It was a little after three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, when the dark green Cherokee jeep, loaded with canisters of propane gas, hurtled towards the Departure zone at Glasgow International Airport. The driver was saying prayers and asking for god’s help, when his vehicle hit security bollards and burst into flames. 28-year-old, Kafeel Ahmed had intended that the jeep would crash through the glass doors, enter into the airport concourse, where it would blow-up, killing as many of the men, women and children who queued patiently for their holiday flights.

It was June 30 2007, and this was the first terrorist attack in Scotland since PanAm Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie in 1988. Little could Ahmed, or his co-conspirator Dr. Bilal Abdullah, have known that their actions were not to lead to holy martyrdom, but rather to the resurrection of one of the funniest, most popular and successful comedy creations of the last 50 years.

In a hotel room in Budapest, the writer Ian Pattison watched the images beamed from Glasgow onto a flickering TV screen, as the would-be terrorists were arrested, all Pattison could think of was one question: “What would Rab C Nesbitt make of this?”

Fall, present day, the trees are cashing in their savings, and the streets are covered with gold. I meet Ian in a coffee house, in Glasgow’s West End, a background of children and mothers laughing and chatting, and the hiss of an espresso machine. It’s a clear day, and we have a long sweeping view down to the Clyde and across the water to the high rises and tenements of Govan beyond,  home to the fictional Rab C. Nesbitt - “the original unemployed man”, whose comic television adventures have brought national acclaim, incredible viewing figures and a cabinet full of awards.

Pattison looks relaxed, toned and much younger than his grey hair implies, and he must be older than he looks for It’s twenty-five years since he first dreamt up the alcoholic, head-bandaged street philosopher Rab C. Nesbitt:

“It was New Year’s Eve,” recalls Pattison, “And I was married and living in this masionette apartment in the north of England. Now I’m an anti-social person and when the front doorbell went, I said to my then wife, ‘That’ll be them from downstairs coming to First Foot, I don’t want to see these people. You entertain them, give them a drink and send them on their way. I’ll go upstairs and you tell them I’m in Glasgow.’

“I go upstairs to ‘Glasgow’, but wives don’t always do what you ask them, and these two neighbors sat there until about 5am knocking back the swally. I was upstairs fuming, wondering what can I do? I just can’t suddenly materialize – I’m in Glasgow!

“So I had a notebook up there, because I used write in the wee room, and I started trying to write something about a Liverpool councilor, but it wasn’t working. Then suddenly, I don’t know why, this mutated into a Glasgow speech rhythm, and in about 10 minutes I’d written the first Nesbitt monologue.

“I’ve no idea where it came from. All I knew about him was he raved, he had a head bandage and wore trainers.””

It was a piece of genius inspiration and Ian passed it on to Colin Gilbert, producer of the sketch show Naked Video. Gilbert liked it, but the actor chosen to play the part, Gregor Fisher, wasn’t so keen.

“There was no inkling of developing the character. I just knew it was a character piece, that is to say you weren’t going from gag to gag to gag. I just knew if it got into Gregor’s hands, I knew what he could do with it, and how he would play it. The trouble was persuading Gregor to do it.”

Anyone who has seen Fisher’s work will know that he is a brilliantly gifted actor, with a warmth and subtlety most Hollywood actors would pawn their looks to possess. I first saw Fisher as an unforgettable, happy-go-lucky, wide-boy in Peter MacDougall’s brilliant Just a Boy’s Game, then a few years later stealing the crappy eighties version of 1984 with a cameo role from under the noses of Richard Burton and John Hurt.

Now Naked Video had made Fisher a household name, on the back of his incredible comic acting, but when presented with a new character to play, he was less than impressed by Pattison’s latest creation.

“Gregor read it and said it was as funny as cancer,” Pattison recalls.
 

 
Thankfully, Head of the Comedy Unit, Colin Gilbert was on hand to quietly help matters along. Gilbert is a legend in TV comedy, with a long list of ground-breaking shows from Nesbitt to The Limmy Show, Still Game and Gary - Tank Commander on his long and impressive CV. Indeed, Gilbert with his white hair and beard and twinkling eyes is a polar bear disguised as a man - he may look nice and cuddly, but underneath you know there is this formidable energy just waiting for its moment.

“Colin quietly insisted, and Gregor tried it 2 or 3 times, and by the third time, I think Gregor began to think maybe I’m wrongish, and we never thought any more about it. But when the show went out, people picked up on this drunk character, largely because of Gregor’s eye-catching performance.”

The sketch hit home. It was 1986, Margaret Thatcher was in power and Nesbitt’s rant reflected the nation’s mood during a time of recession, high unemployment, and “jumped-up fascist bastards” running the country into the ground. Its success started the evolutionary process that led to the first series, as Pattison explains:

“Phil Differ, who was the Script editor on Naked Video, said, ‘Why don’t you write another monologue? Let’s interact him, let’s see what happens. We know he can rave, so put him in a Job Center situation arguing’

“That seemed to work, we knew he could talk to people. The next step was to give him a friend, so he was in casualty with a hatchet in his head, and that seemed to go okay, and I thought, ‘What can I do now?”

“Well, of course, he had to go home, and that’s when we met his wife, played by, lo and behold, Elaine C Smith.”

The fabulous Elaine C Smith was another player from the Naked Video ensemble, who had also appeared in the sitcom City Lights. Elaine made Mary Doll a real character - someone you could recognize down the supermarket and not just an appendage to the drunk, raving Nesbitt.

After Pattison had created the Nesbitt family (with their offspring Gash and Burney), he was asked to write a Christmas special - Rab C Nesbitt’s Seasonal Greet, which was broadcast in 1988, two nights after Lockerbie bombing.

A difficult time to broadcast, two days after such a horrendous terrorist attack, but the show proved to be the necessary cheer the country needed, and its success guaranteed a series commission from BBC 2 Controller, Alan Yentob (famed for his documentary Cracked Actor on David Bowie).  Yentob may have taken a gamble, but it proved to one which returned high dividends, paying out phenomenal viewing figures and winning a Royal Television Society Award for Best Sit-Com.

But it was more than just a TV success.

In 1990, Ian Pattison’s Rab C Nesbitt literally kicked in the patio doors of British situation comedy. Over the first 8 series of Rab C Nesbitt, every sacred cow was huckled off to the burger van, as Pattison’s astute humor dispatched every imaginable TV taboo - alcohol, drugs, sex, adultery, sexual harassment, crime, and even cancer. There had been nothing comparable to it on television, and its success opened the way for more brutal, open, hard-hitting comedy to follow.

Without Rab C Nesbitt there would have never have been Shameless. In fact Shameless has Rab C Nesbitt written through its entire DNA. Even more recent classics like Ideal would have found it difficult to find a slot without the “original unemployed person” kicking down the walls.

While I’ve known Ian Pattison for twenty-three years, since he worked as a script editor on the red-carpeted corridor of the second floor at BBC Scotland, he is still an enigma, who is incredibly guarded about who he is and what he is about. He is charming, thoughtful and when discussing his achievements prefers to use “we” or “you” instead of “I”, “Me”, or “Mine”.

Ian portrays his career as a series of “happy accidents”, which seems disingenuous, as Ian Pattison is a brilliantly talented writer, a comedy genius, whose standing in the history of British TV Comedy places him in direct lineage to Ray Galton and Alan Simpson (Hancock’s Half Hour, Steptoe and Son); Johnny Speight (Till Death us Do Part); and mavericks Spike Milligan (Q9) and John Cleese (Fawlty Towers); as well as a cousin twice-removed from playwrights Harold Pinter and Joe Orton.

Born into a working class family in Govan, the district of Glasgow once famed the world over for its shipbuilding, Ian grew up with ambitions in his head to be more than just a ship’s welder.

“The mantra then was get a job, just get a job. Get a trade at your fingertips. The idea of doing a job you liked almost caused you shame, because it seemed self indulgent, for it wasn’t proper work.

“So I did what lots of people of my generation did and went to London. It was the sixties, I was exactly the right age, 15 in 1966.

“You meet all the misfits in London. Anybody who doesn’t fit in where they are, inevitably goes to London.

“So you meet lots of interesting people, who have no qualms about saying to you they write, they want to be writers. And by degrees that confidence rubbed off on yourself, as a wee raised-in-the-dark-kind-of-fellow. And you begin to think, ‘I can do this.’ That’s the way it worked for me – it was just happy accidents.”

When he was in London Ian worked “as a kitchen porter for a fast food chain called Billy’s baked Potato. The company was run by the famous boxing brothers Billy and George Walker. Billy was the golden boy of British heavyweight boxing at that time though George was the more accomplished businessman. I also worked as a furniture porter and as an assistant in an off license. By the seventies I had moved up the social scale and found a job as a laborer in the House of Commons, sweeping up in the corridors of power.’

He also tried his first attempts at writing.

“I was staying in Wandsworth, in a bed-sit, and the guy downstairs, happened to write. We got talking through mutual girlfriends, who introduced us. We thought this would be fucking horrendous – I hate meeting people, being forced to meet people. Anyway we met up and we talked all night and we showed each other bits of work we’d done. Mine were always sub-Kafka, you know, that shite we all do. The guy’s name was George Kosinski, and George always sjowed me his pieces, and they always seemed more mature than mine.

“Then one day, in frustration, I wrote this scurrilous comic thing, and George said, ‘This is what you should be doing.’

“I was mildly insulted, because it was like slithering down the literary pole into the bowery. But that put the seed into my head. And then, of course, to get your comedy, the old adage, Write what you know, so, after long years and by slow degrees, you begin to look back to where you came from.

“You realize that is you. Don’t apologize for it. Just dig it out and put it on the page.”

Through trial and error and enough rejections slips to paper a wall, Pattison succeeded and began writing sketches for the sketch shows Spitting Image, Laugh, I Nearly Paid My License Fee and Naked Video. He also worked as a script editor, where he learnt the Golden Rule of Writing:

“I realized at that point if you can’t re-write, you can’t write.”

When he first started writing Nesbitt, Ian didn’t submit an outline, as he explains:

“There’s a reason for that, because I don’t know what they’re going to be about until I write something. I don’t know what the journey’s going to be.

“All you maybe have is the kernel of a wee bit of dialogue or something you’ve heard or quite often it’s an issue, as you’re always keen to keep the character contemporary and of its time. Some are more snuggly than others. Some are more crow-barred.”
 

 
Ian Pattison’s Advice on Developing Storyline

“For example, we did one on sexual harassment, which was in the news at the time. I thought, who would be sexually harassed in the Nesbitt household?

“So, this story is complimentary with Mary’s story. Basically one story suggests another. And by the time you get to the end, it looks as of you’ve thought this through, or, it should look like you’ve thought it through. Coldly calculating, when in fact you’ve blundered from A to C by way of B.”

The success of Rab C Nesbitt led Pattsion to write other sitcoms, Bad Boys, Atletico Partick and Breeze Block.

Bad Boys starred Freddie Boardley, Karl Howman and Ashley Jensen, and concerned small time criminals in Glasgow’s West End.

“I enjoyed writing the pilot for Bad Boys, there was kind of swagger about it. We got the series commissioned, but I didn’t have the time to write the 6 x 50minute episodes, as I had to go and write Nesbitt. So, I ended up writing 2 eps, other writers wrote the 4 other eps.

“Now, if I’d have been able to template a full series, other writers would have had the opportunity to go and experiment. But because there was so little for them to play with, they just tended to replicate what had gone before.

“It wasn’t perfect, and we could have done with more thought time, but that’s one of the ironies of television, you can hang around for years waiting on a commission, and when you get it, they say, ‘By the way, we want it yesterday.’ That’s just the way it works.”

Atletico Partick starred Gordon Kennedy and Jonathan Watson, and was a about an amateur soccer team.

“If I’d been smart, what I’d have done was to make it about a woman’s soccer team instead of a bunch of guys just drinking beer and shagging. Drinking beer and shagging didn’t become popular until a couple of years later with Men Behaving Badly

“If I am totally honest, my heart wasn’t in Atletico Partick or Bad Boys, it was just the obligation to come up with more shows and I did my best with them. I worked hard with both of them, but sometimes you work harder on the shows that aren’t working than the ones that are, because something in you senses they aren’t working.”

By the late 1990s, Gregor Fisher wanted a “pause” from Rab. Pattison and Colin Gilbert thought Fisher meant it wanted out and the series came to a sudden halt.

“To get a whole squad of egotistical writers and actors together and to get along swimmingly for the rest of time is unrealistic. Things change. Also, I think Gregor began to feel he was being defined by Rab C.”

Just at the moment Nesbitt seemed to “implode”, Pattison signed a book deal with Picador publishers to write a biography of Nesbitt, and this began Pattison’s new career as a successful novelist.

“The success of Nesbitt had the impact of making people viable for other projects. I’m just mystified that it lasted so long. I think the reason we did go for such a long time was basically we were a bunch of working class people, and we knew how lucky we were to have this show in the first place.”

The end of Nesbitt didn’t stop Pattison’s comedy writing, as he wrote other sit coms, including the vastly under-rated Breeze Block, which commissioner Stuart Murphy described as “hard core”, and Ian claims was watched by “3 men and a dog”; and The Crouches, a sit-com about an Afro-Caribbean family, which Ian submitted under a pseudonym, and was successfully picked up by the BBC; and he started writing plays for the theater.

But never one to lose a Golden Goose, Colin Gilbert gently prodded Pattison, Fisher and Elanie C Smith over a number of years to get together for a new series of Rab C Nesbitt. This they eventually did, after Pattison had an epiphany in front of a TV screen in Budapest.

“I’m the same age as Nesbitt,” says Pattison, “Nesbitt’s actually sixty now, that’s because I’m sixty. It’s easier for me to write from my own age, and I noted, the people my own age, most of the hard drinkers were no longer with us or if they continued to drink were shambling alcs. Now I had given up the drink because I had seen the writing on the wall, but Nesbitt without drink? He’s almost defined by drink.

“Yet, the very fact I was asking if it will work shows there’s an exploration to be done. So there was the challenge to take away the prop of alcohol. Then you ask, why would he have given up drink?”

Mary Doll also progressed, running her won business with neighbor, Ella Cotter (Barbara Rafferty). “The women are now the bread-winners, the men are neutered, which created chaffing and tension within the Nesbitt household.” Apart from the “chaffing”, Rab and Mary also have their 10-year-old grand-daughter to look after.

Earlier in the interview, I asked Ian how he felt when he was commissioned to write the first series of Nesbitt.

“I think of it as a kind of elation. You’ve got this opportunity and hardly anybody in their life gets an opportunity to accost the public and impose their rancid views on them. So when you get this opportunity, you’re going to use it.

“It is an elation. I am going to shout as loud as I can and then I’ll slip back into oblivion, but at least I’ll have had my moment. It’s that kind of thing, and that’s the way I’ve always viewed it.”
 
Rab C Nesbitt returns to BBC 2 for 6 weeks from Wednesday 5th October at 22:00 hours.