She gabbed away with her showbiz pal as the bins overflowed
RISING star Nicola Sturgeon was the closing turn of the Edinburgh international Book Festival, capping a season of glittering appearances by a performer tipped for great things.
As the garbage swirled around the streets of Edinburgh, festival-goers gathered in Central Hall, a refurbished church in West Tollcross, to watch the ingenue schmooze with a more established name.
Her leading man was actor Brian Cox, who has played Lear, Titus Andronicus – and an ageing media mogul with a fondness for industrial language.
‘Before we start, i have a complaint,’ Sturgeon sniffed. ‘i appear to have been beaten in the glamour stakes by a 76-yearold bloke.’
Next to her, Cox perched on his chair, decked out in a candy-red lounge suit and a colour-speckled shirt that may have been a lost Jackson Pollock painting.
Sturgeon described him as ‘a wee boy fae Dundee’ and asked how he made the journey to Hollywood. He recalled his childhood, including the time he ‘plugged school’ to go to the pictures to see Giant with James Dean. The young Cox dozed off and woke up the next morning, necessitating a break-out from the cinema and an encounter with a constable.
‘i’m on my way home, but i’m running late,’ Cox pleaded.
‘Running late, boy?’ the bobby spluttered. ‘it’s four o’clock in the morning!’
Cox gave the audience a crash-course in Dundonian. ‘There are no consonants in Dundonian. if you want to say, “i’ve eaten everything,” you say: “Ah eh eh a’.”
The Succession actor spoke about downplaying his Scottish accent to get ahead in London, where he felt ‘slightly a secondclass citizen’. He had, he said, become less bothered by what others thought.
‘i just don’t give a f*** any more,’ he declared. ‘i can’t wait to reach that stage,’
Sturgeon joked. ‘Nicola, you’ll reach that stage,’ he assured her.
‘I get closer to it every day,’ she quipped.
The First Minister asked whether young Scottish actors still had to follow this path to fame. No, Cox told her, because ‘they have a country’, and observed that since the rise of nationalism in the 1970s, ‘your party and now my party’, had changed things.
Given Cox’s nationalist political leanings, it wasn’t long before the subject of Scottish independence came up, though still longer than it usually takes at First Minister’s Questions.
‘I remember you in 1997 being a New Labour luvvie then, like many people in Scotland, you became sensible and started supporting the SNP,’ Sturgeon teased.
Cox explained how ‘we blew it’ – Tony Blair’s landslide – and particularly lamented the Iraq War.
By the time the independence referendum came around in 2014, he had settled in his new political home.
Cox vowed to return next year to campaign in the referendum that Sturgeon, pointedly, said would be taking place and hinted at a return to live in Scotland, adding he still hadn’t found the right home.
The country could and should be independent, he added, but ‘we have to have the confidence’.
‘We have to have the confidence,’ Sturgeon echoed.
It was a bit of a celeb gush-fest and Sturgeon seemed more than a little Marie Antoinette-ish, gabbing away with her showbiz pal while bin strikes had left the Scotland they both professed to love looking like a council tip.
Yet it would be churlish not to record that the First Minister was a relaxed and even charming questioner, drawing stories out of Cox that were alternately humorous (various noses he had put out of joint in LA) and poignant (the attempted suicide of his mother).
He was enamoured by her. ‘It’s great to be talked to by such an amazing woman,’ he gasped. ‘She’s doing an amazing job for our country, so let her do it.’
We will have to disagree on that point. As First Ministers go, Nicola Sturgeon is a very good celebrity interviewer.