FAT CHANCE!
BBC show too offensive to make today, says Kiernan
IT became one of Scotland’s most popular comedy sketch shows and was known for its risqué humour.
But co-creator Ford Kiernan has said Chewin’ the Fat could not be made today – it would be deemed too offensive.
He and co-star Greg Hemphill shot to fame on the BBC sketch show before going on to write hit sitcom Still Game. However, Kiernan, 58, said many of the Chewin’ the Fat sketches would be too controversial for modern audiences.
He said Karen Dunbar’s randy character Auld Betty, the chain-smoking family who use voice boxes and a scene in which a female ice-cream van worker lifts her skirt to two boys would not make the cut now.
Kiernan admitted the programme
‘Stuff you couldn’t get away with now’
did attract complaints for some of its content but said they were allowed to ‘get away with murder’.
‘A lot of the stuff on Chewin’ The Fat you couldn’t get away with now,’ he said. ‘The likes of Karen pulling her skirt up I don’t think you could do.
‘We did get letters at the time. Somebody wrote in and said, “As funny as the nation thought that sketch was, would that sketch work if it was two wee lassies at the van and it was a man?”
‘Me and Greg went, “No, it wouldn’t be as funny”. So the point was made, don’t write any more sketches like that, so we didn’t.
‘Another thing is dirty Auld Betty. You couldn’t have her on the telly now.’
Chewin’ The Fat started as a radio show and later ran for four series on TV between 1999 and 2002.
Kiernan also told how the medical firm that supplied the voice boxes for the chainsmoking family sketch were horrified to find out they were being used to make fun of throat cancer sufferers.
On the Open Goal podcast, he said: ‘We asked the medical company if we could hire them for television for me, Greg and Karen Dunbar to use and they never asked us what for.
‘I think they thought we were making a health advert. When they found out they wrote back and said, “We don’t like this at all”. They said we had misrepresented them and were not happy. They never made us take them off but eventually we slowed down on them.’ He also ruled out bringing back Still Game after the final TV series of the comedy was aired on the BBC in 2019. He said: ‘Never in a million years.
It’s done.’