20 YEARS OF HOGMANAY HIGHS & LOWS AY
She’s been BBC Scotland’s belle of the bells for two decades, but as she finally hangs up her mic, Jackie Bird raises a glass to the leaky sets, the celebrity guests, the showbiz mums – and reveals the truth about THAT outfit...
WHAT are you doing at Hogmanay?’ It’s a common question at this time of year. But there can’t be many people whose answer ranges from pleading with Marti Pellow to get his kit off, harassing Paolo Nutini’s mum, suffering mild hypothermia, being set on fire, getting hammered by the media, and telling Scotland its world-famous knees-up has been cancelled.
Most employers would ensure a bit of staff rotation on the biggest party night of the year, but it’s been my joy to be landed with the midnight shift on Hogmanay Live for a couple of decades. I should have known it wouldn’t always be plain sailing. The word Hogmanay comes from the Norse Hog-maan-aye, which roughly translated means: to give anything on the telly on December 31 a kicking.
My launch into Hogmanay TV was inauspicious: in late 1999 the millennium was approaching and so was the end of the world, according to some party-poopers. The BBC must have had its doubts because it decided to blow the entire licence fee for the year ahead on a feast of New Year’s Eve programming.
Every star on the telly firmament was brought in at great expense to see in the new millennium around the world, including marking the sunset on the most northerly part of the British Isles, the Muckle Flugga lighthouse. The tiny problem was that no one wanted to spend a once in a lifetime event stuck on a rock off Shetland, no matter how scenic.
The network producers needed someone Scottish and had approached anyone who’d ever been an extra on Take The High Road, but all were washing their hair. I’m sure they were about to screen test the bubbly lady on the BBC reception desk when someone suggested me. I prevaricated for five minutes then grabbed the gig with both hands and convinced the bosses that not only could I read out loud for a living as I did on the news, but I could also walk and talk, occasionally simultaneously.
Ithe only one. Come the big event, the network presenter thanked an eloquent Kirsty Wark in a stunning Edinburgh backdrop and threw to me on Shetland as I battled to stay vertical in the teeth of a gale.
Two RAF men from the nearby base were on the ground holding onto my ankles while another two held down the buffeted camera.
The planned glorious sunset was wiped out by cloud. The vision mixer in London took one look and cut to what was happening in Bali.
This moment of TV gold merited a hilarious spoof by Still Game’s Greg Hemphill which, if you ever think you’ve had a bad day at the office, you should seek out if you ever need reminded someone can have it much worse.
As I recovered from hypothermia (and, perhaps, to avoid any insurance claim I might be considering) BBC Scotland offered me the chance to front the next year’s Hogmanay Live alongside the lovely Dougie Vipond.
This was my first proper foray into the world of light entertainment and on the most watched programme of the year, too. We had fabulous guests including The Proclaimers, Ricky Ross and Eddi Reader. With that sort of glittering Hogmanay talent, what could possibly go wrong?
In the event though I upstaged them all, albeit inadvertently. Dougie V later admitted to me that during the deluge of negative publicity that resulted from the programme he’d feared for his own career simply by association.
Initially, I thought it had all gone swimmingly. I hadn’t talked over the bells, as had been poor Robbie Coltrane’s misfortune a few years before, and even felt quite pleased with myself for singing live accompanied by the sublime guitarist Martin Taylor. I still insist the show would have been a success, had it been on the radio.
In those innocent days before social media could aim its slings and arrows instantaneously, we had to wait 24 hours to get the audience response. And it emerged there had indeed been a response, an overwhelming one, focusing not on the content of the show but on how I looked. The headline Tacky Jackie Boobs At The Bells was one of the kinder descriptions of my outfit, deemed too revealing for a skinny gal. Maybe that was predictable comment from the tabloids – but surely the august pages of the broadsheets would have a more considered view?
Sadly no, as The Herald went, quite literally, for the jugular: ‘The offending article made her neck seem scrawny as a piece of battery-farmed poultry.’
It seemed my chest cavity and meagre embonpoint had left viewers the length and breadth of Scotland gagging on their black buns. I often wonder if The Proclaimers got a fright when they woke up to another headline which declared The Pair That Ruined Hogmanay.
But I can now reveal for the first time there was another duo who were partly culpable for my fashion faux pas. In the weeks leading up to the show I had lunch with two journalist friends; let’s call them Pennie and Connie, for those are their names.
I’d found the offending top in a shop and dragged the girls back there to get their opinion which they duly pronounced ‘beautiful’. Only, as our lunch contained more liquid than was helpful for artistic critique, their verdict was ‘sh’boooti-ful’ and my fate was sealed.
I can see now the top was desperately unflattering, but I blame the champagne goggles.
Despite the furore – and believe me, it went on for weeks – I was asked to do the Hogmanay show again while the top got its own television series on an adult channel before being modelled by a comparatively buxom Tam Cowan in a red wig (true) and sold off for Children In Need.
YOU will not be surprised to learn that next time, more planning went into finding my outfit than for the Normandy landings. But hiccups aside, one of the best things about presenting Hogmanay was the guests I got to work with. Down the years there’s been criticism that the show doesn’t attract the really big names, but it’s not for the want of trying.
Few A-listers and their entourage want to spend Hoggers working unless you beckon them with a prohibitively large cheque. Thankfully there have been some major stars who have put their own celebrations on hold to entertain the troops at home and for that I have been grateful.
Wet Wet Wet’s Marti Pellow joined us in the early noughties when we broadcast from Edinburgh Castle. It’s a fine global landmark but a rotten makeshift TV studio.
The place was freezing and there were buckets everywhere collecting leaks from cracks in the ancient stone ceilings. I genuinely feared that a few of our lighting technicians would see out the old but not necessarily see in the new.
During rehearsals, Marti saw the folk bands and fiddlers who were joining us that year and whose costumes for the show were on the informal side. He decided to follow suit and ditch his planned dress suit for the woolly jumper he’d
arrived in. The wardrobe department was apoplectic as the audience were turning up in their party clothes. I was planning to wear a Vivienne Westwood-style tartan long dress and Marti and I side by side would have looked like the Dowager Duchess of Grantham and her gardener.
Wardrobe and I joined forces to convince Marti to get his kit off but he was having none of it. With minutes to go we took him to have a peek at the audience in their glad rags before I personally helped pull the woolly sweater from his back. Showbiz is a dirty job but someone’s got to do it.
Another year we were lucky to have Paolo Nutini at the peak of his fame. Paolo’s parents Alfredo and Linda came along and were understandably proud if slightly bemused by his meteoric rise.
I wanted to have a brief chat with Linda on the programme but she would only do it with Paolo’s approval. Paolo may be a songwriting superstar but at heart he’s a quiet, lovely man who was reticent, probably understandably, about having his mum on the show. Again, a bizarre exchange:
‘Let me talk to your mum?’ Paolo: ‘Nope.’ Me: ‘Please let me talk to your mum?’ ‘Nope.’
AND so on. It took a long time but finally I convinced him it would be a nice touch on a night renowned for bringing families together. I was very grateful and every time I bump into him I always ask after the lovely Linda.
For the producers of Hogmanay Live the challenge has always been how to cater for such a unique range of viewers: from children allowed a special late night to the very elderly, or those who just felt very elderly after watching the show. Down the years we tried to mix traditional with contemporary and I’ll admit not always successfully.
Back in 2003 the glamorous ladies from Liberty X in their mini kilts breathily pouting their hit, ‘Sexy, everything about ya’s so sexy’ may not have entirely been to the taste of those viewers still missing Andy Stewart and The White Heather Club. Alternatively our plethora of energetic ‘trad bands’ usually infuriated those who wanted to hear a familiar pop tune as they waited for the Bells.
Highlights for me included the year we got a swing orchestra to accompany Ford Kiernan belting out jazz classics, the mayhem that accompanied the Bay City Rollers – trying to get them all onto the same stage at the same time was like herding cats – to a performance that brought together Nicola Benedetti and our Hogmanay stalwart Aly Bain in a poignant violin and fiddle duet that sent shivers down your spine.
Aly and his partner in crime Phil Cunningham were as synonymous with Hogmanay as first foots and lumps of coal and were performing on the programme long before I turned up.
One year the BBC press office staged a festive photoshoot with Phil and me in front of a candlelit Christmas tree. It was such a lovely image that the cameraman and the producer ran towards me, arms outstretched, to presumably hug me for such great work. In reality they had realised that my hair had caught fire and I was indeed smouldering for the camera.
Make-up was called for to snip off the offending singed bits, Phil got gags to last a lifetime, and the press office got stories entitled Jackie’s TV terror which gleaned more publicity than any boring old photoshoot not involving self-immolation.
While there have been Hogmanay dramas entirely of my own making there have been others for which even I bear no responsibility. As you can imagine there is a huge and magnificently talented team behind the scenes on New Year’s Eve. Many have done it as long as I have and we all agree the best thing to do would be to shift Hogmanay to July.
Working on the show the nearest I get to danger is teetering around in vertiginous heels or saying something career-endingly stupid, but in the depths of winter we have guys and gals hanging off Edinburgh Castle rock for hours waiting to capture the sights and sounds of the midnight moment.
Hogmanay Live was the most ambitious and complex production made by any broadcaster in Scotland and timed to the nanosecond, but the weather occasionally threw a spanner in the works.
During rehearsals in 2003, we started getting word that conditions had turned nasty and events throughout the country, including the massive Edinburgh street party and concerts, were being cancelled.
As the danger of winds and ice became more apparent, I had the unfortunate task of switching from frivolous light entertainment mode to my serious news head and informing Scotland many of their parties were off and there was a danger to life. The same thing happened in 2006, but both times our show went on.
The only year I almost had to call off was shortly after I’d fallen ill. Late 2012 I suffered a twisted bowel and then sepsis.
My surgeon said that hosting Hogmanay was a non-starter, my family was horrified at the very idea, but ask anyone who has been seriously ill what they crave, and it is normality.
HOGMANAY was my normal and I was damned if anyone else would annoy the great Scottish viewing public in my place. Anyway, I couldn’t let down the fashionistas desperate to see what I was wearing.
Unfortunately that year we were presenting the programme outside from a scaffold platform high above Princes Street. From that incredible vantage point I could see the majesty of the castle, a sea of revellers, a huge queue for the Portaloos, and a sea emanating from some of the revellers who’d got fed up with said queue.
I’d been love-bombed by the BBC, presumably mindful of their insurers, who had bought me layers of the finest thermals, but it was so cold that during my last couple of links I performed like a bad ventriloquist as my mouth was partially frozen.
But for someone who’d first footed at death’s door weeks earlier, it was a marvellous night.
This year BBC Scotland is trying something new at New Year and good luck to them. Whether or not you personally like the party atmosphere that’s supposed to surround Hogmanay itself, it’s a significant date and at the very least a chance to kick back and take stock.
So I will raise a glass to all that’s gone and to all the fun to come, and I hope you will too.
Happy New Year!