I WILL TELL YOU THIS
Gregor Fisher takes us on a tour of Glasgow and its people
Iwas brought up in a little village just outside Glasgow, called Neilston. It’s a wee place on the way to Ayrshire. It lies in a pretty damp valley and used to be a cotton mill town. It’s pretty rural, pretty agricultural – pretty idyllic, actually. I had a very pleasant childhood there.
I was adopted, but I didn’t know it when I was a boy. My mother was in her fifties when she adopted me. I was three years old and I just totally accepted that she was my mum. But when I reached about 14 I started to think, ‘Um, she can’t be my mother, she’s too old.’ I wasn’t shocked when I found out. It’s more interesting for other people looking in on my life than it is for me living it. To me, all this is my normal life, so shock never entered into it. Of course I was interested, maybe mildly surprised, but it was never traumatic. I could tell you that it was. I could call up The Sun and get it plastered on the front page – ‘My adoption hell’ – but it just wasn’t like that. I was brought up by a woman who was my mother, because she played the part, and by God she did it well, and that was the way it was.
Until I approached journalist Melanie Reid to help me in 2014, I only knew about a quarter of my family history. We’ve written a book called The
Boy from Nowhere and together we’ve discovered the other three quarters. I have two older siblings. One, Margaret, is retired and lives on the island of Tiree. The other, Una, still lives in Neilston. I also had a half-brother who died quite recently.
‘I was always the one staring out the window, a bit of a dreamer’
School was a waste of time, much to my regret. I don’t know if it was laziness or bad teaching or a combination of both, but I was always the one who was staring out the window, a bit of a dreamer. I think I was a huge frustration to everybody, especially my eldest sister Margaret, who was a teacher, and I think a particularly good teacher. She did try with me, but I think she failed miserably. I went to pretty rough schools as a result. If you passed your eleven-plus, which I didn’t, you were given the option of going to grammar school, Paisley Grammar or something, which was a wee bit further up the ladder.
I went to the local secondary modern – you know, where men were kitted out for the workplace and girls were taught domestic science to feed the drones who went to university. So, no, school was a bit of a waste. I think when you’re young and daft at school you don’t think about what life is going to be like in thirty years’ time.
They used to do Gilbert & Sullivan operettas at school, and one particular teacher collared me in the corridor and thrust this libretto, this script or whatever you call it, at me and said: ‘You’re doing this part.’ And I said, ‘No, sir, no, please don’t, I’ve done nothing, I did nothing, why me?’ To cut a long story short, I quite liked it. It was good fun and I enjoyed it. I’m sure I wasn’t any good – I’m sure I was bloody awful – but I liked it and I suppose then I thought ‘maybe’. But I genuinely never considered that I could make a career out of it.
When I left school, I had a series of deadend jobs. I cut grass, I made sticky plaster that used to get exported to Africa. I probably would have been sacked from most of these jobs. Going to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama wasn’t something that sat well with my mother or father. They thought ‘ get yourself a trade’. My parents were that much older – my mother’s father had fought in the First World War. They knew what the Depression was all about because they’d lived through it. They knew how uncertain life could be, so I suppose from their perspective it was good solid advice.
I didn’t spend a great deal of time in Glasgow as a child. My mother had an aunt who lived in Shawlands, and maybe once in a blue moon we would get the bus into the city to visit her. I didn’t really get to know Glasgow until I went to the Royal Scottish Academy when I was 18 or 19. I didn’t finish the course because I was offered a job at Dundee Rep that paid £35 a week. I didn’t really sit well at drama school. It was full of people telling me that I wasn’t speaking properly. Anyway, I don’t think you can be taught to act. So, I don’t know if I really trained to become an actor. I’m still in training now, as far as I’m concerned.
All the places in Glasgow that I used to go to are gone. Every time I come back I say, ‘Where’s this? What’s happened here?’ I was on Byres Road the other day, and I said: ‘What’s that?’ The Chinese are building student accommodation. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Okay.’ And it’s not the Royal Scottish Academy any more – it’s the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Conservatoire! Get a grip! A) That’s a French word, and B) What’s that got to do with Scotland? So it’s all change nowadays.
It’s not so much favourite places that bring me back to Glasgow. Places have never been that big for me – I suppose because most of my
life has been fairly transient, especially when I was a child in children’s homes and things. It’s people that matter to me. I have lots of friends. There’s one there – that’s Monica Brady. We first met at the Dundee Rep in 1976. It’s seeing familiar faces, and people you know and love in Glasgow, that’s what does it for me. It’s not because I love the view of the Kelvin or looking down Buchanan Street to St Enoch’s or anything like that, it’s always people. That’s what brings me back here. There’s a familiarity to Glasgow that I like and that’s quite cosy but that’s not the draw. I shared a flat in the city with Willy Wands, the producer of Whisky Galore, my latest film. That’s Glasgow for me – it’s these people, it’s these connections. We were all kids growing up together. I’m doing panto in the city at the moment,
Cinderella at the King’s Theatre. Acting – pretending to be someone else – is a very strange occupation for an adult human being to have. I’ve been doing it since I was 24, dressing up as somebody else. But when that somebody else is an Ugly Sister… well, you think maybe I should’ve stuck in at school! I think I’d really like to have been a builder or an architect. One of the great passions in my life is finding old buildings and restoring them. I’ve done it in France, and I want to do another one.
I don’t get a lot of hassle in Glasgow. I think perhaps it’s to do with me having played Rab C Nesbitt – some of his aura of slight menace might have rubbed off, making people think, ‘I’d better not, he might give me a Glasgow kiss!’ Rab is a Glasgow character, but I never thought of him as a Glasgow stereotype. The great thing with Iain Pattison’s writing is that Rab is a universal character. You can find him wherever you go, whether it be Glasgow, Liverpool, Rome, Paris or Sydney. He exists if you walk down 42nd Street to the bus station in New York. He may look different, he might be wearing an old bomber jacket, but that’s Nesbitt.
He’s essentially somebody who’s been forgotten, from the so-called underbelly of society. There is nothing new about Rab C Nesbitt. The Greeks had people like Rab C Nesbitt coming on at the interval. He’s the guy you wouldn’t want to sit next to on the bus – not that the Greeks had buses, but you know what I mean. He was the one who got away with speaking home truths about the people who were in charge in Sparta. I enjoyed playing him, but I don’t miss running around Glasgow in a string vest with my nipples hanging out.
I don’t think I really consider myself to be a Glaswegian. A cockney needs to be born within the sound of the Bow Bells. But then what makes a Glaswegian? Maybe I’m an adopted son of Glasgow.
‘It’s people that matter to me. I have lots of friends’