The Eternal Shame of Sue Perkins review – a Bake Off star basks in self-abasement

Perkins’ return to live comedy features some lurid stories of her personal and professional ineptitude, and jaunty tales about vacuum cleaners and a drug-addled trip to a shaman

Shame is what Sue Perkins promises us in this return to live comedy after years away: her public personae withdrawn like the layers of a Russian doll to reveal the true, humiliated person beneath. Who wouldn’t want to see the former Bake Off star, after “30 years in our living rooms”, put on such a show? But it’s not quite what Perkins delivers. Like Dawn French before her, in a touring set purporting to show what a “huge twat” she was, The Eternal Shame of Sue Perkins compiles a series of perky professional and personal anecdotes only loosely connected to that theme, and is judicious with its intimacies.

It is stronger in its second half, which cleaves more tightly to the theme and affords more glimpses behind our host’s brisk demeanour. Act one begins with Perkins alluding to her shame at being middle-aged and tired in an industry dedicated to youthful vigour. The ensuing anecdotes have nothing to do with that whatsoever, as she relates an inconclusive tale about local drug dealers cloning her car registration, and a literal shaggy dog story, more suggestive of pride than shame, about rescuing a wounded pup on a trip to Bolivia.

In neither instance, one senses, does Perkins let truth get in the way of a lively comic yarn. And she certainly tells them well, embroidering each with lurid details of her own ineptitude. See for example the bilious tale, all sobs and dry heaves, of a drug-addled trip for telly to a South American shaman. That skit is not alone in parlaying Perkins’ public life into comedy: another fine Dave Gorman-esque routine, about a story she wrote for a celebrity anthology, obsesses over the statistical likelihood of “being bummed by a Dyson”.

But, away from the showbiz world, the show’s most striking passage is about the breakdown Perkins experienced a decade ago courtesy of a benign tumour on her pituitary gland, pitching her into “a posh One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” scenario, vividly outlined here. The rest of the show, all jaunty tales of skin-deep self-abasement, is entertaining enough. But here alone are her protective Russian-doll shells stripped away, and something more meaningful revealed.

• At Leeds Playhouse on 6 February. Then touring