Few actors are more indelibly associated with one role than Gregor Fisher – and few comic characters (although Alan Partridge leaps to mind) grow with their audiences over decades rather than years. “Somebody pointed out to me the other day,” says Fisher of his most famous alter ego, the unemployed Glaswegian alcoholic Rab C Nesbitt, “that it’s 40 years since he first appeared on the telly”. Fisher wore the string vest on and off for 30 of those years, weaving himself into Glasgow folklore – but backing himself into a casting cul-de-sac too. Now 71, he’d love you to bear in mind the other roles he can play – not least that of Gregor Fisher, in which out-from-behind-the-mask persona he is soon to set off, for the first time, on a UK tour.
You might imagine that an actor stepping out as himself after years in character(s) could be scary, or exciting, or a chance to set the story straight. But Fisher is not, as I discover when meeting him in Glasgow on the eve of his tour, a man apt to self-dramatise. Ask him about his career and he’ll toss the word back at you in scare quotes. Ask him about Nesbitt and he’ll tell you: “It’s just a part. It’s gossamer wings. It’s nothing.”
Ask him about An Evening With Gregor Fisher – cooked up with his friend, the theatre director Nigel West (a neighbour in France, where Fisher lived for 10 years until his recent homecoming) – and he’ll give you this: “There’s no lines to learn. We can maybe have a laugh. We might make a couple of quid, and we might not. But it’ll be a painless exercise. There’s no crucifixion involved.” Who said that romance was dead!?
Ah, but this is the face Fisher presents to the world – and not the whole story. For a start, he delivers all this stuff with the twinkle of a man who, as the Guardian once said of him, “could make reciting the alphabet uproarious”. And then there’s the palpable affection with which he recalls the passerby who, way back when, apprehended him mid-filming in public to offer his curt appreciation of Fisher’s life and work. “I saw this wee guy coming up the street. The light was fading, he’d obviously just finished work. And he clocked me, and I thought, ‘He’s going to say something.’ And he went …” – and here Fisher grabs my arm, with arresting intensity – “‘Thank you very much, son.’” It’s not much, but between two Scottish males, it’s plenty. “It meant a lot,” says Fisher. “It’s nicer to be liked than not.”
Nesbitt, along with Fisher’s other identifiable alter ego, the combover king and Hamlet cigar salesman known only as the Baldy Man, started life on the 80s sketch show Naked Video. Fisher, who was separated from his birth siblings and given up for adoption aged three, had grown up on Glasgow’s outskirts, and cut his acting teeth at the Dundee Rep theatre in the late 70s. As Nesbitt, a street philosopher with a skanky headband, he touched a nerve in his native land – and far beyond: Fisher points out that the vast majority of the viewers of the eponymously named comedy, which ran on and off on the BBC between 1988 and 2014, lived south of the border.
Indeed, he was somewhat resistant at first to playing a character who he worried perpetuated stereotypes of boozy and aggressive Scots. “I thought, ‘Why does it have to be this? Why are we portraying this nutcase brandishing a rolled-up newspaper?” But the character caught on – probably because Fisher’s performance (and Ian Pattison’s scripts) fleshed out the cartoon of sozzled Scottish masculinity into something smarter, more lovable and more complex.
Watching back episodes of Rab C Nesbitt now – including one that teases at his home town’s 1990 glow-up into a European city of culture – you can interpret Nesbitt as a spirit of Glasgow incarnate, reassuring us that, at a time of tumultuous change, there remained some constants we could hang on to. But, for all that the series was more innovative than it’s given credit for (with direct address to camera decades before Fleabag – not to mention a very early TV appearance for the young David Tennant), Nesbitt remained, in Fisher’s phrase, “a Marmite character”.
He tells me about the time he was invited to turn on Glasgow’s Christmas lights – only for the invitation to be rescinded when the leader of the council “got wind of the fact, and didn’t think [I was] a suitable person to represent the city”. Mind you, Nesbitt was always loved, says Fisher, where it mattered most: “Nancy Banks-Smith [in the Guardian] was always a great fan. I always used to think if Nancy likes it, it must be not too bad.”
It did, however, typecast for a while an actor who would later star alongside Al Pacino in The Merchant of Venice, not to mention his role as Bill Nighy’s manager in Love Actually. “People would say to me, after I’d done an audition, ‘Well that’s absolutely marvellous, I didn’t realise you could speak properly.’ These people don’t know what acting is.”
Does Fisher regret that Nesbitt pigeonholed him as a comic turn? “Well, I was never going to play Romeo,” he says. “Maybe on the wireless.” As for fretting about his career path, well, “Your career is your career is your career. We’ve all got bills to pay.” It all comes down, he says, to “casting directors who say, ‘We’d like him to do this, and we’re no’ interested in him doing that’” – and to your financial circumstances at any given time. “I’ve had some scripts sitting on my shelf for months,” he says, “until the tax bill comes in. I’ll be thinking, ‘This is crap’, but then suddenly it’s, ‘Oh thanks, I’d love to do it. Yes, I’ve got a window for that.’ That’s how a career works.”
If he’s never exerted much control over it, Fisher is chuffed with how the most recent chapters of his working life have panned out. The last decade has seen an acclaimed stint with the National Theatre of Scotland in the stage comedy Yer Granny; an unlikely new direction, orchestrated by his grownup daughter Cissie, as an Instagram cookery guru (“I get people stopping me in the street saying, ‘I made yer potato scones.’ It’s just nuts!”); and acclaim for his role alongside Greg McHugh in the BBC sitcom Only Child, about a son looking after his ageing dad. Of the last one, Fisher says, “One of the things that makes comedy sing is if there are people you can connect with, and where that connection really lifts it to unexpected places. The young McHugh boy does that for me. Which, when you’re 71, you think, ‘Christ, how lucky am I?’
“So yes, I now specialise in dotty old people losing the plot.” Is he surprised to find himself at such a career stage? He replies with a memory of the great Scottish vaudevillian Stanley Baxter, who guested on a Rab C Nesbitt episode. “Stanley was already at a very advanced age.” (He is still with us, now aged 99.) “But he insisted on wearing a grey wig, despite already having grey hair. I thought, ‘You’re fine, Stanley, I think the wig’s overkill!’”
Fisher himself is now in his no-need-for-a-grey-wig era, and relaxed about it. “There’ll come a time, and I hope I know when it is, that I think, ‘Maybe I’ll just give it a miss now.’ You hear stories of people, who shall remain nameless, who now have earpieces [to be fed their lines] in films and on stage. For me, I think, ‘If you can’t do it any more, you should just do something else.’”
Until such time arrives, Fisher has his An Evening With … to look forward to, although “I’ve no idea what we’re going to talk about, because Nigel and I have yet to discuss that.” But a Q&A with his fans, in character only as himself, “doesn’t alarm me in any way”, says Fisher. “OK, there may be certain things I don’t want to talk about, personal things. But I can’t imagine somebody coming along to the Beacon Arts Centre in Greenock and asking, ‘How many times a week do you shag your wife?’” Assuming no such inquiries, “I think you just answer the questions as truthfully as you can. And you know, everybody likes a good story, don’t they?”
“I’m doing it,” he concludes, unsentimental to the last, “because I love a laugh, it’s not too much pressure, and I might make a couple of quid. What’s not to be happy about?”
