There being Glasgow. Or, rather, the Glasgow he grew up in back in the 1950s and 1960s. Home. Childhood. Call it what you want.
“Once you get a whiff of that you realise we were literally marinated in the stuff,” he says. “When you get six flats, all up one close, all with a fire going … And as early as possible in the winter. And every factory around us at that time had coal.”
There will be some for whom Paterson will have the same effect as coal smoke has on him, I suspect. His appearance will take them back in time to their childhood home, TV on in the corner. He’s been part of our TV watching lives for five decades now. Paterson’s first TV credit – The Flight of the Heron – is now 50 years old. Since then, he’s turned up in everything from Jackanory to Fleabag, from The Singing Detective to Shetland, from Dr Zhivago to House of the Dragon. Next year, most likely, we’ll see him in the new TV version of Tomb Raider. And we haven’t even mentioned his film career (which takes in Bill Forsyth’s Comfort and Joy and the Spice Girls movie Spice World).
Bill Paterson as James Perez in Shetland (Image: BBC)
Oh, and he’s also the voice of the BBC’s The Repair Shop.
You can hear why. That voice. Solid, comforting, familiar, softly Scottish. If it was a perfume, it would be the smell of mizzle and smoky days in Glasgow after the war, the first day of spring and the last day of autumn in the Ochils, the fug of a Dennistoun bar and the scent of fresh furniture polish on the wooden bannisters of your favourite theatre (probably the Citz).
Today he has an audience of one. Me. Surrounded by books, he is looking out over his garden in the aforementioned north London home he shares with his wife Hildegard. But for most of the time he spends speaking to me he is in a Glasgow of the mind.
Back in 2008 Paterson published Tales From the Back Green. Subtitled “A Glasgow Childhood,” it’s an evocative, beautifully written book of his reminiscences of the city he grew up in. It has now been reissued with a new chapter that sees him revisit Dennistoun, the area of the city he grew up in.
Dennistoun hasn’t changed so very much. “It survived pretty much intact. If I was to walk around Dennistoun I wouldn’t have any trouble finding my way,” Paterson admits. “But my folks looking at Townhead, or my family who lived up in Springburn … Just forget it. They wouldn’t know anything.”
There’s a truth to that. In a way Tales From the Back Green is a book about a city that doesn’t exist anymore, transformed by time and other thieves.
Tales From the Back Green was originally published in 2008 (Image: Birlinn)
“That’s true of anywhere,” Paterson admits, “but great chunks of the actual physical fabric of Glasgow have totally gone. We were really sitting in the dying embers of an industrial, commercial powerhouse. We were seeing it being knocked down around us in the sixties and into the early seventies. So, yeah, there’s a complete change.”
That change is the subject of nostalgia, regret and some anger for Paterson. He talks of the city he grew up in, the one now lost, with affection and eloquence. Not that there haven’t been improvements. All that coal smoke has gone and so has its effects.
“The blackness of the buildings, the blackness of the tenements, have all since been cleaned up, the ones that managed to survive.
“The black went and the red sandstone shone through. We were at the blackest of times, I think in the early fifties.
“The tram cars were this brightly coloured contrast to the black tenements that they passed through.”
This, I tell him, is a Glasgow I don’t know. I didn’t start visiting the city until the end of the 1970s. Trams were already a thing of the past. Not so when he was growing up.
“Trams were almost the reason for Glasgow. They fitted Glasgow very well because there were long, long, straight streets and people just poured out of these buildings and onto a tram.
“When they went you could measure Glasgow’s ending as a commercial city and later as an industrial city. The trams marked the end of it.”
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Tales From the Back Green actually started as a short story for radio. “It was a little exercise. Very compact. Very manageable for the amateur writer. It has to be done in 14 minutes and 10 seconds, or whatever the length of the 15-minute short story was,” Paterson recalls.
He sent it off to the BBC under a nom de plume. The BBC wrote back and said they wanted to use it and were thinking that they might ask the actor Bill Paterson to read it.
“Instead of saying, ‘I won’t have Paterson anywhere near it, it’s got to be Brian Cox or nobody,’ I admitted right away that I wrote it,” Paterson suggests.
He was soon writing more.
“Each of the stories has something of a slightly bigger world, or local issue like the loss of the tram lines, or the difficulty of being keen on football and having to make a decision about what team you supported based on a religion we allegedly followed.”
It’s not a rose-tinted book, but it does conjure up a fond image of the city before the upheavals of the 1960s. Paterson started as an apprentice quantity surveyor in the early 1960s which is when Glasgow began to replace tenements with high rises. It was described, he recalls now, as comprehensive redevelopment.
“And it was comprehensive. You were a lone voice in the wilderness if you said, ‘Do we need to knock everything down? Is it not possible to rebuild it? Look, they rebuilt Warsaw after it was virtually obliterated in the Second World War. They managed to make it look like somewhere people would remember their own Warsaw from.’
“But you felt very much as though you were swimming against a tide if you spoke in any way like that. Of course, the city had massive problems of slum housing and conditions that needed sorting out, but whether we needed to take everything down on the way …”
“I was critical,” he recalls, but to no effect. “You were just patted on the head as a wee apprentice quantity surveyor if you said, ‘Why are we getting rid of these tenements to put up Bluevale Street housing development? Maybe it would be a good idea to take people out for a couple of years or a year and rebuild and put in toilets and staircases and keep the structure.’
“You were a voice in the wilderness in those days.”
Paterson as radio DJ Dicky Bird in the 1984 Scottish comedy film Comfort and Joy (Image: StudioCanal)
Paterson worked in an office on the corner of Elderslie Street and Berkeley Street. “So, we were within 200 yards of that destruction of Charing Cross. They got rid of the Grand Hotel. A trench was built, which, of course, is the M8 motorway to this day.
“I came out of the train at Charing Cross station, negotiated ramps and building sites to get to the office, so we were in the midst of it. The plan was to do the eastern side of the inner ring road which would have just cut right down in front of the cathedral. It would have cut off the cathedral from what is now known as the merchant city. A motorway running through. Fortunately, that was stopped. But it was a period of mad, mass destruction that could have been done more subtly. There’s no doubt about it.”
What of Glasgow now? He revisits regularly. He’s coming up not long after we speak, in fact. How does he feel about his home city?
“I think we had a great period of optimism in Glasgow in the late 1990s. Glasgow’s Miles Better and the Year of Culture. There was great hope, but I think that’s dissipated.
“And the loss of the Art School is like a blow to the heart, really. To have one fire looks like misfortune, but to have two looks like carelessness, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde.
“I think that’s really cut the feet from a lot of us. Because there are not that many cities where the most important, revered building wasn’t a castle or a cathedral. Glasgow had this special, special place.
“I fear at my age, really, I don’t think I’ll ever see it back in business as it was. And I think that’s lost a lot of confidence.
“Other parts of Glasgow are delightful for people to live in. It’s a very comfortable city for many people up the West End. It’s as nice as anywhere to hang around. I think that slightly insulates a lot of what needs to be done to keep the city centre at its heart.”
The story is not totally gloomy, though. He has yet to revisit the Citizens Theatre, the place that sparked his interest in acting in the first place, now revived and revivified.
“I’m dying to see it again because that auditorium … You could say it’s like a jewel box. And it’s a jewel in the crown of my background. I’ve seen a lot of theatres over the years, and none ever really has the atmosphere that the Citizens had.”
Describe that atmosphere, Bill?
“It used to have a wee coffee bar at the side, and it had a kind of smell of coffee, which was a comforting smell, and mixed with the fish and chips from the greasy spoon cafe, the legendary one. I can’t remember the name. Somebody will tell me. There was a fishy aroma, with the coffee then hitting the disinfectant that would be needed for the sanitary facilities. I could almost recreate it in my head, an incredible aroma as you walked into this red, welcoming, plush theatre. A perfect view in every seat.”
The Citz nurtured an interest in Paterson in acting. He made his professional debut there in 1967. He then spent a few years at the theatre before joining Billy Connolly to work on The Great Northern Welly Boot Show, after which he joined the theatre company 7:84 and appeared in The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil (the 1974 adaptation starring Paterson is currently available on the BBC iPlayer). He broke into TV with his appearance in David Hare’s Licking Hitler and hasn’t looked back since.
Bill Paterson in Licking Hitler (Image: BBC)
It would be invidious to pick out favourite roles, but, today, invidious is my middle name. Bill, I say, tell me about Comfort and Joy.
“Oh yes. Well, Bill Forsyth was a very good friend. He had been around making feature films around the time I was in 7:84 and one time Bill said, ‘What we’ve got to do is stop doing these commercials for the herring industry or Scottish whisky. We’ve got to go out and make stories like you’ve done on the stage.’ And that led to these great successes, That Sinking Feeling and Gregory’s Girl, Local Hero.
“Bill had asked me to be involved, but various things had got in the way. And then suddenly Comfort and Joy, which was to some extent autobiographical. It was really about Bill’s attitude to his own life. We’re very much the same age and had a similar kind of upbringing, him in the west of the city and me in the east.”
The film, Paterson suggests, might be more valued now than it was when it came out.
“It was by far the least successful of Bill’s films, but now people say, ‘Oh, yes,’ because it is about mid-life crisis and hopelessness and the fact that fame and fortune don’t necessarily lead to happiness.”
To be honest, I tell him, I’d have been happy if the film consisted solely of shots of Paterson driving up and down the M8. Director of Photography Chris Menges does an amazing job on those sequences.
“He was a fantastic operator, and he would be strapped to the bonnet of the car in those days before miniatures and steadicams. It was pretty hefty equipment.
Bill Paterson, Aly Bain and Phil Cunningham on board the Maid of The Loch
“It’s a documented fact now so I don’t think I’ll get arrested. I didn’t have a licence when we shot Comfort and Joy. I could drive a car alright, but I didn’t have an official licence, and it was felt better that I didn’t mention that to the policemen as they stood stopping traffic for me.”
And then there was his role in The Crow Road, an adaptation of the Iain Banks novel filmed in Glasgow and Argyll and made back in the days when BBC Scotland had a bit of ambition (and money).
“Oh, yeah,” he says approvingly. “When people ask me about it, I put it very high on my list. When the DVD came out Iain Banks put a quote on the front to say, ‘Annoyingly better than the original.’
“My story is about Glasgow, but I had strong connections with Argyll through family. My father travelled the Western Isles and Argyll for a plumbing company. And to be there with pals like Paul Young and Peter Capaldi and David Robb, I look back on it with great affection.”
Paterson is now in the foothills of his ninth decade. He could retire if he chose but he chooses not to. His role in the new TV version of Tomb Raider is all thanks to “the lovely Phoebe Waller Bridge,” he says.
Paterson with Phoebe Waller Bridge in Fleabag (Image: BBC)
“I played her dad in Fleabag and she’s the showrunner of Tomb Raider and she wanted me,” Paterson explains. “Instead of Fleabag’s dad, I would be Lara Croft’s butler and it’s a gift of a part for an elderly actor …”
He hesitates.
Except, Bill?
“Except that butlers have to do a lot of standing. I don’t think Gordon Jackson sat down very often in Upstairs Downstairs. And Jim Carter, who is a pal of mine.”
That’s Jim Carter, star of Downton Abbey in which he plays a butler as you probably already know.
“He said, ‘Keep out of as many shots as you can. Don’t volunteer to be in the background and say, ‘Well, maybe I could be doing this.’ Just hide away. Otherwise, they’ll ask you to stand there all day.’”
The tricks of the trade. You’d think Paterson, after the long and distinguished career he’s had would know all of them by now.
“Apart from that,” he adds, “it’s been a pleasure. It’s got one of these NDA things on it,” he notes, “but I haven’t said anything.”
What keeps him going?
“When you reach an age, and you realise an awful lot of your friends have gone or are not able to work, if you’re in a position health wise – and I’m touching wood here – it would be odd not to say, ‘Thank you.’
“It’s got tougher in recent years because the hours are very long. The actors at a certain level get a bit cosseted, but even then, it’s not as light-hearted and as casual as it used to be and you notice that the crews are working incredibly long, difficult hours. It’s a tougher environment than it was, but that aside …
“I wouldn’t be able to do it every day of the year like a full-time thing, but filming allows gaps and it’s a luxurious way to keep yourself busy.”
Tales From the Back Green is a wonderfully evocative book and proof that Paterson is anything but an “amateur writer”. Maybe it’s time for a memoir, I suggest?
The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black Black Oil (Image: unknown)
He’s thought about it, he admits. Maybe along the lines of the Tales From the Back Green perhaps.
“Here’s the short story about doing the Welly Boot Show and what that led to. Here’s the short story about me and Bill Forsyth. But I never quite got around to it, and I didn’t fancy a book that just went, ‘Then I did this and then I did that and then I worked with so and so’.
“I’ve just contributed to something about Alec Guinness, Smiley particularly. I was in Smiley’s People, and I met him and worked with him. He spent the war delivering tanks to the Greek forces in the Royal Navy. Great chunks of his life are fascinating; travel and work through significant events. Our ordinary little lives look pale in comparison to that. So, I thought it would run out of steam somewhere. Maybe about The Crow Road.”
Such a pity. I hope he reconsiders. If nothing else, can you imagine the audiobook?
Tales From the Back Green is published by Birlinn, £9.99. Bill Paterson will be in conversation with Matthew Sweet at the Wigtown Book Festival on October 2: wigtownbookfestival.com.