Gregor Fisher - one of Scotland's greatest exports

 It may seem bizarre that a TV character should become such a national treasure when most of what he utters is completely incomprehensible to anyone outside Glasgow, but that’s down to the brilliance of Gregor Fisher. However, as with other Scottish comedy legends such as Billy Connelly, Rikki Fulton and Stanley Baxter, Fisher is no one-trick pony.

He first came to my attention in BBC Scotland’s sketch show Naked Video back in 1986. We used to tune in every week, welcoming its company of characters into our Essex living room. It was hardly ground-breaking material but nonetheless made us laugh more often than not. Gregor was one of the DIY scientists and also hosted the Outer Hebrides Broadcasting Corporation’s regular news bulletin. However, I distinctly recall the debut of a grubby-vested alcoholic street philosopher who later became Rab C Nesbitt. 

Naked Video was still ongoing when Rab was granted his own series, and the Rab C Nesbitt spin-off soon became one of the most popular series on BBC2. Mum didn’t really ‘get’ it but Dad and I would lap it up. It took a lot to make Dad chuckle out loud but the misadventures of the dysfunctional Nesbitts, Cotters et al often succeeded. Rab’s addresses to the audience – usually prefaced by an indignant “I’ll tell you this!” - about anything from devolution and City of Culture to Christmas marketing were especially entertaining and, for all their fights, he always held a smidgeon of love and respect for his ‘Mary Doll’ (Elaine C Smith), notably when she inflicted a wee ‘Glasgow Kiss’ on a troublesome jobsworth! 

Such was our love of the show that Dad and I attended its live tour in 1991. A cavernous Brentwood sports centre wasn’t ideal but it was both confusing and reassuring that there were no concessions to geography in the language used. The Govan accents were just as impenetrable as they sounded on screen. It really shouldn’t have worked. The series could easily have slipped into parody of Scottish stereotypes but the energetic way Gregor Fisher brought Ian Pattison’s scripts and Rab’s character so vividly to life helped make Rab C Nesbitt a Caledonian classic. Not sure about the twenty-first century revival, though….

Rab wasn’t the only Gregor Fisher creation from Naked Video to spread his comedy wings. ITV turned his ‘Baldy Man’, complete with single-strand combover, into an alternative Mr Bean but it really wasn’t very funny. Far better were the short, sharp Hamlet cigar ads. They didn’t turn me into a smoker but Fisher’s performances were hilarious. 

With Fisher’s star status secured, in the mid-Nineties the Beeb revived The Tales of Para Handy. I’d vaguely recalled The Vital Spark from the early Seventies, featuring John Grieve and Roddy McMillan as the original ‘Para Handy’, but the humour proved rather too gentle for my thirty-something self. I think I watched only one episode, which may or may not have featured this appearance by a young David Tennant. 

I don’t recall giving Gregor’s 2008 series Empty even a single viewing, and I always allow his most famous film, Love Actually, a very wide berth whenever it is broadcast. In 2000 I’m pretty certain I witnessed ITV’s new version of The Railway Children (must have been at Mum and Dad’s!) featuring Fisher in the role of lovable stationmaster Perks. In the trailer I gave a silent cheer when he seemed to share star billing with Jenny Agutter, Richard Attenborough and Michael Kitchen.

At least it demonstrated that Gregor was no longer shackled by the ghost of Rab, nor even a Scottish accent.  I presume he didn’t give Oliver Twist’s Mr Bumble the full Fulton Mackay either, but even his contribution wouldn’t have lured me into the dark world of Dickens for love nor money. 

Indeed I have seen very little of Gregor Fisher in his more mature years. An exception came just after Christmas 2018. Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders was a lovingly-crafted, atmospheric feature-length period piece which had me enthralled. John Malkovich’s turn as an off-kilter Poirot was predictably eye-catching but my attention was diverted by the unheralded appearance halfway through of Gregor as the rather sad, ageing ventriloquist Dexter Dooley, who met a tricky sticky end. 

I would love to have seen the two men swap roles. Rab would have spotted the murderer straight off, and given him a Glasgow Kiss for good measure. That’s the sign of a memorable character and an actor with such a natural gift for comedy.

TV Treasure: The late, lamented Jill Dando

 It was around lunchtime on Monday, 26^th April when news filtered through my BBC office close to Broadcasting House that Jill Dando had been shot dead. We were all stunned. It wasn’t just that she had been the Corporation’s new ‘poster girl’; she was possibly the most popular TV presenter in the country. Her face was on that week’s edition of Radio Times, a new series starting just the day before. 

With a cool elegance, a trendy but not showy hair style and commonly photographed in long-legged pose, Jill had often been likened to Princess Diana. Like me, she was born the same year (1961) but that fateful day the list of similarities grew by one: senselessly killed in her prime, less than two years apart.  But, just as Diana’s death in Paris should never define her life, so Jill Dando should not be remembered merely as ‘that news presenter who was murdered’. 

Jill wasn’t really like Diana. She was the daughter of a local journalist not an earl, and attended an ordinary comprehensive school near her Weston-Super-Mare birthplace before herself studying journalism at a Cardiff college, not flunking all her exams at a swanky all-girl prep school. She trod a well-worn path from print to local radio to regional TV news before being invited up to West London to present news bulletins in the mid-Eighties. 

I may well have seen Dando occasionally on afternoon duty, possibly even on the One o’Clock News if I had the day off. As a young, single staffer she also got the holiday shifts and I may well have watched this Christmas week news bulletin in 1990. Her celebrity strengthened that decade and she branched out into light entertainment, guesting on big-ratings shows like Noel’s House Party and This Is Your Life but for me she became closely associated with the Beeb’s Holiday show. Moving away from the old desk-bound format, she was perfect for introducing or actually making film reports from some gorgeous location or other, and presented a New Year special from Australia in 1999. 

She also possessed the ideal poise and voice, authoritative yet warm, for introducing royal-related broadcasts such as the 1996 Royal Variety Performance and upmarket awards shows like the BAFTAs, scheduled two weeks after her death. She was also the obvious choice as the BBC face of major charity appeals, such as the one for Kosovo, again in ’99. 

By this time she was ubiquitous on the BBC. When not presenting the News or strolling along a sun-drenched foreign shore, she had become, with Nick Ross, the co-host of the live monthly reconstruction and witness appeal show, Crimewatch UK. Indeed just nine days before her murder, she had been on the programme, doing her thing. A month later, she wasn’t the host; she was the main story. That edition was especially harrowing to watch, particularly as the police had precious few witnesses despite Jill being shot on her doorstep in broad daylight. Was it family, was it a professional hit as revenge for her Crimewatch association or just the product of a warped nutter with a gun. The Met plumped for the latter but their conviction was eventually quashed on appeal. 

In September 1999, five months after her murder, I returned from lunch to find metal barriers outside Broadcasting House. Inside the entrance hall was a hushed, heavy atmosphere. Unaware of the reason I asked a fellow staff member who informed me the memorial service to Jill Dando was taking place at next-door All Souls Church, and the main participants would soon be heading out of the building. I waited a few minutes to observe the sombre procession: Jill’s fiancé, elderly dad, various BBC execs and her friend and fellow tennis partner Cliff Richard in a very showy ‘look at me!’ blazer. 

It was all a sharp reminder of the esteem in which she was held, not only by the broadcasting elite but also by a nation. A Google search for her name inevitably throws up a host of hits relating to ‘shooting’, ‘murder’ and ‘mystery’ and I was unable to resist watching a few twentieth anniversary documentaries last year. Jill was undoubtedly heading towards national treasure status but she had already achieved enough to make this viewer’s list of TV Treasures two decades later.