian’s onstage shtick. This is a compelling return, stuffed with experiences and insights gleaned from that standup downtime, and which undergirds familiar tales of cat fancying, being small and entering menopause with a heartfelt reckoning with recent bereavement and rocky mental health.

That last material feels raw, as she tells us she only returned to standup (the thing she feared the most, she says) to shock herself out of a bad depression. That would be hard to credit based on her show alone, which finds Calman in her element: faux truculent but palpably adorable, fulminating at the indignities of short, lesbian, middle-aged womanhood, revealing to us the unseen idiocies of her gilded TV career. Her supposed flaws are arrayed for our pleasure: her catastrophising (cue a fun anecdote about being trapped on a hotel balcony), her addictive personality, and – in the peachy set-piece that closes act one – her hormonal lust for righteous revenge.

That number, about her newfound love for golf, finds Calman at her best, when the occasionally generic midlife patter becomes uniquely, idiosyncratically her. See her story about her granny’s recipe for “Italian mince”, her penchant for the 80s TV show Hart to Hart, or the tale of terrorising her neighbour with the Weeping Angel (from Doctor Who) she keeps in her back garden. The behind-the-scenes stories culled from her work on daytime telly are homelier, although she does derive from her Strictly Come Dancing stint a bulletproof standup set-piece about, ahem, personal grooming.

All of this is given emotional heft by the recent parental loss and experience of depression, which – while the point isn’t laboured – clearly knocked Calman for six. This may, she says, be her last standup show. If so, this pint-sized tall tales teller goes out with her head held high.