Modest star with much lustre

SAD to hear that the reliably great character actor Jake D’Arcy passed away at the weekend.

Jake, left, was in some of the best Scottish films and TV of the past 40 years and his work always made them a wee bit better.

You’ll have seen him in Taggart, Still Game, Tutti Frutti, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but most memorably as Phil Menzies, the hapless coach trying to train a football team and grow a moustache in Gregory’s Girl.

Despite a CV that took in Scottish film, TV, and theatre appearances alongside Rachel Weisz, Billy Connolly, and David Tennant, Jake was a modest man, who never volunteered to strangers that he was an actor. Instead, he’d tell them he was a plumber. He certainly made me laugh like a drain.

Jake had the air of a distracted ferret but the timing of an atomic clock: even now, the scene in Gregor y’s Girl where a pupil slides away from the school di nner queue warning ‘Don’t touch the ravioli, it’s garbage’, immediately foll owed by Phil cheerfully requesting ‘Ravioli please’ still gets a laugh from me.