Desperately seeking the real Susan
She’s the gloriously irrepressible Strictly contestant who won the nation’s hearts. But behind the sequins and smiles is a woman who self-harmed, was sectioned... and tried to take her own life at 16
IT was perhaps inevitable that when susan Calman exited strictly Come Dancing, she would have a little cry. after all, she’d been choking back the tears since week one. Wrapped in the arms of dance partner Kevin Clifton she sobbed as she thanked everyone on the show (even those mean judges!) and informed Tess Daly that dancing with ‘this handsome, handsome man’ had been ‘the highlight of her life’. aw.
Yet while Calman might have lost out on strictly, waltzing off into the wings one final time last weekend with mascara-stained cheeks after being roundly beaten by alexandra Burke in the dance-off, you get the sense she may have inadvertently won a rather bigger prize.
Because something remarkable has happened during the ten weeks Calman has been on strictly: the diminutive Glasgow lawyer who once worked with death row prisoners has become something of a national treasure.
With her infectious dance moves, willingness to dress up in ludicrous costumes (the Wonder Woman get-up springs inescapably to mind) and those easy, endearing tears, Calman became an unlikely show favourite, beating technically more competent competitors because simply watching her, it turned out, was something of a joy.
as Dawn French – one of the many celebrity fans she picked up along the way – said, she was a ‘delightful tiny dancer’.
Calman, a comedian best known for acerbic remarks on radio 4 panel shows wasn’t, perhaps, the most likely candidate for strictly Come Dancing, the glossy light entertainment show that has a reputation for breaking up marriages and turning the lumpier contestants (see: Ed Balls, ann Widdecombe) into national laughing stocks.
or maybe that was the point. at 4 foot 11 and with a rather more curvaceous figure than some of the other female contestants, producers perhaps saw in Calman a ‘joke’ figure, the sort that would garner a few piteous laughs and be out in the first few weeks.
They couldn’t have been more wrong. ‘There’s nothing in this world that I wanted more than to be on strictly,’ Calman declared at the start of the series, and if her ebullience and enthusiasm each week were anything to go by, there really wasn’t.
SHE and Clifton would perfect their routines in the salubrious surroundings of pollokshaws Borough Hall in Glasgow’s south side (Clifton’s dedication to their practice regime is said to have caused a rift with wife Karen, another strictly pro dancer), before wowing TV audiences with their impressive high-energy dances.
as the weeks went by, she appeared not only as Wonder Woman but also a painter/decorator and – on several occasions – in full sparkles and sequins. It was a stark contrast from her usual uniform of tweed suit and tie.
The judges’ remarks were surprisingly praiseworthy. Darcey Bussell declared her ‘guilty of having too much fun’, Bruno Tonioli called her ‘weird but wonderful’ while Craig revel Horwood remarked drily of one particular performance: ‘I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything quite like that.’
Clifton, whom she clearly adored, was even more fulsome. ‘You have been the absolute epitome of joy and happiness,’ he informed her when they were eliminated, ‘which in my eyes makes you a beautiful dancer.’
as well as French, Calman’s coterie of celebrity fans includes JK rowling, scots Tory leader ruth Davidson, and even the legendary dancer and choreographer sir Matthew Bourne, who remarked that she and Clifton ‘exemplified why we love strictly’. High praise indeed.
rowling, meanwhile, was so invested she turned up in the audience at the Blackpool special to cheer her on. It’s an extraordinary rise to mainstream fame for a comedian who once cheerfully admitted to having played to ‘two people in a gym hall’ and used to catch the £1 Megabus from Glasgow to Manchester to perform gigs, dossing down in bus stations to save money.
Yet Calman has never quite done things by the book. The daughter of sir Kenneth Calman, chancellor of Glasgow University, former chief medical officer for England and scotland and chairman of the famed Calman Commission on scottish devolution, she was educated at the private High school of Glasgow, and while fiercely intelligent described herself as the ‘short, slightly overweight lass who was a bit bullied at school and who made everybody laugh’.
Boys never interested her, although she ‘went out with a couple of young gentlemen when I was 17 just to check’, and she came out as gay to her family at a young age because, she says, ‘I don’t like lying and if I hadn’t said anything, I would have been lying’.
she says she knew she was gay when she won the role of Virgin Mary in her primary school nativity and burst into tears, telling her mother she couldn’t play Mary ‘because it would mean kissing a boy’.
a more challenging struggle, and one that has lasted her whole life, is with depression, which has haunted her since she was a teenager.
‘I felt alone, isolated, con50p
fused about why I couldn’t just make myself happy,’ she wrote in her autobiography. ‘I’d started cutting myself. I would sit in my room punishing myself, a common thing to do among many depressives, and I still have the scars on my arms from that time.’
At 16 years old, she tried to take her own life, revealing ‘I took a load of pills one day because I couldn’t see any way out.’
As a result, she spent time in an adolescent psychiatric ward, sectioned for her own safety under the Mental Health Act. ‘I was terrified,’ she wrote of that period in her life. ‘No doors on the toilets or showers, being watched 24 hours a day.’
But the experience also strengthened her resolve to work on her mental health and make sure she would never return, and once on an even keel she went on to study law at Glasgow university, where she excelled.
She won the prestigious Judge Brennan scholarship and spent three months in North Carolina working with death row prisoners, an experience she described as ‘all very Silence of the Lambs’ and one that led her to a lifelong abhorrence of capital punishment, a view she expounded in her Radio 4 show Susan Calman Is Convicted.
She had always been interested in comedy – a throwback perhaps, to those early school days when making others laugh had been a way of getting through the day – but with a sparkling law degree she entered the legal world, and spent years as a practising Glasgow lawyer specialising in data protection and Freedom of Information.
By 2006 she was on her way to being made partner in her firm, Dundas & Wilson. But she found herself increasingly dissatisfied with the job and would often moonlight at comedy clubs, trying out her first tentative pieces of stand-up material to half empty rooms. Eventually, boosted by reaching the finals of the prestigious Funny Women competition, she quit the law. ‘When I walked out of the office for the last time, it was a great feeling,’ she said once. ‘No matter how bad it gets, I always think that I could still be sitting in an office working on the same corporate file for six months. It was that sense of being myself for the very first time and that is exciting, not frightening.’
You get the sense however, that there was also a steeliness behind that decision. Before she quit she paid off her car, sold her flat, moved in with her girlfriend and made sure she had enough money to live on for a year.
‘I’m ridiculously sensible,’ she said once. ‘I’ve got ISAs and everything.’
Work, at first, was slow. In her first year on the circuit she earned only £250. The next year it was £400, and £1,000 the year after that. But winning a Scottish Bafta in 2007 helped and before long she had attracted the attention of Radio 4 producers, who put her on shows such as the News Quiz and Just a Minute, where audiences warmed to her no-nonsense Scottish style of humour.
Calman’s appeal is hard to nail down. She is not a mean comedian, and does not garner cheap laughs from pointing out the failings of others. She does not take the Sarah Millican/Victoria Wood route that it’s ‘hard to be a woman’, yet somehow manages to produce comedic magic from her own brand of self-deprecation and searing honesty.
In one episode of Susan Calman is Convicted she talked about her depression, and later wrote a book detailing her experiences. She is open about her sexuality, her lack of desire to have children, and insecurity about her own looks. It is perhaps worth nothing that she shares much in common with Sandi Toksvig, another gay, 4 foot 11 inch female comic who came to prominence through her appearances on Radio 4 quiz shows, and now also enjoys national treasure status.
Calman is also a workaholic, and in recent years has presented children’s shows for CBBC, acted in the TV comedy Fresh Meat, done several gruelling one woman tours, appeared on endless panel shows, presented two separate series of one woman shows for Radio 4 and written a book.
HER Strictly appearance will no doubt propel her career to the next level: she is signed up to dance on the Strictly tour, which will salsa its way around the UK next year with 20 live shows, and she has started a second book. A new series of her radio show Keep Calman and Carry On starts on Radio 4 next week.
Meanwhile, she can be seen on BBC1 each weekday afternoon hosting Armchair Detectives, a curiously addictive game show that combines the puzzle-solving skills of Countdown with an episode of Miss Marple, as contestants attempt to solve a fictional crime played out in dramatic form.
Calman is her usual easy, dry self as host. ‘I have a qualification in forensic medicine,’ she volunteered in a discussion about injuries that would result from strangulation. ‘And look at me now.’
She credits much of her success to her wife, Lee Cormack, a local authority lawyer she met 15 years ago. The pair became civil partners in 2012 and married in 2015, and, while children have never been on the agenda, the couple own five cats, including one named DCI Jane Tennison, the police officer played by Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect (Calman is a huge Mirren fan). Cormack garnered a small amount of fame of her own when she turned up each week in the Strictly audience.
Of their wedding, Calman says: ‘They were two of the happiest days of my life. And, yes, being married does make a difference. I don’t like it when people say it’s just a bit of paper. Not to me it isn’t. And anyway, it’s something gay people fought for over many years.’
This week Calman tweeted that now she’d been on Strictly she had one burning ambition left: to be in Doctor Who. If she keeps the tears at bay, you get the sense anything might be possible.