Scones and Tea with V&B

Forbes Masson and I (or our alter egos Victor and Barry) hosted this interview series Scones and Tea with V&B on BBC Radio Scotland The conceit of the show was that the various celebs we interviewed (Liberal politician David Steele, Private Eye editor Ian Hislop, TV journalist Kirsty Wark and entertainer Nicholas Parsons) had all started their careers with the Kelvinside Young People’s Amateur Dramatic Art Society, of which Victor and Barry were the founder members. The first three shows were broadcast in 1988 but then bizarrely there was a three years gap until the last one in 1991. You can listen to them all below…

Young Playwrights Festival Cabaret

Radio 4 hosted its annual Young Playwrights Festival and it began with a cabaret hosted by Victor and Barry!

The Word Made Fresh!

Victor and Barry present an evening so achingly funny it makes Batman look like media hype....

With Victor and Barry, Miles and Milner, Steve Coogan , Lemn Sissay , Simon Munnery ,Benjamin Zephaniah and Ian Targett.

Producer CLIVE BRILL

Won't Somebody Up There Listen?

I read Won’t Somebody Up There Listen? for Radio 4’s Morning Story. You can listen to it here.

The Hogmanay Show

Victor and Barry were already in Australia preparing for their opening at the Sydney Opera House so couldn’t take part in STV’s Hogmanay Show in 1988, but they appeared courtesy of this video of their song Glasgow. Please note that we risked our lives for the big finish helicopter shot!!

39,000 Steps

Victor and Barry Edinburgh Festival Fringe

39,000 Steps Edinburgh Fringe John Lloyd 1988 Jeremy Hardy Mark Steel Arthur Smith DAAS

John Lloyd hosted this Channel 4 documentary about the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in which Victor and Barry played a very prominent part!

Automatic Transmission

Automatic Transmission was a pilot for Night Network on ITV in the UK, which I shot with Forbes Masson and Ross King late in 1988.

The premise was that Ross drove a huge old NYC taxi and the guests sat with him in the front, and Forbes and I, in our guises as Victor and Barry, were the car wash men who hopped into the back of the taxi and bitched about the guests in the front. Luckily we shot our bits on a different day from the guests!  The pilot had The Boys, Sigue Sigue Sputnik and Pia Zadora as guests, but strangely it was never made into a series!!

Also here is our first appearance on Night Network, singing our paen to Victor an Barry's favourite shop, Marks and Spencer!

Victor and Barry Take The High Road

At the 1988 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Victor and Barry's sell-out show Victor and Barry Say Goodbye was chosen to be part of the Perrier Pick of the Fringe Season at the Donmar Warehouse in London's Covent Garden.

 This was Victor and Barry's first sojourn south of the border (though they would be soon appearing south of the equator when they toured Australia) and it caused quite a storm amongst the Scottish media. It's hard to describe now, but in the eighties it was still a big deal to 'make it' in London if you lived in Scotland.  And as Victor and Barry had become really successful in a relatively short time there was much anticipation about their London debut and how they would be received (indeed even if they would be understood.)

So when Scottish TV asked to film us and our preparations for the Donmar debut we decided it would be fun to make it a sort of mockumentary in Victor and Barry's rather surreal style.  Our friend Hazel Eadie, who had been in our panto the previous year at the Tron Theatre, made an appearance as a mysterious beauty, and our au pair was played by the actual room-mate we inherited when we rented a half-renovated flat in Stoke Newington from a set designer I had been working with. It is a bizarre little show culminating in some footage from the actual first perfomance. Look out for actor Richard Griffiths who was in the audience for some reason!

Hear Victor and Barry And Faint

 It had to happen.  One day when I was performing Conquest of the South Pole in London, I flew up to Glasgow to hold a press conference with Forbes to announce the release of Hear Victor and Barry and Faint, the latest installment of their plan to rule the world.

You can hear the full album on these Youtube clips above.

Victor and Barry Say Goodbye

Victor and Barry took their new show Victor and Barry Say Goodbye to the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh for the festival, and later in the year to the Donmar Warehouse in London where we were invited to take part in the Perrier Pick of the Fringe season. The shows at the Donmar were my West End debut.

We'd previously opened Glasgow's Mayfest with a huge sell-out show at the Theatre Royal.  Here we are premiering our anthem for Vic and Baz's hometown, Glasgow, on the STV Mayfest TV show, followed by two TV appearances during the Edinburgh festival

Conquest of the South Pole

Conquest of the South Pole is by German writer Manfred Karge. I played Slupianek, an unemployed youth who went on an imaginary journey with his friends to the South Pole, emulating the real-life journey of Roald Amundsen.

The play premiered as part of the Traverse Theatre's season in 1988, returning for the Edinburgh Festival and then transferring to the Royal Court Theatre in London for a limited season at the end of the year. It was directed by Stephen Unwin, who would later direct me in Knickers and Hamlet. Tilda Swinton was assistant director.

The rest of the cast was Paul Higgins, Alasdair Galbraith, Simon Donald, Hilary Maclean, Ewan Bremner, Carol Ann Crawford and Sam Graham

This play was huge for me because when it transferred to London I was nominated Most Promising Newcomer in the 1988/89 Laurence Olivier Awards (losing to Richard Jones who later would direct me in La Bête.)  That was a big deal and I started to be offered work in London, and shortly after moved there.

When I finished the run at the Royal Court I went to Australia to do the Victor and Barry tour and met a young actor who was playing Slupianek in the Sydney production at the Belvoir St Theatre.  His name? Baz Lurhman!

Poll Tax Demonstration

I took part in a demonstration against the Poll tax, which was about to be introduced into Scotland the following year.  Aside from it being a horribly unfair tax (the poorest people were taxed more because they tended to be living with more people in one home, and the richer taxed less as this tax was per person and did not take into account how many or how valuable homes were) we were also furious that Scotland was being used as a guniea pig to try it out before it was introduced into the rest of the UK in 1990. There were eventually street riots in London and many believe the failure of the poll tax was the death knell of Margaret Thatcher's premiership.

I also joined a thing called the Scottish 100, a list of 100 prominent Scottish artists, politicians, clergy and all sorts who just refused to pay the poll tax.  I eventually paid the equivalent once it had been abolished.

Victor & Barry Host the ITV Telethon

Victor and Barry were co-hosts of the Scottish part of the ITV Telethon in 1988.  We had to stay up all night and constantly greet members of the public who got progressively more drunk and carried larger and larger checks.  It was very surreal, especially the Victor and Barry Search for a Star parts, where people did things like singing with their heads inside a washing machine!

It was great fun, and actually my first time ever doing live television with people talking to me in my ear whilst trying to be witty and effervescent. No mean feat.  I also remember that when day broke we had a couple of drinks and some prawn cocktail and then went on live TV again, a bit pished.

Great Expectations

Great Expectations was a co-production between TAG (The touring arm of the Glasgow Citzens' Theatre) and the Gregory Nash Dance Group.

Six actors and six dancers performed a version of the Dickens novel and we won the Spirit of Mayfest Award at that year's festival. The production went on to tour Scotland and Northern England. I played Pip.

I really enjoyed this show because the actors really had to dance and the dancers really had to act.  As I was playing the lead I had to dance a lot, and I think this show really cemented the way I think about acting, in that I think of characters in a very physical way first, and put great emphasis into the way any character moves.

I got blisters on my feet in rehearsals from all the barefoot movement, and I remember soaking them in surgical spirits to make the skin harder. (A dance tip for you!)

The cast included my Victor and Barry partner Forbes Masson, and fellow RSAMD students James Kennedy, Alasdair Galbraith and Rachel Ogilvy.

Cuttin' a Rug

I returned to Dundee Rep at the beginning of the year to play Phil McCann again in the second part of John Byrne's Slab Boys Trilogy.

Cuttin' A Rug takes place at the carpet factory's work dance. I really loved this production because there was no set to speak of, and we had a really complex set of imaginary walls and mirrors and loos that became incredibly alive. The action picks up after Phil has discovered he didn't get into art school that day.

The last last line of the play is one of my favourite ever: "You're nineteen, you've got a wardrobe full of clothes, you've got everything to live for."