Rab C Nesbitt actor Gregor Fisher: “People say: ‘I didn’t realize you could talk properly!’ | platform

FThere are new actors more indelibly associated with a single role than Gregor Fisher – and few comedic characters (though Alan Partridge comes to mind) grow with their audiences over decades rather than years. “Someone pointed out to me the other day that it’s been 40 years since he first appeared on television,” Fisher says of his most famous alter ego, unemployed Glasgow alcoholic Rab C Nesbitt. Fisher took the string jacket on and off for 30 of those years, weaving himself into Glasgow folklore – but also setting himself up for dead ends. Now 71, he would like you to keep in mind what other roles he could play – not least that of Gregor Fisher, in which he will soon embark, for the first time, on a UK tour.

You might imagine that an actor stepping out of character after years of playing the character(s) could be scary, exciting, or an opportunity to set the story straight. But Fisher, as I discovered when I met him in Glasgow on the eve of his tour, is not a man prone to exaggerating himself. Ask him about his career and he’ll throw you the word in scare quotes. Ask him about Nesbitt and he’ll tell you: “It’s just a part. It’s drool wings. It’s nothing.”

Ask him about An Evening with Gregor Fisher – which he made with his friend, the theater director Nigel West (a neighbor in France, where Fisher lived for 10 years until his final return home) – and he’ll give you this: “There’s no lines to learn. Maybe we can have a laugh. We might make a few pounds, we might not. But it will be a painless exercise. There’s no steel in it.” Who said that romance is dead!?

Ah, but that’s the face Fisher presents to the world, not the whole story. For starters, he offers all these things in the blink of an eye of a man who, as The Guardian once said of him, “can make reciting the alphabet a roaring affair.” Then there’s the obvious affection with which a bystander who caught him mid-filming publicly remembers him to offer his succinct appreciation of Fisher’s life and work. “I saw this little man coming down the street. The light was fading, and it was evident that he had just finished his work. He registered me, and I thought: ‘He’s going to say something.’ And he went…” – and here Fisher grabs my arm, with remarkable sharpness – – “Thank you very much, son.” It’s not a lot, but between two Scottish guys, it’s a lot. “It meant a lot,” Fisher says. “It is better to be loved than not to be loved.”

Nesbitt, along with Fisher’s other recognizable character, the promiscuous kingpin and Hamlet cigar salesman known only as The Bald Man, began life in the 1980s sketch show Nude Video. Fisher, who was separated from his siblings and given up for adoption at the age of three, grew up on the outskirts of Glasgow and trained as an actor at Dundee Rep Theater in the late 1970s. As Nesbitt, a street philosopher in a threadbare headband, he struck a chord in his home country – and beyond: Fisher points out that the vast majority of viewers of the comedy film bearing his name, which was broadcast intermittently on the BBC between 1988 and 2014, lived south of the border.

In fact, he was initially somewhat resistant to playing a character that he feared would perpetuate stereotypes of drunken, aggressive Scots. “I thought: Why does it have to be like this? Why are we filming this lunatic waving a folded newspaper?” But the character caught on – perhaps because Fisher’s performance (and Ian Pattison’s script) embodied the caricature of Scottish masculinity steeped in something wittier, more endearing, more complex.

Watching episodes of Rab C Nesbitt now – including those that evoke his city’s 1990 glow to become a European city of culture – you can interpret Nesbitt as the spirit of Glasgow incarnate, reassuring us that in a time of turbulent change, there are still some constants we can cling to. But although the series was more innovative than it’s given credit for (with its direct address to the camera decades before Fleabag – not to mention the very early TV appearances of a young David Tennant), Nesbitt remained, in Fisher’s words, a “Marmite character”.

He told me about the time he was invited to turn on the Christmas lights in Glasgow – only to have the invitation rescinded when the council leader “knew the truth, and thought nothing of it”. [I was] An appropriate person to represent the city.” Keep in mind that Nesbitt was always well-liked, Fisher says, where it mattered most: “Nancy Banks Smith [in the Guardian] He was always a big fan. I always used to think that if Nancy liked it, it must not be so bad.

However, for a while he was cast as an actor who later became a star alongside Al Pacino in The Merchant of Venice, not to mention his role as manager Bill Nighy in Love Actually. “People would say to me, after I auditioned, ‘Well, that’s quite amazing, I didn’t realize you could speak properly.’ These people don’t know what acting is.

Does Fisher regret that Nesbitt took it as a comedic turn? “Well, I would never play Romeo,” he says. “Maybe over the radio.” As for worrying about his career path, well, “Your career is your career. We all have bills to pay.” He says it all comes down to “casting directors who say, ‘We’d like him to do this,’ and we’re not ‘interested in him doing that'” — and it all comes down to your financial circumstances at any given time. “I’ve had some scripts on my shelf for months, until the tax bill comes out,” he says. “I’ll say to myself: ‘That’s rubbish,’ but then suddenly I’ll say: ‘Oh, thanks, I’d like to do that.’ “Yes, I have a shot at it.” That’s how the profession works.

If he didn’t exercise much control over the matter, Fisher is thrilled with the way the final chapters of his working life have turned out. The last decade saw a stint with the National Theater of Scotland in the comedy Yer Granny; An unexpected new trend, organized by his adult daughter Sissy, as an Instagram cooking expert (“I have people stop me in the street and say, ‘I made you potato cakes.’ They’re just nuts!”); He received acclaim for his role alongside Greg McHugh in the BBC sitcom Only Child, about a son caring for his elderly father. Of the latter, Fisher says: “One of the things that makes comedy sing is having people you can connect with, and that connection lifts comedy to unexpected places. Little McHugh’s boy does that for me. And when you’re 71, you think, ‘Gosh, how lucky am I?’

“So yes, I now specialize in elderly loss to conspiracy.” Would he be surprised to find himself at such a career stage? He responds by recalling the great Scottish vaudeville performer Stanley Baxter, who hosted the Rab C Nesbitt episode. “Stanley was already of a very advanced age.” (He is still with us, and is now 99 years old.) “But he insisted on wearing a gray wig, even though he already had gray hair. And I thought, ‘You’re fine, Stanley. I think wigs are overrated!'”

Fisher himself is now in the era of not needing a gray wig, and he’s relaxed about that. “There will come a time, and I hope I know when it comes, and I think, ‘Maybe I’ll miss it now.'” You hear stories of people, who will remain anonymous, now have headphones [to be fed their lines] In films and on stage. For me, I think if you can’t do it anymore, you should do something else.

Until then, Fisher has an evening with… to look forward to, although “I have no idea what we’ll talk about, because Nigel and I haven’t discussed it yet.” But the Q&A with his fans, who represent him only, “doesn’t bother me in any way,” Fisher says. “Well, there might be some things I don’t want to talk about, personal things. But I can’t imagine someone coming into the Beacon Arts Center in Greenock and asking: ‘How many times a week do you caress your wife?’ Assuming there are no such inquiries, ‘I think you answer the questions as honestly as possible.’ And you know, everyone loves a good story, right?”

He concludes his speech, unemotional to the end, saying: “I do it because I like to laugh, it’s not a lot of pressure, and I might earn a few pounds. What wouldn’t make me happy?”