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

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

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.