Feature: A Century of Ivor Cutler

A century of Ivor

100 years on from the birth of Glasgow-Jewish humorist Ivor Cutler, Mark Brown celebrates the “oblique musical philosopher”

Ivor Cutler – the great Glaswegian-Jewish poet, singer-songwriter, humorist and self-proclaimed “oblique musical philosopher” – would, had he lived to tell the tale, have turned 100 last weekend. Born Isadore Cutler in Glasgow on January 15, 1923, and raised in the Govan area of the city, he would become one of the most distinctively eccentric and beloved figures in UK popular culture.

Cutler’s parents and grandparents – refugees from the violent anti-Semitism of the Czarist Russian Empire – arrived in Scotland in the late-19^th century. By the time Ivor was born the family name, Kushner, had been Anglicised to Cutler (a common practice among Jewish refugees and immigrants, who altered their names to make them sound less “foreign”).

Cutler believed himself to have been traumatised by the birth of his younger brother, which drew attention and affection away from him. “Without that I would not have been so screwed up as I am, and therefore not as creative,” he once said.

The poet even claimed to have attempted to murder his younger sibling using a poker, only to have been thwarted by a vigilant aunt.

As a schoolchild on the southside of Glasgow, Cutler experienced anti-Semitism (not least from teachers) and witnessed children growing up in dire poverty. These experiences contributed to his leftwing and humanist sensibilities.

After training to be a teacher at Jordanhill College in Glasgow, Cutler expressed his dislike of the regimented and disciplinarian aspects of the Scottish education system. He held corporal punishment (to which he had been subjected many times while a pupil at Shawlands Academy) in particular contempt.

During a difficult time teaching at a school in Paisley early in his career, Cutler is said to have demonstratively taken his government-issue leather strap from his drawer, cut it into pieces and distributed them to the pupils. This gesture stood him in good stead for his periods teaching at AS Neill’s “hippy school” Summerhill and a number of schools run by the Inner London Education Authority.

Cutler believed that teaching helped to unlock his artistic creativity, and his career in education ran in tandem with his emergence as a humorist (he was, he insisted correctly, resolutely not a comedian). From quite early in his artistic career, Cutler’s gloriously tangential take on life found some famous champions.

_{Paul McCartney with Ivor Cutler on the set of Magical Mystery Tour}

The philosopher Bertand Russell appreciated the poet’s work greatly, as did Billy Connolly. Paul McCartney and John Lennon so loved the Scot’s performances that they asked him to play the part of the bus conductor Mr Bloodvessel in The Beatles’ 1967 film Magical Mystery Tour.

On radio, Cutler recorded more sessions for John Peel’s popular, late night Radio One programme than any other act, apart from Manchester post-punk group The Fall. It is testament to the breadth of interest Cutler generated that he performed on BBC radio channels One, Two, Three and Four. In more recent times, singer-songwriters Alex Kapranos (of Franz Ferdinand fame) and KT Tunstall have emerged as aficionados of all things Cutler.

It was typical of Cutler that, when invited to make a programme about his life and work for STV, he used a split screen in order to interview himself. The first Cutler sat at a harmonium on the right-hand side of the screen, the second knelt before the first, like a supplicant, on the left side.

“May I interview you, Ivor?”, asked Cutler number Two, meekly. “Mr Cutler to you!”, Cutler One replied, gruffly, before adding, “only my intimate friends get to call me Ivor.

“When strangers call me Ivor, it’s like getting a French kiss from a public relations consultant.”

The chastened Cutler Two offered a mild protest: “But you know me.” Unmoved, Cutler One concluded the exchange, saying: “I know nothing, and it’s taken me a lifetime to get to this stage.”

It’s often said that dreamers live in a world of their own. In Cutler’s case that world had its own name, as he divulged in the title of his first album Ivor Cutler of Y’Hup (released by Decca in 1959).

Many albums – such as Velvet Donkey (1975) and Gruts (1986) – were to follow. There were numerous books (for both adults and children) too, including the poetry collection Fresh Carpet (1986) and the anecdotal prose of Glasgow Dreamer (1990).

Throughout this prodigious oeuvre Cutler combined his delightfully, and sometimes troublingly, surreal humour with a gently subversive, anarchic humanism (the latter of which was reflected in his steadfast support of both the Noise Abatement Society and the Voluntary Euthanasia Society).

I had the pleasure of seeing Cutler perform his poetry live, at the Stills photography gallery in Edinburgh in 1994. The occasion was the launch of the whimsically titled A Stuggy Pren, a book of photographs of Cutler and his partner (in life and art) Phyllis King taken by Katrina Lithgow, accompanied by poems by Cutler.

Lithgow’s black and white photos – of Cutler peaking out from inside a cupboard and so on – are typically playful and humorous.

Cutler encouraged the children in the audience to sit at the front. Following a short interval he returned proclaiming: “Shut up! Shut Up! The poet’s coming back!” (an injunction that would be paraphrased in the theatre show The Beautiful Cosmos of Ivor Cutler, co-produced by the National Theatre of Scotland and Vanishing Point theatre company in 2014).

Cutler was a resolute atheist who joked about God taking revenge upon him. However, his Jewish identity was important to him.

“Religion is not relevant to my life”, he said, “but I was born a Jew and there is no way you can hide under the carpet, not that I want to.” Cutler’s Jewish roots also emerged in some of his music, which was inflected strongly with the distinctive sound of Ashkenazi Jewish klezmer.

Ivor Cutler was a brilliantly unique figure in Scottish and international culture. He also stood in a tradition of Glasgow-Jewish comedians and humorists that stretches back to the early-20^th century music hall artist Ike Freedman and forward to contemporary figures Arnold Brown and Jerry Sadowitz.

With thanks to Harvey Kaplan, director of the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre

An edited version of this article was originally published in the Sunday National on January 22, 2023

Interview feature: Arnold Brown

July 4, 2022January 31, 2023 scottishstage Comedy features, Interviews

The King of Alternative Comedy

The “culture wars” rumble on in comedy, but the father of “woke” humour is the great Glaswegian Jewish comedian Arnold Brown, writes Mark Brown

Comedy fans are preparing themselves for the post-Covid return of the huge jamboree of humour that is the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. As they do so, stand-up comedy is embroiled in a so-called “culture war” between “woke” comedians (who believe that comedy carries some kind of socio-political responsibility) and “anti-woke” acts (who, broadly, think no subject is off-limits for comedy).

However, as the good book tells us, “there is nothing new under the sun.” The current debate over “wokeness” is, in many ways, a re-run of the tussle over “alternative comedy” and “political correctness” in the 1980s.

Alternative comedy was a reaction against the right-wing humour that had predominated hitherto (in which acts like Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson had dealt, to a very large extent, in racism, sexism, homophobia and other bigotries). The new, progressive movement in comedy gave us such names as Alexei Sayle, Ben Elton, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, the late Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson.

It also produced Arnold Brown, who is considered by many to be the father of alternative comedy. Raised in the Jewish community in Govanhill, on the southside of Glasgow, Brown was 42 years old before his career in stand-up comedy got going.

Since then he has become known as “the comedian’s comedian” (although he insists, with typical, self-deprecating wit, that it has always been his ambition to be “the bank manager’s comedian”).

Prior to his breakthrough in the Eighties, he had been an accountant. He remembers expressing his humour through cartooning and, later, writing sketches for the BBC, which was, he says, an “antidote” to accountancy.

The young Brown’s cartooning included a strip he created with a friend for the Jewish Echo newspaper in the 1950s. Titled Sammy the Shammas (“shammas” being the Hebrew and Yiddish word for a beadle or sexton of a synagogue), it followed the life of the titular character.

He remembers one Sammy cartoon in particular. The character is, the comedian tells me, “on a ladder. He is replacing the ‘exit’ sign with one that reads ‘exodus’.”

This excellent Jewish joke, created when Brown was just 20 years of age, was a harbinger of the clever, sometimes bleak, and brilliantly sharp comedy that would become his stock-in-trade as a stand-up.

The comedian remembers the early days at the Comedy Store in London. Initially, he wasn’t paid for his stand-up routines.

It took Keith Allen – a brilliant comedy pioneer who would become well-known as a member of the team that created the Comic Strip films for Channel 4 – to secure Brown’s first fee. “Keith badgered the Comedy Store people to give me £10”, the comedian recalls, with a laugh.

From there, Brown was invited by Peter Richardson (who would also become a stalwart of the Channel 4 film series) to join a group of comedians who were taking up residence at Raymond’s Revue Bar (home of the notorious strip club). The new comedy venue was called, inevitably enough, the Comic Strip.

“On one side, was the box-office for the Comic Strip”, the Glaswegian comedian recalls, “and on the other side was the queue for the strip-tease punters.” This set-up was ripe for comedy. Brown duly obliged.

“One of my jokes was”, he recollects, “‘as we sit here laughing at my joke’, note no plural, ‘next door, in Raymond’s Revue Bar, 192 Japanese businessmen are lusting over our women, and you’re sitting here doing nothing about it.” A complex joke that turns racist and sexist comedy upside down, this gag is typical of Brown’s unerring ability to create tension in an audience by challenging expectations.

I had the good fortune to experience this first-hand more than 20 years ago in New York City. Brown was one of the acts in a showcase of Scottish culture which was being staged in Manhattan in conjunction with the Tartan Day parade in New York.

As so often, the comedian made his Jewishness known early in the set. “I’m of the Jewish persuasion”, he said, before adding, “I can’t quite remember who persuaded me to be Jewish.”

As he got towards the end of the set, he created some confusion among an audience who were not accustomed to hearing Jewish comedians make jokes that were in any way critical of the State of Israel. “When I watched the news on BBC TV, I was puzzled as to why the Jewish settlers on the West Bank always seemed to have American accents”, he said.

“Now that I have come to New York, I think I understand”, he continued. “They had to move out because the rents in Manhattan are so incredibly expensive.”

Jokes like that have earned Brown great respect among his fellow comedians. Indeed, in 2014, he received the first ever lifetime achievement gong at the Scottish Comedy Awards (which he describes, of course, as “the Scottish OBE of comedy”).

Brown agrees with fellow comedian Jerry Sadowitz that Jewish Glaswegians have had “a double dose of gallows humour”. It is, he observes, “the old cliché of the outsiders making a joke at their expense, before someone else does.”

The comedian has often told London audiences: “I’m Scottish and Jewish. That’s two racial stereotypes for the price of one. Perhaps the best value in the West End tonight… perhaps not.”

Unsurprisingly, where Glasgow humour is concerned, the comedian talks very warmly of Billy Connolly. As to the younger generation, he has, he says, “an incredible admiration for Kevin Bridges.”

“I saw him at his first Edinburgh show. I was blown away”, Brown comments, “he was so young and already a perfectly formed talent.”

He remembers, in particular, Bridges’s line about a government initiative to help children in deprived areas, such as Castlemilk in Glasgow, through a music programme in schools. Bridges wasn’t sure, he said, that inequality could be addressed by giving kids a glockenspiel. The gag was delivered, Brown remembers, “with all the panache and social accuracy of Victoria Wood.”

Brown’s admiration of Bridges doesn’t extend to the deliberately offensive humour of Jimmy Carr’s supposed “joke” about the mass murder of Roma people by the Nazis (which, Carr said, was as one of the “positives” of the Holocaust). Likewise Ricky Gervais’s supposed “gags” at the expense of oppressed and marginalised groups in society.

“Stand-ups like Ricky Gervais and Jimmy Carr seem to me to be more concerned with provoking controversy than anything else”, Brown comments. “Goading the ‘woke’ brigade is the main aim, but, ultimately, it doesn’t ring true.”

After he heard Carr’s material about Roma people, Brown jokes, “my idea of ‘Comic Relief’ is switching him off on TV.”

The hollow controversialising of Carr contrasts with the white-knuckle ride that is the comedy of Jerry Sadowitz, he observes. His fellow Glaswegian Jewish comedian is, Brown says, “the real thing” when it comes to humour that is controversial, but has irony and substance.

At the heart of Brown’s comedy is, of course, Jewish humour, which often relates, he says, to the Talmud (the central text of rabbinical teaching and law within Judaism). This involves examining an issue from many different angles and perspectives, “almost taking it inside-out.”

The best practitioner of this “Talmudic” humour is, says Brown, the New York Jewish comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Indeed, the Glaswegian’s comedy heroes include a number of New York Jewish figures, such as Mel Brooks and, Brown’s absolute favourite comedian, Woody Allen.

The maker of such films as Hannah and Her Sisters and Manhattan is the creator of “very dark humour”, the comedian says. One of his favourite gags of Allen’s is: “I got this watch from my grandfather on his death-bed… he sold it to me.”

I suggest that Brown shares with Allen an ability to deal in very serious subject matter – not least the Nazi Holocaust – with a great levity and lightness of touch. As if to prove my point, he remembers one of his jokes in that vein. “People ask me about the Jewish contribution to civilisation. I tell them, ‘we’ve given already’.”

This article was originally published in the Sunday National on July 3, 2022

Preview: Glasgow International Comedy Festival 2014

March 18, 2014 scottishstage Comedy features

Does indy comedy stand-up?

As the Glasgow International Comedy Festival prepares to get underway, Mark Brown asks two of Scotland’s top comedians if the independence referendum is funny.

Scotland’s independence debate has generated a lot of high profile commentary of late. David Bowie ‘s now infamous four-word message at the end of his Brit Awards acceptance statement has added a bit of glamour to the debate. Much needed, some might say, given that other recent celebs chucking in their opinions have included TV and pantomime star John Barrowman and hair stylist to the famous Nicky Clarke.

There might be a bit of unintended humour in Margaret Thatcher’s former hairdresser lecturing the people of Scotland on economics, but is the indy referendum actually funny? As Glasgow prepares to host its annual International Comedy Festival, who better to ask than two of Scotland’s top comedians, Fred MacAulay and Bruce Morton?

The debate running up to the plebiscite had “f***ing better be” funny, says MacAulay. “At this year’s Edinburgh Fringe I’m doing a show called The Frederendum, and it’s going to be entirely about Scotland and the coming referendum. So, if the campaign’s not become funny by then, I’m going to end up giving a lecture, and I’m not qualified to do that.”

The comic and BBC Radio Scotland presenter (who plays Glasgow’s King’s Theatre on March 26 as part the Comedy Festival) is a bit bemused by recent commentary to the effect that comedians aren’t picking up the referendum gauntlet. “You only have to set foot inside a comedy club in Scotland and you’ll find that plenty of people are talking about it.”

He cites, for example, Aye Right? How no’? The Comedy Countdown To The Referendum – a self-defined “mix of stand-up and panel-show comedy, poetry, political comment, music and spoken word” – which is hosted by Vladimir McTavish and Keir McAllister at The Stand comedy clubs in Edinburgh (March 26) and Glasgow (April 21), with other shows in the pipeline. “I’m trying to get a date to do that”, says MacAulay. ” I think everybody who’s in comedy in Scotland wants, in the six months that are left, to have a right good go at the referendum.”

Which is not to say that MacAulay is about to declare his voting intentions. Perhaps mindful, as a Radio Scotland presenter, of the BBC’s guidelines on balance, he’s taking the Billy Connolly position, and refusing to publicly back either side.

If he’s avoiding controversy, he’s not sure David Bowie intended to cause as much of a stramash as he did. “I think there was a glitch” [in the message read out at the Brits], he says. “I think it was like when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon and it was meant to be, ‘one giant step for a man’, but it came out as, ‘one giant step for man’. I think Bowie actually said, ‘Scotland, come and stay with us’. He was inviting us all to go and have a wee break in Manhattan.”

For his part, Bruce Morton (whose show, The Greater Shawlands Republic, is at The Stand, Glasgow on March 14) is somewhat less charitable where Bowie is concerned. “From my point of view, Bowie’s an overrated pantomime act who would struggle to get a gig at the Pavilion”, says the comedian.

“It was hilarious the day after [the Brits] at First Ministers Questions when [Conservative leader] Ruth Davidson was quoting David Bowie lines”, Morton remembers. “The ‘No’ campaign must have been excited.”

In fact, Morton’s still chortling at Scots-American Barrowman’s much-derided broadcast for the Better Together campaign. “Not only did he put on a Scottish accent, but he also put on a suit of the kind of tartan you’d usually only see on the seat covers on a Cal Mac ferry.”

Unlike Connolly and MacAulay, Morton is more than happy to pin his referendum colours to the mast. In fact, he is actively campaigning for a ‘Yes’ vote, and recently chaired a pro-independence meeting in the East End of Glasgow at which former Labour and Scottish Nationalist MP Jim Sillars was a guest speaker.

Although he’s publicly arguing the Yes case, Morton makes no criticism of Connolly for preferring to keep his views private. “We all recall his comment about ‘the wee, pretendy parliament’. If he’s decided he wants to stay out of the referendum debate, then fair play to him. It may be that’s he’s being altruistic in that decision, or it may be that he doesn’t want to get popped at by either side.”

However, he adds, “I’m not sure those of us on the pro-independence side are particularly concerned about being pilloried. I mean, how many Valium am I going to need if I get pilloried by [Conservative MSP] Murdo Fraser?”, he asks rhetorically.

There is, for Morton, a serious point in the fears of some celebrities that stating their views on the indy debate publicly might lead them into trouble. “Traditionally in the arts it’s people who are on the right who feel that they have to keep their mouths shut. I remember, some years ago, Gary Numan saying he’d always felt disinclined to raise the flag as a Conservative voter, because he knew he’d get pelters for it. That does seem a little unfair. I’ve always said that people should stand up for what they believe in.”

The Glasgow International Comedy Festival runs from March 14 to April 5. For full programme information, visit: glasgowcomedyfestival.com

This feature was originally published in the Sunday Herald on March 9, 2013

Preview: Adam Hills, Assembly Hall, Edinburgh

August 4, 2013September 18, 2013 scottishstage Comedy features, Interviews

More Mr Nice Guy

Australian stand-up, and presenter of hit TV show The Last Leg, Adam Hills can’t escape the tag of ‘nicest man in comedy’. But, as he tells Mark Brown, he doesn’t want to.

When Channel 4 bosses were considering their coverage of the 2012 London Paralympic Games, they called upon comedian Adam Hills. He was an obvious choice. As an Australian, sport, to him, is more of a religion than a past-time. Even more importantly, as a disabled performer (he was born without a right foot), Hills has a strong track record of busting taboos around disability.

The resulting programme, The Last Leg – which Hills presented with Alex Brooker and “token able-bodied sidekick” Josh Widdicombe – averaged an impressive million-plus viewers and picked up the “outstanding achievement” gong at the Creative Diversity Awards. With its famous “is it okay to ask?” segment, the show made discussion of paralympic and disability issues much easier for a general audience while, simultaneously, being very funny.

As with so many good ideas, Hills tells me on the line from Melbourne, the show reached our screens virtually by accident. “It’s almost a fluke, the way that The Last Leg came about”, he explains. “Originally, Channel 4 asked me to host a two-hour long, late night paralympics highlights show on More 4. It was going to be a little bit humorous, but ostensibly a sports highlights show. Then, after they’d seen me do a bit of comedy about the paralympics, they went, ‘hang on! There’s comedy to be had here. Maybe we should turn it into a primetime comedy show.'”

The Sydney-born comic had no idea that the newly proposed format would prove to be such a success. “All we really wanted to do was celebrate the paralympics. I’d been in Beijing in 2008 and I knew the joy that the paralympics brings.”

The popularity of The Last Leg is widely considered to be founded upon its sensitive and intelligent approach to comedy about disability and disabled athletes. However, that too, says Hills, was more a question of accident than design. “We had to let people know that it was okay to make jokes about the paralympics, and that paralympians were okay with it. All of the important things that we achieved were almost side effects. If we had set out to make a path-breaking show that ‘pushed the barriers of disability awareness’, blah blah blah, we’d just have looked like preachy twats.”

Another element in the show’s success was Hills’s personality. Known, almost universally, as “the nicest man in comedy”, he is, quite simply, one of the most likeable people on stage and television. It’s a reputation he’s embracing with his latest stand-up show, which plays at the Assembly Hall in Edinburgh during next month’s Festival Fringe. Entitled Happyism, I wonder if it is taking a very conscious stand against the aggressive and cynical strand in modern day comedy.

“Yes”, says Hills. “The show’s about a personal story, but it’s a story that reflects that [contrast with aggressive comedy]. The story is, I went on a TV show called Chelsea Lately [in 2011], which is hosted by an American comedian called Chelsea Handler. They were filming it in Sydney. It was one of those shows that takes pot shots at celebrities. They asked me to go on and be mean. They said, ‘we’ve seen what you do, we know you do nice, but we want you to be edgy and harsh.’ The problem is, when I try to do that, I forget to be funny.

“I’m really good at being mean”, he laughs, “but it just comes across as being mean… I went on the show, and I tried to do mean jokes about celebrities that I really didn’t care about and, half the time, didn’t really know. It went so badly, it was just awful. I did look as if I was just mean. It actually ended up in the papers here in Australia, just how badly it went. It kind of followed me around for ages.”

Indeed, the notoriety of his backfired attempt at nastiness followed Hills all the way to a very unlikely encounter. “Not long after doing the show, I was hosting a concert for the Dalai Lama”, the comedian remembers. “There were a whole load of Australian bands, and the Dalai Lama gave us a private meeting backstage, and His Holiness said, ‘I’m a Buddhist monk. I don’t know anything about music or comedy, but I do know this, you have a microphone, you should use it to say something.’

“I really love the fact that, of all people, the Dalai Lama said, ‘put something into your microphone’… I do think there is a responsibility in having a microphone and going out on stage. You can put anything you want into that microphone, and a lot of people are going to hear it.”

Lest you think Hills is on the road to a spiritual conversion, it is not only the leader of world Buddhism who has influenced his notion of “Happyism”. A later encounter with the creations of Jim Henson also had a part to play. “I was on stage with The Muppets in Montreal, and I watched them put so much joy into a room full of people, and it reminded me, ‘you have a microphone, use it to do something positive.'”

Hills’s new show may be all about accentuating the positive, but as a left-leaning, progressive Australian, I suspect he’s not exactly happy about the current state of the Australian Labor Party, whose parliamentarians kicked out their own leader, Australia’s first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, last month. “It’s an appalling state of affairs”, the comedian says of Gillard’s ousting, and her replacement by Kevin Rudd, the man Gillard herself had ousted in 2010. “It’s made a complete mockery of Australian politics.

“To boil it down”, he continues, “and this comes from the media, from talking to various politicians, and from talking to Julia Gillard, who I’ve got to know: basically it seems that the reason the parliamentary Labor Party got rid of Kevin Rudd three years ago was that he was almost impossible to work for. He was a real control freak, and the people who worked for him just couldn’t deal with it anymore. That’s what led Gillard to mount her leadership coup in 2010. From what I can tell, he’d just been chipping away in the background ever since. He made it impossible for her to get anywhere.”

The comic admires much of what Gillard achieved as Prime Minister. He cites, as examples, progressive policies on education funding and disability insurance. However, he parts company with her, and with Labor, on asylum policy; the “offshore processing” of would-be refugees to Australia, including children, in what he calls “virtual concentration camps” in neighbouring countries, such as Papua New Guinea, is, he says, “a blight on Australia”.

If the internal turmoil in the Labor Party is a source of dismay, rather than comedy, for Hills, there is another subject that Edinburgh audiences can expect him to leave out of his show. “I always find it hard to make jokes about the rugby league team that I support”, he admits. “I’ve supported the South Sydney Rabbitohs since I was three days old. If I had to get up on stage and do jokes about them, I don’t think I could. I’m so passionate about the team, I’d have to distance myself from it in order to find the funny… It’s probably easier to make jokes about politics, because politics doesn’t matter.”

However, ask Hills, who is an Edinburgh Fringe veteran, about his attitude to the world’s biggest arts festival, and his favourite sport comes readily to his mind. “I always used to view Edinburgh as my grand final, to put it in rugby league terms. I would work up a show in Australia, say at the Adelaide Fringe, take it to Melbourne, and tour it around Australia. Then, by the time I took it to Edinburgh, it was as tight as it could possibly be.” It’s no different with Happyism, he says. Edinburgh remains, for him, comedy’s greatest showcase.

Adam Hills plays the Assembly Hall, August 15-25. For further information, visit: http://www.assemblyfestival.com

This feature was originally published in The Herald on July 27, 2013

Preview: Andy Parsons, Glasgow International Comedy Festival

March 20, 2013 scottishstage Comedy features

Never take stand-up lying down

Many comedians would find the thought of a Glasgow audience intimidating, but not Andy Parsons. He talks to Mark Brown about coming to the Comedy Festival

“The Glasgow crowd are up for it”, says comedian Andy Parsons, explaining why he’s bringing his latest stand-up show (entitled, Monty Python-style, “I’ve Got A Shed”) to the Glasgow International Comedy Festival. “Glasgow audiences aren’t like the reserved Home Counties English crowd. They come out to have a good night.”

Gone are the days, says the comic, when Glasgow was considered a graveyard for English comedians. “I was first up in Glasgow doing a gig in the early Nineties”, he remembers, “and, ever since I’ve been coming up, it’s never fitted that bill [of being tough for English comedians] at all. In fact, there are a lot of English comedians who film their shows for DVD in Glasgow, just because they enjoy the crowd so much.”

Parsons has enjoyed a distinguished career as both a writer and performer in radio and on television, ranging from writing on ITV’s hit puppet satire programme Spitting Image to, more recently, starring on BBC panel show Mock The Week. Now that he’s on the British comedy A-list, he’s selling out large houses, such as Glasgow’s King’s Theatre, where he plays on Wednesday night.

It wasn’t always this way, however. Having trained as a lawyer, and quickly left the profession (which he “hated with a passion”), Parsons started on the bottom rung of the comedy ladder. He certainly doesn’t take his current success for granted.

“I did the clubs for many years, when you’re just part of a bill, and nobody really knows who you are”, he recollects. “So, being able to go and sell out a theatre under your own name, that is a fantastic thrill and something I’ve yet to get over.”

Where Glasgow is concerned, much of his success was earned in a comedy institution which he continues to hold in high regard. “Most of my experience of playing in Glasgow has been related in some way to The Stand comedy club”, he says. “It is a brilliant venue. In the world of corporate gigs run by people who don’t know much about comedy, it stands out as a beacon.”

For Parsons, performing stand-up is the apogee of his career. “Touring is my favourite”, he comments. “You get to do every facet of the business. You get to be the producer, the director, the writer and the performer. You have total, 100 per cent control. You get to do whatever you want to do. Although, admittedly, you do, therefore, have to take any flack that’s going.”

Flack or not, the freedom of stand-up is, he says, in stark contrast to the increasingly nervous world of TV comedy, especially in the modern day BBC. “The trouble with doing radio or TV is that there’s always a higher power, and somebody, somewhere will be saying. ‘no, you can’t do that.’

“The boundaries have changed ever since Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross’s infamous phone call. Obviously, Mock The Week was cutting across those boundaries. We got away with a lot more before [the Brand/Ross phone call] than we have subsequently. People who come to see the live show over the three hours will see a very different show from what goes out in the half-an-hour. I would love it to go back the other way.”

Parsons is understandably diplomatic when it comes to the issue of fellow stand-up Frankie Boyle’s famous departure from Mock The Week. He won’t be drawn on whether or not he sympathised with Boyle’s decision to leave the programme, saying only, “Frankie had been wanting to leave Mock The Week for some time.”

Nevertheless, Parsons is absolutely emphatic about the nature of Boyle’s departure from the BBC show. “In Frankie’s court case with the Daily Mirror, I believe that was one of the points in contention. They said he was kicked off the show when, in fact, he wasn’t at all kicked off. He left of his own volition.”

Despite Boyle leaving the programme, Parsons says he and the Scottish comic “get on well”. Indeed, when he takes to the King’s stage on Wednesday, the Englishman expects to see Boyle in the audience.

Given that he has worked with many of the best writers and performers in modern British comedy, I wonder what have been the greatest influences on Parsons’ career. “When you’re into comedy, everything influences you”, he replies.

“However, my first grounding, when I didn’t know that much about what I was doing, was when I was working on Spitting Image. That taught me a massive amount about TV, about how to frame sketches, and also how to do satire. So, Spitting Image, out of everything I’ve done, has influenced me the most.”

Having worked on the show, which was credited with severely damaging the careers of numerous politicians (not least David Steel, who it portrayed as a tiny, abused sidekick of David Owen during the days of the Liberal/SDP Alliance), does Parsons agree with those who say that Spitting Image marked a high watermark in British TV satire which has never been equalled since? It is, he says, “probably true” to say that British satire has gone backwards since the days of the ITV show.

Spitting Image was, he says, “very much on the nail.” By contrast, “The Thick Of It is less specific [in its satire], and, in terms of specific material, there is nothing like Spitting Image on the TV at the moment.”

This lack of political bite in TV comedy is something that Parsons very much regrets, not least because we are living in such turbulent times. “Politics is entering into everybody’s lives in a way that it hasn’t done for a while”, he observes. “Ever since the financial crisis, everybody now knows somebody who is out of work, and that gives a certain piquancy to whatever you’re talking about as a comedian.”

There has been a lot of talk, in these days of Michael McIntyre and Jimmy Carr, of the domination of contemporary English comedy by performers from middle-class backgrounds. Does Parsons, who is the son of a nurse and a teacher, and was educated in state schools, feel that he has a greater connection with the lives of people at the sharp end of the economic crisis than many of his stand-up colleagues?

“I come from very much a middle-class background”, he says. “A lot of the stand-up circuit these days is dominated by people who have been to university, and that is definitely a change from comedy 30 years ago.”

Nevertheless, surely he has more to say about the lives of people who are being hit by job losses and benefit cuts than someone like Michael McIntyre. “Given that he [McIntyre] observes things that happen to everybody, his job will become tougher and tougher”, says Parsons. “The more money he earns, the more difficult he’ll find it to respond to things that everybody experiences.”

As a denunciation, this is mild compared to Jerry Sadowitz’s expletive-laden proclamation of hatred for McIntyre at last year’s Glasgow International Comedy Festival. That’s typical of Parsons, however. Perhaps it has something to do with the legal training that he so hated, but there is a carefully considered subtlety to much of his material which sets him apart from the likes of Boyle and Sadowitz.

Indeed, Parsons’ combination of satirical wit and careful precision seems tailored to the scandals of recent weeks, from the fall from grace of Cardinal Keith O’Brien to the jailing of Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce. Surely there are times when an issue arises which makes him wish he was recording Mock The Week.

“You wish you were”, he agrees. “But, to take the case of Cardinal O’Brien, given that it’s both sexual abuse and religion, the chances of getting something on the BBC on those two topics at the moment might be fairly limited. So you might be better off doing a live show anyway.”

So, will his Glasgow audience be offered material on the Scottish cleric? “Obviously, there’s a basic structure to the show, says Parsons, “and some things will fit very neatly into that structure. At the moment, Cardinal O’Brien is in the clear, but who’s to say that will still be the case by Wednesday night?”

Andy Parsons plays the King’s Theatre, Glasgow on Wednesday night at 7.30pm. For tickets and more information, visit: http://www.glasgowcomedyfestival.com

This preview was originally published in The Herald on March 16, 2013