Radio Comedy
Mrs Z. and I were out on the town last night, attending the 10th birthday party for the , the Glasgow-based production company behind such hits as Rab C. Nesbit, Still Game and Radio Scotland's own Watson's Wind-Up.
It was strange to be surrounded by so many famous faces. We saw Gregor Fisher, Greg Hemphill, Ford Kiernan and Jonathan Watson and there was a very funny speech from the Comedy Unit's top man, Colin Gilbert. Of course he fed the paranoia that haunts all of us who work in radio by talking about his company's television triumphs with no mention that so many of those programmes and performers began life on the wireless. I would have gone home in a huff, but then Mrs Z. reminded me we'd brought the car.
Anyway, congratulations Comedy Unit and well done on the party. It was a lavish affair in the upstairs function suite at Oran Mor . We met Nick Lowe from productions who joked that his company's tenth birthday was a more modest 'do' with a table-booking in a local restaurant. Nick's company makes a lot of the new comedy for Radio Scotland, including Sabotage, which you can see live at next month's .
We also met , one of the stars of The Why Front, which will also be live at the festival. Elaine is one of Scotland's best comedy actresses and I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the rest of the world wakes up to her talent. You read it here first!
We had a good natter with Louise Beattie, former star of Emmerdale, who has given up acting to pursue a career in law. We'd both watched the recent series about Glasgow's Sheriff Court and we agreed that the most memorable moment was when the teenage girl is sitting in a holding cell and other jailbirds are trying to cheer her up by telling her that prison isn't so bad because "everything there is organised for you."
Sneaking down the stairs at eleven o'clock (babysitters await) we get caught by John McCormick, my old boss and former controller of Ö÷²¥´óÐã Scotland. He tells me he's been enjoying the new programmes on Radio Scotland and asks me if my recent job-swap with the Headmaster of Elgin High School was more job-shadowing or job-swapping. I tell him it was more like shadowing.
"Of course," he says, "because you don't know how to run a school and he wouldn't know how to run Radio Scotland."
At least, I think he said that. It might have been the other way around.
