If You Read One Thing…
Enjoy our interview with national treasure Elaine C Smith as she talks turning The Gruffalo Glaswegian
ONE of the most famous faces in Scottish pop culture, you’d struggle to find a more precious national treasure than Elaine C Smith. Whether it’s starring in classic sitcoms City Lights and Rab C Nesbitt, playing Christine O’neal in the BBC’S Two Doors Down, touring the UK on stage or starring in the yearly Christmas panto, every Scot knows Elaine for something.
But something that is maybe less well-known about the actress is her passion for the Scots language and local dialects. This came in handy in 2016 when she wrote The Glasgow Gruffalo, a Glaswegian translation of Julia Donaldson’s children’s book The Gruffalo, about a mouse who meets a monster in the woods.
Now Elaine has just released a translation of Donaldson’s sequel The Gruffalo’s Child – called The Glasgow Gruffalo’s Wean.
“My kids drew me to The Gruffalo. They loved the books when they were younger,” says Elaine. “I realised it was quite a phenomenon and Julia was this prolific writer, and I loved the idea of it being translated.”
“The Gruffalo had been done in Scots, Gaelic, Doric and Dundonian. James Robertson and his company Itchy Coo contacted me and said, ‘Would you be interested in doing a Glasgow version?’
“I said, ‘I don’t know if I could do that’, and then said, ‘If it’s really terrible you have to let me know!’ Luckily, James came back saying, ‘It’s hilarious!’”
When writing The Glasgow Gruffalo, Elaine and her husband Bob sat down and wrote out their
favourite Glaswegian phrases to fit into the book.
“‘Shot the craw’ is just such a great phrase – I had to get that in there, so ‘he leapt up and shot the craw’. I managed to get in, ‘Ask the wee barra what they think,’” says Elaine – “wee barra” means a small, likeable person.
Elaine’s hard work really paid off, with the book becoming an enormous success across Scotland.
“You never know with books, and you don’t know if – because it is called The Glasgow Gruffalo – people will think, ‘Well I’m fae Edinburgh, I’m no reading it!’ But the reaction was great,” says Elaine.
“I did an event for primary school kids at the Aye Write Festival and we had to put on an extra show in the Mitchell Library because it was just so packed.
“One of the highlights was going to a nursery in Govan and they’d done the whole place out as the Gruffalo Wood for me coming.
“Many of the kids’ first languages were Polish and Urdu, and they were now learning Glaswegian. The kids asking me what certain words meant was absolutely joyous.”
Elaine dedicated both of her Glasgow Gruffalo books to her granddaughter Stella. At the beginning of lockdown in 2020, Elaine filmed herself reading The Glasgow Gruffalo and sent it to Stella. “I thought that’ll be a nice wee thing,” Elaine says. “Well, it got more than a million views. I couldn’t believe it, it was lovely.”
One of Elaine’s young fans also went viral due to the reading. “Four-year-old Jessica made her own version, copying my exact intonation and she ended up on TV!
“Her mum posted her version online and it got hundreds of thousands of views, she’s actually getting more gigs than I am out of it!” says Elaine.
Jessica’s video was the start of an unexpected partnership between the two. “We did a book festival together a couple of weeks ago. We were reading bits of it together. It was joyous to see a kid doing something like that. She had every phrase of mine absolutely perfect. “So I’ve promised her a signed copy of The Glasgow Gruffalo’s Wean.” Elaine is extremely proud of the book’s popularity with kids in Scotland, especially if goes some way to normalise the use of Scots and local dialect.
“It’s really important that kids are introduced to such dialect from a young age,” says Elaine.
“I was brought up in Lanarkshire, there was a language we spoke in the house but we weren’t allowed to speak it in the classroom. We’d say, ‘Get that, it’s ben the loaby,’ but in school you would have to say, ‘It’s in the hall.’
“There was a real cringe about the way working class Scots, in particular, spoke. We’re brought up to cringe at what my mother used to call slang words, but they’re not slang – they’re brilliant pieces of language.”
That “cringe” has lessened, according to Elaine, who sees Scots language and local dialect celebrated a lot more.
“I think it’s changed a bit now in Scotland. You see kids being interviewed in pretty hard areas and they can express themselves in a way that they couldn’t in my generation.
“There was a shyness and you didn’t want to get a showing-up in front of your betters and all of that sort of stuff – I think that is largely gone, thankfully.”
The Glasgow Gruffalo’s Wean, which is out now published by Black and White Publishing, isn’t the only Julia Donaldson adaptation Elaine has been working on. She’s been filming an adaptation of Julia’s book Princess Mirror-belle for CBBC, and is speaking to The Scots Magazine while sitting next to the author herself.
“It’s the first time I’ve met her. I’ve done the two books and here we are on set and she’s playing the Storyteller in Princess Mirror-belle. It’s been a real thrill.”
Elaine will also soon be on our screens once again as nightmare neighbour Christine O’neal, as the popular
“We slang” were brought up to cringe at
“I’ve been around for so long people know me as just Elaine – I take it as a compliment ”
BBC Scotland sitcom Two Doors Down returns for a fifth series.
“It’s great to get back because we should have shot it last May and then it was put off to September, then to March, so finally we’re doing it,” Elaine says.
“It’s so well-written, to the point that you really can go back and watch it again and get a whole other thing out of it – it’s very clever and very funny.”
Christine, who Elaine describes as a “monster”, is neighbour to married couple Beth and Eric, played by Arabella Weir and Alex Norton, and always pops round at the most inopportune times.
“There’s a bit of Christine in every woman! There’s a bit of my mum, there’s a bit of my auntie, there’s a bit of my pals. She’s pass-remarkable and I think that’s why she registers, because she is like so many women that people know,” says Elaine.
“To play someone like her is a joy, and to get to swear as much, I’ve never been allowed to swear! The irony being all those years as Mary Doll in Rab C Nesbitt – those were the days you couldn’t swear so I never did.”
With six episodes of Two Doors Down plus a Christmas special commissioned by the BBC, we’ll be seeing a lot more of Elaine this year. But will we see her on stage this Christmas in panto? She certainly hopes so.
“It was very strange Christmas last year. I don’t particularly miss two shows a day, but I miss the joy of it. I’ve done more than 20 years of panto. It’s wonderful.”
Whichever outlet Elaine C Smith’s creativity takes – stage, screen or print – she means something to the whole of Scotland, and is proving as popular as ever.
“I’ve been around for so long, and because of the varied career I’ve had, with people watching me from when they were kids all the way up, people know me as just Elaine. ‘How you doing, Elaine?’ they’ll say.
“I take it as a real compliment.”