How Susan became the Hogmanay GOLDEN GIRL
She’s the lawyer-turned-comedian who became a national treasure after her star turn on Strictly. And now she’s taking on the ultimate challenge... as the new face of BBC Scotland’s biggest night of the year
ON New Year’s Eve 2017, Susan Calman posted a picture of her cat, Pickle, sprawled in front of a roaring fire. ‘Hogmanay party in full swing,’ she wrote, preparing to hunker down for a cosy night in with her wife Lee Cormack and their five cats.
This year, it’s fair to say, Calman’s New Year will be slightly wilder.
For in the biggest shake up to the BBC’s Hogmanay show in more than 20 years, the diminutive comedian will be taking over from Jackie Bird as the host of the nation’s favourite New Year TV programme.
‘It’s going to be a fun night packed with great comedy, entertainment and music,’ Calman declared recently.
‘I always like to get a party started and hope everyone will join me to welcome in 2020 in spectacular fashion.’
Spectacular or not, it will certainly be different. Presenting the festivities alongside Calman will be Scots comedian and radio host Des Clarke and BBC Scotland entertainment presenter Amy Irons, all strangers to the Hogmanay show in previous years.
Gone, along with Bird – who stepped down from her role on Reporting Scotland this year before knocking back an offer to present a live segment of the revamped Hogmanay show – is folk musician Phil Cunningham, who has appeared on the programme every year since 1999, and fiddler Aly Bain, a stalwart since 2004.
According to BBC Scotland’s head of commissioning Steve Carson: ‘We’ve changed things a little this year so that we can bring all the key live moments from around Scotland, as we always do, as well as bringing great music for the hundreds of thousands who join us in their living rooms.’
That means some parts of the show will be pre-recorded at BBC Scotland’s HQ at Glasgow’s Pacific Quay a full five weeks early.
‘We’re pre-recording bits of the show so we can secure super duper guests,’ Calman tweeted, before revealing that one of those ‘super-duper guests’ will be the Scots rock band Travis. Golly.
WHAT, one wonders, would the Reverend I.M. Jolly have had to say about it all?
Yet the evolving nature of BBC Scotland’s Hogmanay show – who can forget, for example, the disastrous ‘Live into ’85’ from Gleneagles, featuring a disorientated Chic Murray freezing on-air while an out-oftune pipe band blared in the background – means that when it comes to bringing in the Bells on the nation’s number one channel, little is off-limits.
For Calman, 45, it is certainly a departure. A lawyer turned stand-up comedian who came to wide-scale attention after a surprisingly successful stint on Strictly Come Dancing, she has turned her hand to a number of presenting jobs in recent years, including BBC2’s Great British Menu, which she is currently filming in Stratford-upon-Avon.
But there is something unique about the Hogmanay show, for decades now the most accurate barometer in most Scottish homes after a few drams of when the bells strike midnight. As Bird rightly says: ‘It’s a hugely prestigious night for BBC Scotland.’
Given the programme itself has been renamed Susan Calman’s (Not Quite) End Of Year Show, the pressure must surely be on.
She, however, seems to be taking things in her admittedly small (she is only 4ft 11in) stride. ‘Hogmanay is such an important occasion across the country and I’m delighted to be on hand to help usher in the New Year,’ she said.
Calman’s road to TV stardom is an unusual one.
The daughter of respected surgeon Sir Kenneth Calman – the chairman of the famed Calman Commission on Scottish devolution and Chancellor of Glasgow University – she was brought up in Glasgow and educated at the city’s private High School, where she was, according to her own recollection, the ‘short, slightly overweight lass who was a bit bullied at school’.
Although she dreamed, secretly, of a life on the stage, it was not encouraged at home. She said: ‘My parents are lovely people but we weren’t a family of performers – my father is a doctor. If I’d said to them I wanted to be a comedian, it would have been tantamount to saying I wanted to be a prostitute.’
IF she seems taken aback by her own comedic success nowadays, those who knew her back then are even more surprised. At a school reunion a few years ago, one old school pal came up to her and said: ‘I don’t understand it, Susan, you weren’t even funny’.
As she remarked later: ‘It probably came as quite a surprise to everyone that this is where I’ve ended up.’
Fiercely intelligent and a naturally bright student, she was nevertheless haunted by depression from a young age, and at 16 tried to take her own life, revealing that, ‘I took a load of pills one day because I couldn’t see any way out’.
‘I felt alone, isolated, confused 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.’
As a result, she spent time in an adolescent psychiatric ward, and was sectioned for her own safety under the Mental Health Act.
‘I was terrified,’ she later wrote. ‘No doors on the toilets or showers, being watched 24 hours a day.’
But Calman rallied and resolved never again to let herself get herself into such a situation (she later wrote a memoir about depression, Cheer Up Love). Buoyed by high marks at school and feeling it the sensible thing to do, she found herself at Glasgow University, where she studied law. There she came across Sister Helen
Prejean, who campaigned against the death penalty in the US, and inspired by her words applied for and won a scholarship to spend a summer in North Carolina studying state executions.
She spent time interviewing prisoners, including a serial killer, on death row, and had a shotgun waved at her while visiting a trailer park. Another summer, she spent time at the United Nations.
But if these experiences promised a life of high-octane excitement, returning home to work for a corporate law firm, reality set in.
‘You have high hopes for what you’re going to do as a lawyer,’ she said. ‘And then you end up doing a telecoms line for the contract for the Edinburgh trams.
‘Lots of late-night reading and conference calls. I felt suddenly frustrated by the confines of being in a suit.
‘My childhood self would have thought, “What are you doing, Susan? Surely by now you should be in Hollywood, not sat at a desk doing corporate diligence”.’
She eventually quit, having done a few small-time standup gigs around Scotland, to go full-time. She was canny about it though, paying off her car, selling her flat, moving in with her girlfriend and making sure she had enough money for at least a year before she left.
SOMETIMES you miss having people to talk to,’ she has mused about office life. ‘[Showbiz] can be a lonely job. But it was the right decision. I loved being a lawyer. I thought it was a good job. But I left at the right time – it wasn’t long before the crash happened and a lot of people were made redundant.
‘Some would say leaving was a slightly stupid decision but I think it was the right one. I miss it – but not that much.’
Her comedy career started slowly and she claims she made just £250 in her first year from professional gigs. But by 2012 she had a critically acclaimed show about equal marriage at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and was starting to catch the eye of commissioners on Radio 4.
Steady gigs on shows such as the New Quiz started flooding in. Her comedy has often tackled difficult subjects, and she has talked openly about her depression and sexuality.
Not that it has always been appreciated. In her book, Cheer Up Love, she relates how she discussed her suicide attempt during a live show, only for one Glasgow heckler to respond by shouting: ‘Did you manage it?’
‘What I’ve found about comedy is that if you make people laugh you can tell them things that might otherwise be uncomfortable,’ she once said.
Thus she has produced two series of her Radio 4 programme, Susan Calman is Convicted, which covers issues including the death penalty, nationality and body image, while stand-up shows have never shied away from detailing her personal life.
She and wife Cormack have been together for more than a decade and entered a civil partnership in 2012, before marrying in 2015.
She credits Cormack – a Glasgow-based public sector lawyer who, on her Twitter page, describes herself as ‘much funnier than [Calman]’ – with much of her success.
‘They were two of the happiest days of my life,’ Calman recalled of her wedding days. ‘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. It’s something gay people fought for over many years.’
Children were never really on the agenda for the couple. As Cormack once remarked: ‘It was something we toyed
with superficially a number of years ago and then decided absolutely not, that it wasn’t for us.’
Instead, they have their five cats – Pickle, Dr Abigail Bartlet, Olivia Pope, Daisy Fay Harper and DCI Jane Tennison – and live in domestic bliss in Glasgow’s South Side.
But if Calman has retained anything from her previous life as a lawyer it is a fearsome work ethic.
Maintaining a home in Glasgow while filming primarily south of the Border means she is away for long stints at a time – she is currently in Stratford-upon-Avon filming Great British Menu for nine weeks – and seems never to say no to a project.
Her CV is a TV cornucopia, from cosy teatime show Armchair Detectives to Secret Scotland, a Channel 5 show about the country’s hidden gems, not to mention a second book called Sunny Side Up, inspired by her time on Strictly Come Dancing.
Then there are regular cameos on QI, The News Quiz and a podcast series for the BBC entitled Mrs Brightside, in which she discusses depression with a host of other celebrities.
Whether Susan Calman’s (Not Quite) End of Year show will become a regular fixture on our TV screens depends on how this year’s stint goes down. Scottish TV audiences are notoriously loyal and resistant to change, and may take a while to warm up to the new format.
But none of that is likely to put Calman – a woman who has faced down serial killers and the judgmental eye of Strictly’s Craig Revel Horwood – off the job.
As for Bird? Well, after so many years in a television studio she will finally be footloose and fancy-free on the biggest night of the year.
‘Having a free night after all these years means I’ll certainly be up for a party,’ she said. Or perhaps just a quiet night in with the cats.