Great Lives is a download from Radio 4. We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear.

Well now, there's no point in me trying to do a Glaswejan accent, so I'll read out the vernacular description I've been offered of our great life today,

open quote, a Sparky Wee Glesger woman, aka the Flying Scotswoman, close quote.

And she's been chosen by the comedian Susan Kalman.

Susan, who is this Flying Scotswoman?

It's the wonderful and magnificent Molly Weir is the person I've chosen for this great lives.

Someone who's inspired me for many years actually.

And she's your inspiration? Why?

Well it's a curious tale. Molly, we are who a lot of people know from Rent a Ghost or The Flash Adverts is somebody I encountered through her books, actually. She wrote a series of autobiography's best foot forward a toe in the ladder stepping into the spotlight and I read the books before I knew who she was they were in the bookcase at home I've got them with me today. They were gifted I think to my dad in

1974 and I just started reading these books about this woman who grew up in Glasgow, was

a secretary for a time and ended up on the BBC, ended up on the radio.

And as my life has progressed, there are so many strange parallels with Molly Weir that I find her quite remarkable.

She was about four foot ten.

She was tiny, so am I.

She was a tiny Glasweigian woman who with no formal drama training ended up in some of the biggest

shows of the time on the radio and she just did it and in addition to that in Glasgow when she was in Glasgow she was actually a stand-up

she was doing impersonations of Tommy Morgan in the music halls in Glasgow

notoriously some of the most difficult places to perform.

She's actually probably one of the first female stand-ups from Scotland and she's largely ignored,

I think, in comedy terms for what she did. So she's

inspirational to me her life story is and the courage that she must have had at

four foot ten to stand in front of a Glasgow music hall and just do some impersonations

...