When the old ones are, sadly, no longer the best

THERE are certain core expectations of every functioning Scot. Our lower lips are supposed to tremble at the laments of lone pipers and the poetry of Burns.

We are meant to go beetroot at the first blink of summer sun and to deny our national inferiority complex until we are blue in the face.

To that end we are supposed to claim places for Dalglish and Law alongside Pele and Messi in any alltime footballing dream team. If that puts Maradona on the subs bench, so be it. And we are programmed to imagine the Italians are as jealous of our haggis as we are of their penne all’arrabbiata.

Oh yes, and a new expectation so self-evident it hardly needs stating: laughing like drains at the new series of Still Game on Fridays is mandatory. From Durness to Dumfries, Portree to Prestonpans, everyone in Scotland hoot. It’s the law.

Nine long years we waited for Scots comic actors Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill to settle their differences and write more episodes of their beloved BBC sitcom.

Nine years OAP characters Jack Jarvis and Victor McDade spent missing in action in the fictional Glasgow enclave of Craiglang as the Tories returned to power in Westminster, Rangers landed with a thud in the Third Division, Scotland ripped itself apart over independence, Billy Connolly discovered he had Parkinson’s disease, Sir Alex Ferguson left Man United and Britain voted to leave the EU against Scotland’s will, providing the cue for the nation to rip itself apart all over again.

Confident

If ever there were a sight for sore Scottish eyes it was Jack and Victor back at the Clansman skewering barman Boaby with more classic, made-in-Glasgow put downs. If ever Scotland could use a giggle it was in the year 2016 – and never were we more confident of the home-grown talents who could supply it.

So confident was the BBC, in fact, that for the first time, a new series of Still Game was networked across the UK, affording households in England, Wales and Northern Ireland the opportunity to hoot along with us.

This was huge. It felt like Hogmanay when the first episode was broadcast three weeks ago, said Ford Kiernan. ‘There was no traffic outside, the pubs were quiet. It was odd but a comforting odd.’

Away on First Ministerial business in Iceland, Nicola Sturgeon tweeted Kiernan’s co-star Hemphill that she would be ‘catching up as soon as I get home’.

Ah, such cosiness. Wha’s like us? We’re just one big happy family up here.

Which makes me all the sorrier for what I have to say, but facts must be faced.

We do get that Still Game Series 7 is not funny, don’t we? I know we wanted it to be – that, since it was going out in England too, we may even have needed it to be. But, in our truthful souls, we can see the magic is gone, can’t we?

Episode four is tonight and I am starting to wonder if it will bring more sadness than mirth. For, once upon a time, Jack and Victor really did have something to offer to the rest of Britain.

They were the defiant widower everymen in the autumn of lives which felt like home to us. Scratch the surface of the Glasgow patter and find below it universal fears, regrets and sadness.

There was the time Jack found romance in a charity shop and, for a while, neglected his best pal. Victor’s heart would ache over the son who said he’d come to visit but never did. Both men lamented the ageing process, which put them at the mercy of neighbourhood neds young enough to be their grandchildren. But they soldiered on, accepting their fate with touching grace and humour.

Those men represented more than inner-city life for Scottish oldies. They were the tragicomic story of retirees everywhere.

How ironic, then, that the first series to be networked across the UK finds the show at its most insular, angry and guttural.

Moving, beautifully nuanced storylines now give way to weekly bouts of name calling (p **** , t**t, t **** r, d***) and clunky, puerile slapstick. We wanted the rest of the UK to see Scottish comedy at its finest and instead discover a sitcom at the fag-end of its charm.

Divisions

It could be our fault. Scotland is an angrier, ruder place now than it was when we last met Jack and Victor. For all the writers’ determination to leave politics out of it, maybe they reflect the bitter divisions in their audience in spite of themselves.

As we argue over almost everything – our identity, our past, our future – reaching all of us with comedy becomes harder, impossible even. But, in the week that Dad’s Army creator Jimmy Perry died, it is worth noting the most withering put down heard on that show was Captain Mainwaring’s ‘You stupid boy!’

Five years after the death of Only Fools and Horses writer John Sullivan, we should remember the worst Del Boy ever called Rodney was ‘a plonker.’

Comedy seemed to exist elsewhere in shows like these – not in the name-calling per se but in the capers which led to these catchphrase put-downs, in the brilliantly drawn characters, in the expertly orchestrated farce.

Still Game had it once. But why is it, I wonder, that Scots feel more at home with comedy classics such as Dad’s Army and Only Fools than I suspect the English ever could with Jack and Victor’s 2016 incarnation?

We are a nation of extraordinary creativity and wit but one in flux. Are we now too politically wedded to our own output? Must we patriotically back whatever Scottish horse the BBC deigns to take to the network races whether we truly believe it has legs or not?

From the ecstatic reviews of Scottish critics (I see none similar from other parts of the Union) it seems we must.