The Herald - The Herald Magazine
YOU DON’T WANT TO TURN INTO FRANCIE AND JOSIE
Greg Hemphill and Ford Kiernan on the return of Still Game
FORD Kiernan laughs as he rewinds on bygone days when he and writing partner Greg Hemphill would take a break from creating Still Game to watch Countdown. Well, not only to watch Countdown, but to take part, from the comfort of their easy chairs in Kiernan’s Glasgow home. They’d compete against each other. Hard. One afternoon, Hemphill won with a nine-letter word score, and scooped their £10 bet.
“He gave it to me in pennies,” says Hemphill, grinning.
“Aye, I had a jar of coppers in the kitchen,” says Kiernan, producing a wicked laugh. “I thought, ‘F*** him.’”
That sense of fun and mischief once defined the duo. It was this chemistry that helped take the pair from writing the first Still Game stage play in 1997 to go on to create radio sketch show Chewin’ the Fat, and eventually to six series of Still Game, the sitcom which elated much of the nation.
They were both talented writers before they met, working separately, for example, on BBC Scotland’s Pulp Video. But together they somehow created this third person who was more than the sum of their talents. Then came their seven-year estrangement when, from 2008, they huffed and puffed and marched off in different career directions.
Yet, if there’s a residue lingering around the bath the pair used to share, figuratively speaking, it’s hard to see. The Countdown tale tells otherwise. They can laugh with, and at, each other. Yes, they’ve been locked in a room for months again, tied by the demands of writing a new series, but it seems they’ve emerged as the friends
they once were. They’re finishing each other’s sentences, taking each other’s lines and adding another comedic layer until the result is watery eyes and sore ribs.
But in getting back together to write the new series, how much of a hill was there to climb? After all, the pair claimed they were exhausted at the end of series six of Still Game, and felt they had run out of ideas.
“We were super exhausted,” says Kiernan, with the emphasis on “super”. Hemphill agrees and says: “We were. And it’s probably safe to say that if we’d gone on to write series seven, straight after six, we wouldn’t be here now talking to you.”
Kiernan chips in, in more serious voice. “We had to personally expand. It was a great privilege to be locked into a great job, but at the same time, you need time to do your own thing. Greg was 36 at the time. And when you’re younger you don’t want to be defined by one thing. You don’t want to turn into Francie and Josie.”
Hemphill agrees. “Actors go through that phase [of being defined by a single success] but sometimes come out the other end.” He adds: “When Leonard Nimoy brought out his first autobiography it was called I Am Not Spock. When he brought out his second it was called I Am Spock.”
Kiernan lets out a huge laugh at his chum’s reference. Both know they can afford to be a little Francie and Josie. During the Separation Years, Hemphill wrote stage show The Wickerman for the National Theatre of Scotland, directed a short film starring Frankie Boyle and will have a new film aired on BBC Scotland at Halloween.
Meantime, Kiernan starred in 2012 comedy movie Song for Amy set in Ireland and on television with The Field of Blood. Both have written with other people. Yet, were they sick of people asking when Jack and Victor were returning?
“When we started working together again we swapped stories about how many times we’d been asked,” says Kiernan, smiling. “And it was a lot. An awful lot.”
Gradually, in 2013, the pair began chatting again and plotted their return, with a show at the Glasgow Hydro. A planned four nights turned into 21. But then unimaginable tragedy struck when Kiernan’s 13-year-old son Sonny passed away. If Kiernan and Hemphill had any unresolved issues about their fall-out they vanished entirely from that second.
“Greg was cognisant of what had been going on in my life, but you can’t let that change the business,” says Kiernan. Hemphill concurs. “No you can’t, although your character informs your writing. But we just wanted to be funny.”
Before flipping open the laptop to recommence writing, the pair “got tore into a packet of Tunnock’s tea cakes”. It was a great ice breaker. But could they still be funny, given the years and experience which had passed? Would they struggle to find their concession passes to Pensioner World?
Hemphill’s face suggests they did, for a while. “When we began to think about ideas for the Hydro show we actually talked of an interactive game show.”
“F*** me,” says Kiernan, laughing at their own folly.
Hemphill continues: “Then we thought: ‘That’s not what Still Game is about.’ Then
we looked at taking the best bits, but we realised: what are we doing? That would have meant doing a show which was trapped in amber, but couldn’t progress.”
Kiernan and Hemphill agreed they would write a new show for the Hydro, and despite the vastness of its 10,000-seater hall, attempted intimacy and familiarity by setting it in Jack and Victor’s homes and the Clansman pub.
“The thing is, if we’d done a Best of Still Game for the Hydro we probably wouldn’t have had the courage to go off and write a new series,” says Hemphill. “The Hydro experience gave us confidence, reminded us of the mechanism for bringing Jack and Victor back. But what we also did was we watched every episode of the sixth series, just to get our heads back into the characters, so we knew instinctively how they would speak.”
Kiernan says: “Then we started and the ideas fell out of us. We knew we wanted a big, schmaltzy ending for example [a Bollywood music extravaganza, all very Slumdog Millionaire, and amazing].”
Thankfully, the comedy muscles built up for the Hydro stint were still pumped for the new series. The plot lines leapt out and the pair came up with dialogue faster than two Glasgow windiehingers. But was there a thinking whimsy could have crept into their writing, a sense perhaps that life’s too short, so let’s do something mental?
“That’s a good question,” says Hemphill. “Yes, that will always be a pitfall you can drop into.”
He continues: “Every time you sit down to write there is always that temptation. But then you look at shows like Roseanne, when the family won the Lotto …”
“They jumped the shark,” chips in Kiernan. He’s referring to Happy Days, when Fonzie once leapt over a shark while waterskiing, and the term is now used to suggest a script has lost the plot.
Hemphill says: “We did an episode in which Winston [Paul Riley] won 35 grand but by the end of the episode he’d lost it all. That’s where it’s great having two writers. The other can always pull the mad one back. And you have to think of the audience. They own the show as well. They know the characters as well as we do. They’ll say to us, ‘Isa wouldn’t say that.’”
Kiernan says: “You have to remember this is about a bunch of broke pensioners on a housing estate. They’re not going to have cash to spare. This isn’t the brothers in Frasier.”
The writer explains how the characters are set in stone. “In the early days we gave Isa [Jane McCarry] a mean husband. This bolstered her up. So she’s had to be tough and you can’t change this experience. Yes,
Still Game is about a bunch of broke pensioners, not the brothers in Frasier
once we had a ‘relationship’ between Navid [Sanjeev Kohli] and Isa, but that was just a wee tingle.”
Hemphill cuts in, adding clarity. “Yes, that’s because we don’t want to turn Still Game into a soap opera. There was one episode in which my son returns and after filming we realised it was soap so we had to go back and re-shoot the ending, making it lighter and softer.”
There will be no political references in the show. In Craiglang, the independence referendum never happened, Brexit will never be bothersome. Nicola, Ruth and Kezia have never been born.
“We avoid politics, religion and sport because they are so divisive,” says Hemphill. Kiernan nods in agreement and reveals how porridge left a bad taste. “Once we wrote, innocently, a piece of Jack and Victor dialogue about Victor taking salt in his porridge and me taking sugar. And we had the pair reckoning if you take salt you’re truly Scottish and if you take sugar you’re English. But people watching this saw it as a metaphor, that this was something to do with political allegiances.” He adds, laughing: “F*** that stuff!”
Hemphill smiles and adds: “What we do is look at issues that affect the gang’s lives. We look at urban renewal, for example, in a fun way, in a way you’d expect Jack and Victor to deal with it … ”
“It’s the minutiae of their lives,” says Kiernan, picking up the baton. “At one point [in the new series] Navid’s store becomes a Spar, but he’s not happy being part of a chain store.”
The pair say they had a great time filming the new series. “The lighting on the show now looks different,” says Hemphill. “We look more natural as the characters, given we’ve aged a bit in between times. There’s less acting involved,” he says, laughing.
Keirnan laughs and looks at his partner. “That’s right. He would get a nine o’clock call to be on set and turn up at 4pm like Marilyn Monroe.”
This time the sitcom will go straight on to the BBC network. How important was it to them? “We had no involvement. We were just told,” says Hemphill.
Those already converted to Craiglang were screaming for the show to return. When BBC Scotland recently announced tickets were available for audiences to see the new series in a cinema, (when the laugh track is recorded using a live audience) 200,000 people applied for tickets.
“And I got a letter from a fan in Thailand,” says Kiernan. “There is a big pensioner culture there, with pensioners living with relatives, and kids are watching the show on the internet.”
If the show grows Down Under, the pair would take a stage show to the Antipodes. The Mrs Brown story has lead the way. But Hemphill says there are no plans for the pair to tackle a new sitcom together. “We’ve looked at ideas and gone up the food chain with them, but the feeling is anything we want to say can be said in Still Game.”
I got a letter from a fan in Thailand. There is a big pensioner culture there, with pensioners living with relatives, and kids are watching the show on the internet