Rab C Nesbitt

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I was more than pleased to see that Paramount 2 are currently repeating some old Rab C Nesbitt shows. It seems they've had a whole weekend of showing it, but I've missed it all except for a couple this evening - ah well, I'm sure they'll do them again... I don't think these have ever been on since their original broadcasts back in the early 90s, though I could be wrong.

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Rab's return
He’s off the booze and Mary Doll has her own cleaning business in a cracking Christmas special Gregor Fisher returns as Rab C Nesbitt for a one-off Christmas special

In the dark of a Glasgow cinema, nine years are reduced to an interruption as a familiar, dishevelled figure veers into view. His hair is washed, but still unkempt in a grimy headband; his jacket is new, but still rumpled over a string vest; his face is older and unshaven, teetering between a scowl and blank incomprehension. His voice is unmistakable. Time has wrought subtle changes on Rab C Nesbitt but his essential nature, the irascibility and acute sense of persecution, defy revision.

This is the first time he has appeared on screen since 1999. We are attending a special preview of his forthcoming Christmas special. Within the opening moments, Nesbitt is berating a security guard and railing against his own misfortune. Eating ice creams in the cinema’s back row, the principal cast and crew are tight with anxiety. How would the audience, after nearly a decade of his absence, respond to Nesbitt?

“It got a good reaction,” says Ian Pattison, the show’s writer and creator, in a hesitant voice. “But that’s only anecdotal. We gave it a good shot. We sweated to make it. When it’s on the television, I’ll be watching from behind the couch.”

The return of Rab C Nesbitt — in what, for now, is a one-off programme, is a big cultural event in Scottish terms. He first appeared in the sketch show Naked Video in 1986, with the opening episode of his own sitcom being aired over Christmas 1988. Within two years it was being broadcast across the UK and, at its height, it attracted 6m viewers. Nesbitt seemed a product of his time, encapsulating the unemployment and disaffection of 1980s and 1990s Scotland. Govan, where he lived, was a place of closed-down shipyards and heavy drinking, and Nesbitt, an out-of-work alcoholic who presided over a dysfunctional family, was pitilessly shaped by his surroundings.

He became a national icon, with one of his string vests displayed in the People’s Palace, Glasgow’s museum of social history. He even featured in a Time magazine article on Scotland. But Govan is a different place now: many of the tenements have been refurbished and the BBC and STV have moved into the area, which is being marketed as a “digital media village”. Wine Alley, where the Nesbitts were supposed to live, is boarded up. Comedy, too, has evolved in the intervening years. So is Nesbitt still relevant?

“He is a universal, common-man creation, while all the world is happening around him,” says Gregor Fisher, the actor who brings Nesbitt’s inherent rage to life. “That might have been Margaret Thatcher, it might now be the one-eyed son of the manse or the global financial meltdown. He reacts to what the world throws at him. He’s got interesting and, hopefully, funny things to say about his situation, whether in the 1990s or 2008.”

Fisher went on to enjoy a career as a fine character actor post-Rab. He appeared in films such as Love Actually and The Merchant of Venice and played Grandpa Potts in the stage version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He exudes a graceful patience, comfortable, it seems, to re-engage with a character he felt compelled to cast aside nine years ago. After eight series, four television specials and a stage show, this accomplished actor had grown weary of playing Nesbitt, and he phoned each of the cast members personally to explain his decision to walk away.

There were rumours of tensions among the actors, in particular between Fisher and Tony Roper, who played Jamesie Cotter. The cast and crew also had to cope with the arrest and imprisonment in 1993 of Eric Cullen, who played one of Nesbitt’s two sons, for possessing child pornography. Cullen, whose character was known as “Wee Burney”, had been sexually abused as a child and attracted considerable sympathy. He died three years after his spell in jail, from a heart attack.

“It makes it much more interesting when people say there was tension,” Fisher says obliquely. “There was the tension that comes from working very hard. It’s not necessarily a huge fireworks display of friction, but everybody in their own way is trying to do their best work. There’s this myth that it all ended in disaster, but not as far as I’m concerned. It ended because it was time to do something else. I don’t make any apologies for that.”

Whatever the strains, Fisher and Roper were prepared to revive their characters for a stage show two years ago. From those initial discussions, the concept of a one-off TV special began to take shape. Colin Gilbert, the programme’s director and producer, had long been keen to resurrect the show, but Pattison needed time and space to allow the idea to take on a more amenable form.

Like Fisher, Pattison earned enough from Rab C Nesbitt to provide a comfortable financial existence. Both men felt the irony in discussing the show’s return over an expensive lunch. It was watching TV coverage of the Glasgow airport terrorist attack 18 months ago, while working in Budapest, that refocused Pattison’s mind on Nesbitt and his life.

“I thought, ‘Rab will have a take on that. I wonder what it would be?’ That was the portal into opening his world up to me. Then it was a case of thinking how he and the other characters would have moved on. The challenge was how to make him relevant to today. If I didn’t feel I could do that, I wouldn’t have got back into the arena again.”

So Nesbitt has sworn off alcohol and now chairs a temperance group, having discovered religion. Mary Doll, his long-suffering wife, played by Elaine C Smith, runs a cleaning business with her friend, Ella Cotter. Gash, the Nesbitts’ eldest son, is married and has become a vegetarian. Only Jamesie Cotter remains defiantly unreconstructed, apart from the hooded tracksuit top and gold earring he now wears. “For somebody his age from Govan, it’s a massive leap,” Roper says of the jewellery. “It would have convinced him he was utterly attractive to any woman — mistakenly, of course.”

Roper admits to reservations about reviving Cotter on screen rather than on the stage, because he was worried about trying to look the same age as the rest of the cast — at 67, he is 14 years older than Fisher and 17 years older than Smith. Once back in character, however, and with his white hair dyed, his scepticism diminished and he gleefully admits that he and Fisher often disrupted filming by laughing helplessly during scenes.

In the intervening years, Smith has been reluctant to return to her role as Rab’s wife. When the show ended, she was invited to casting sessions in London after the programme’s success, only for the producers to be dismayed when she turned up with long, dark hair, rather than Mary Doll’s blonde wig.

She is pleased about the way Pattison has moved the characters on. “It was wonderful to see the development of Mary and that she and Ella would get up off their backsides and run a cleaning company,” she says. “But I always felt the characters were ahead of their time and that was why there was such a resistance to them in certain elements of Scottish society. That always used to annoy me, because there was a part of Glasgow society in particular that wanted to pretend that Nesbitt didn’t exist.

“I look at the Royle Family, for instance, and that’s the Nesbitts’ living room. I look at The Simpsons, and that’s the Nesbitts. But it’s that classic thing in Scotland where we sneer at our own. I don’t think it was like that among viewers, but it was among the so-called cognoscenti.”

The forthcoming programme was shot over seven days in and around Glasgow — and Pattison, who was on set for the first time ever, was struck by the actors’ familiarity with the roles, the way they immediately fell back into the voices and characterisations. Fisher once complained that the iconic string vest he wears became a torment as it chafed his nipples during the filming of outdoor scenes, but he has no regrets about returning to the role, he says.

Fisher famously rejected the idea of playing Nesbitt when Pattison first approached him for a Naked Radio sketch in the mid-1980s, fearing that it was a one-dimensional and trite condemnation of the west of Scotland drunken male stereotype. It was only when he read the script and recognised “what happens between the lines, where he comes from, what he’s about”, that he changed his mind. Nesbitt’s character had enough depth to be redeemable, despite his pugnacity.

The show evolved to deal with such bleakly dark topics as devil worship, cannibalism, contract killings on homeless people, incest, sexual harassment and neo-Nazis, but always leavening the grimness with a sharp humour. The Christmas Special remains blithely unconcerned with political correctness — anal sex is among recurring gags — but there is also sentimental affection.

Fisher and Roper cautiously welcome the prospect of Rab C Nesbitt returning for a more prolonged run, while Pattison is more circumspect. All three are quick to say no decision can be made until the audience figures and reviews for the Christmas Special are known.

But Rab C Nesbitt is back, and already it feels like he never left us.

Rab C Nesbitt Christmas Special, Tuesday, December 23, 9pm, BBC2

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Older, wiser and sober – Rab C Nesbitt returns to our screens
14 January 2010
Craig Brown

He first appeared in the 1980s, railing against the ravages and inequities of Thatcherite Britain. But the Govan philosopher Rab C Nesbitt will next week shamble back on to our screens for his first full series of the 21st century. Dried out and working part-time as an addiction counsellor to help those he sees heading on the same path to oblivion that he had been travelling in the 80s and 90s, the new cleaned-up Rab hits 60 and has intimations of mortality.

According to the series creator Ian Pattison, sobering Govan's most famous drunk was in keeping with the show's gritty take on reality. He said: "I just felt it would have been unrealistic to have him continue drinking at this age and still be coherent. It would have been cheap not to have moved him on – I don't think people live that way. They don't get to their 60s without making a few compromises about their lifestyles. That made it more interesting for me, trying to explore a sober Rab and make it funny and relevant. I couldn't resort to him falling over and swearing just to get a laugh. I would hope it's still fun – it's just a different type of fun."

The new series finds Rab, played by Gregor Fisher, facing a whole new set of contemporary challenges: campaigning against mobile phone masts; reuniting his son Gash with his young daughter; and, more alarmingly, taking up cross-dressing as part of a complex social security fraud.

According to Dr John Cook, media lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian University, his reappearance after almost a decade was due in part to Dr Who's success, which has fuelled television bosses' enthusiasm for bringing back past hits. Dr Cook added that both shows came with existing audiences and were therefore a safer bet than trying new sitcoms. But Dr Cook said Rab was still relevant: "I think when Rab C Nesbitt came along, it was like Scotland's reply to Thatcherism. In a sense, he was a symbol of the rise of the underclass. Those ideas are still here today, the Channel 4 show Shameless is very much about that."

Reluctant to revisit the show, it took the 2007 Glasgow Airport terror attack to persuade Pattison to think again. He said: "I was in Budapest watching it on television and it suddenly flashed through my mind, watching this jeep crashed into the departure lounge with flames leaping around, I wonder what Rab would make of that? The only way to find out is to write about it and so we put the wheels in motion. It was never forced, it had to feel right."

However, Scotsman television critic Paul Whitelaw was less enthusiastic about the show's return: "I think it's a really bad idea. I think the show had run out of steam even before it finished back in 1999. I'm quite bemused by its return. It may just come back and then quietly go away again."

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Depp gets inspiration for accent from Glaswegian comedian
15/03/2010

Johnny Depp has said he watched countless episodes of 'Rab C Nesbitt' to perfect his Glaswegian accent to play the Mad Hatter in 'Alice in Wonderland'. The American actor admitted he found the hit comedy difficult to understand at first, but soon got into it.

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I've not seen the film yet, but why he'd want to copy an accent that hardly anyone can understand is beyond me!

[Colston]

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Rab C Nesbitt set to return for 10th series
18th May 2010

The BBC has commissioned another series of Rab C. Nesbitt, the hit Scottish sitcom starring Gregor Fisher as a rude, dirty, lazy and foul-mouthed unemployed Glaswegian. The new series, which will consist of six episodes, will become the 10th series of Rab C Nesbitt. The sitcom first started as a pilot 1988, and then ran solidly for 8 series up to 1999. The BBC brought the character back for a one-off Christmas special in 2008, an episode which was well received by audiences, leading the BBC to commission a full 9th series.

The last series, broadcast in January and February of this year, saw Rab wrestling with a full complement of demons and plenty to get off his string-vested chest. Reunited with his granddaughter Peaches, Rab struggled to stay off the drink and keep in touch with his new found religious faith. Ian Pattison, who has written the sitcom since its inception, will once again be writing the scripts and the show's original creative team will be reunited for the new series, with viewers no doubt be keen to hear Rab's take on recent events.

Colin Gilbert, the show's producer, says: "It's great to know that in these days of hung parliaments, economic turmoil and volcanic ash that Rab's voice will still be heard above the din. Returning after a ten year gap Rab managed not only to delight his existing audience but also to attract many new and younger aficionados to the fold. We're confident that the tenth series will continue to build on this and that it will attract many more converts to Rab's unique take on the world."

Cheryl Taylor, Controller, Comedy Commissioning said: "Rab C is one of the most enduring and iconic comedy creations of the 90's and we hope he will continue to spread his wit and wisdom to as wide an audience as possible."

The new 10th series of Rab C Nesbitt is scheduled for broadcast on BBC Two in 2011.