If Sir Ian McKellen had been born in Glasgow right now he’d be playing a glue-sniffing bouncer with bi-polar disorder. We’re our own worst enemy. Even programmes made in Scotland portray most Scots as loveable chancers on heroin and incapacity benefit. Imagine if every TV show from America was about a cowboy eating hot dogs on the electric chair. Just once I’d love to see a sitcom based on Dundonian transgender ballet dancers living on a barge.
I couldn’t act at all but I got a couple of parts as an extra with a line or two. I was a cheeky young gardener in a Play for Today. There was a bit where a bunch of us were supposed to shout abuse at Russell Hunter, who was the star, as we walked by in the distance. I couldn’t think of anything else to say so I just shouted ‘Clitoris!’ over and over again. You could hear it quite clearly when it went out on telly. I think the producers just couldn’t understand my accent but it baffled a lot of viewers in Scotland.
Later, I was a cheeky milkboy in an episode of Dramarama, starring Mark McManus. Taggart! He slept in his dressing room quite a bit and would occasionally stumble into mine in a dressing gown and ask if I had any fags. There was none of the tedium an adult would associate with being an extra. I was getting paid to be off school. It was like finding the cheat codes for the universe.
Kids had to have chaperones on set, so I got to meet some interesting characters. One woman I had was an adorable 50-something Glasgow mum. She would go on about her passion for Richard Chamberlain (‘a waste of a good man’) and generally gossiped at me like I was cutting her hair. My favourite was this moustachioed socialist guy who would discourse on what he’d do to various politicians and celebrities if he got them alone in a room. If you’re stuck in a Portakabin for long enough with anyone – even a young kid – you’ll eventually just start being yourself. His marriage, he confided, had been in trouble because of his libido, but had been greatly strengthened by the arrival of AIDS, which stopped him wanting other women.
‘Used to be a pretty girl would smile at me and I wouldn’t be home for three days. You caught anything, the doctor gave you a jab and told you not to drink for a while. Not any more. The party’s over.’
I loved people talking to me like an equal. I was always sad when the job was finished and I had to leave the stories and the card games and the bacon rolls. Looking back, that was the start of my interest in show business. I didn’t particularly enjoy the performing but I did love the camaraderie and the sheer variety of folk, endlessly talking shit.
The school had an annual talent show, which my best friend Aiden and I did one year with a filthy act of pretty basic sex material. We were two detectives, talking about our cases as being a bit of a side issue to all the women we’d fucked. It wasn’t even really double entendre; there was clearly only one way you could take it and everybody was horrified. After that they’d make us audition every year for the talent show on our own, and then ban us. I used to look forward to the wee audition, just standing on our own in an empty lecture theatre doing blue jokes to our very elderly deputy head’s flinty, unchanging scowl.
The shows were always compered by two good-looking drama monkeys called Victor and Andy. Their schtick was that one would come on and say, ‘Where’s Andy?’ then go off to look for him while the other came on and went, ‘Where’s Victor.’ I hated those guys and, denied any other role in the show, we’d go and heckle them. I’d like to say it was witty heckling; it wasn’t.
‘Where’s Andy?’
‘You’re a CUNT, Victor!’
We did notice that people in the drama society seemed to be fucking each other. I guess that’s the way of the acting profession everywhere and I salute it. We even thought about getting involved, purely for sexual reasons. I went to a school production of Guys and Dolls as a reconnaissance exercise and decided it wasn’t worth it. There was a girl who was the school’s Sharpay, who was a hirsute lassie routinely referred to as Teenwolf. She had these really hairy arms and kind of lady sideburns. All the guys affected to dislike her but we were all secretly turned on by the fact that she was a known shagger and must have had a muff like Henry Cooper’s armpit.
There was a thing I got into the habit of doing that was basically the start of my comedy career. There were two attractive girls in the debating society and I knew the entrance they used to come into school. I’d hang around there most days, trying to look like I’d just turned up for school early and hung around near the gates without going in, like a lunatic. Each time I would have some little stories and jokes and stuff that I’d go over in my head on the way to school. It wasn’t that I thought I could get anywhere with them – they were a couple of years older and one of them was dating a huge and disturbing Chinese guy who worked as a bouncer. It was more that making women laugh was pretty much all they’d let me do to them – so I really threw myself into it.
I was always able to make people laugh. In fact I remember at school being able to make them laugh really hard. Imagine nowadays if you were only happy with your gig if you’d made someone spit their drink out, or made milk shoot out of their nose. If a joke worked with one girl I’d keep it and maybe add something for the next one – working a little bit like a real comedian and driven by horniness. Actually, exactly like a real comedian.
I was really into The Comic Strip Presents when it was on Channel 4 and Saturday Night Live. I seemed to be the only person in school who watched any of that stuff. It’s easy to forget that while alternative comedy is now the mainstream, at the time it was a real minority interest.
It was watching Ben Elton that first made me aware of green issues. People give him a lot of stick now because he wrote some Queen musical that causes cancer, but I think he did a really good job of introducing green politics to a generation. Also, he wrote Blackadder, so he could write a musical about Ian Huntley and he’d still be alright by me. I’m always amazed that people aren’t more horrified by things like the ice caps melting. To me it feels like living in a nightmare. It’s just as well Scott of the Antarctic wasn’t setting off nowadays. It’d be a pretty boring journal. ‘Day 1. Got there. Day 2. Came home. Went to pub.’ Now if you get to the South Pole you can bring it home in a flask.
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