COMEDIAN Sara Pascoe is bringing her Animal tour to Dorset, following the success of her book Animal, 'an auto-biography of the female body'. She tells The Guide what the audience can expect from her show

Sara Pascoe is talking to me about hoovers. Well, specifically, Henry the Hoover and his wife, Hetty. Nope, she’s not comparing their cleaning powers or dust-bag capacities. She’s discussing their personalities. ‘Hetty can never leave Henry,’ concludes Pascoe, after she’s talked me through their complicated relationship. ‘He’s the only other hoover with a face, after all.’

There’s a reason Pascoe’s thought long and hard about these vacuum cleaners’ relationship status. Anthropomorphism is one of the many themes in the Essex-born stand-up’s show, Animal, which is currently touring the UK.

Over the last decade, Pascoe has become of the most in-demand and hardest working stand-ups in the country. Ten years ago she was a struggling actor. These days she’s a panel show regular – on Mock the Week, QI, Have I Got News For You and more – and has hugely bumped up her acting CV with roles in The Thick of It, W1A and Twenty Twelve. And as the Foster’s Edinburgh Comedy Award-nominated comic’s popularity has increased, her comedy has become increasingly intelligent, focused and politically engaged.

2016 was a big year for Sara Pascoe - Animal is her biggest tour yet, and coincided with the publication of her first book of the same name. So, what can we expect from her two beastly creations?

Sara says Animal the stand-up show very different from Animal the book.

"They’re sort of two halves. The book came first and deals with evolution and humans beings as animals – particular female humans as animals – but after writing it I realised there were lots of other areas that I hadn't been able to touch in the book that I have now mined for the show."

Sara's show covers a big range of topics, from evolution and Oedipus to Lewisham wildlife and Jason Donovan. She says she likes trying to find 'light and shade in things'.

"The unspoken theme of the show is how we empathise with other people. So it's dealing with that, but with really silly stories in between. I'm trying to talk about things that really matter to me, but in a way that isn't like a boring TED talk."

Sara has been a vegan since 2009 and talks about veganism in the show.

She said: "I did [comedian] Josie Long’s project: One Hundred Days To Make Me A Better Person. My two things were a prison letter writing scheme and becoming vegan.

"I still have struggles with it. I talk about being a “rubbish vegan” because I think trying to be better is good, and sometimes that makes you feel like a failure. People shouldn't feel bad if they slip up. Everyone has had struggles or accidentally ate chocolate or ate a whole lump of cheese when they were drunk; those things happen and I think it's all right to talk about it. But there are a very small number of vegans who would have us killed. They would have us killed and wear our skin."

And veganism can be a difficult subject to talk about on stage, Sara says.

‘As a comedian, if you sound like you're about to be superior – and that's what people think about veganism; that you feel that you're morally better – you have to undercut yourself, and then it's fine. Talking about being a rubbish vegan is funny. Talking about being an amazing vegan is not. No one wants to hear, "I have far reduced rates of the likelihood of having lung cancer!"

Unfortunately Sara did fall a little behind on her prison letter writing, she adds.

"But I've started again. One of the guys wrote back with very, very sexual letters, so I've spent about eight years working on my reply to him [laughs]."

Before Sara started stand-up she wanted to be an actor.

She said: "I remember being around 11 or 12 and making my sister do really long plays with me, just in the bedroom.

"Then at 14 my mum made me join a drama group as a punishment for having a party when she was out the house, and I fell so deeply in love with it that I knew I was going to dedicate my life to putting on hats and voices."

Sara's first paid acting job was at the Millennium Dome, aged 18 and she then decided to try stand-up.

She said: "It wasn’t a decision. I thought stand-up was really stupid. I thought all comedy was stupid. I had done open mic nights with my guitar, and I'd done spoken word nights with poetry; I was trying everything in order not to shrivel up. I went to watch a friend do stand-up and I thought absolutely everyone was terrible. I hadn't realised that you could take words up on a piece of paper, I thought all stand-up was improvised. So when I saw all these skinny boys with pads in their hands being rubbish I thought: Oh, I can do that. So I started it very arrogantly. But I did a stand-up gig and it was like: Oh, now I know what my whole life has been leading to, every job I'd done, it all made sense."

Sara has said previously that she’d like to go into politics but has now changed her mind, she says.

"In the last 12 months I've spent a lot more time being around politicians, and what I’ve realised from meeting them is that you're so imprisoned. You spend your entire time mediating and apologising. I realised that I have so much freedom as a stand-up to talk about what I want."

Stand-up has made Sara really happy she says.

"Firstly, it’s given me all of my friends. People say, 'It's so important to have friends outside of your job.' I don't. I only have comedian friends – I love their work and I love that they understand my life. But also stand-up is a form of self-improvement, if you choose to use it that way. You use it to work yourself out and to forgive yourself. It's a form of self-acceptance. So that's why it's made me very, very happy."

*Sara Pascoe is at Bournemouth Pavilion with Animal on Friday March 17. Animal: An Autobiography of the Female Body is now available in paperback, published by Faber.