Chic Murray

Review - Chic Murray: A Funny Place For A Window

As you might expect, there are plenty of laughs in Chic Murray: A Funny Place For A Window. What is less expected is a touching and beautifully acted love story.

Stuart Hepburn on Chic Murray

Revived play about the comedy master of Scottish surrealism.

Scotland's funniest 60 people

As the Glasgow International Comedy Festival prepares to launch with a gaggle of giggles later this month, we count down Scotland's funniest 60 people.

Gary Little: comedy heroes Chic Murray & Billy Connolly

Glasgow stand-up picks two Scottish legends as his comic icons.

Mordrin McDonald: 21st-Century Wizard (Radio 4, Wednesdays) is proof that, somewhere beyond the usual shouting and swearing, real comedy still exists. It's written by David Kay and Gavin Smith, stars Gordon Kennedy (as Mordrin) and Jack Docherty (as fellow wizard Bernard the Blue) and concerns a 2,000-year-old being who fights evil whenever he isn't jam-making or chatting to the neighbours. He is a Scot and lives in Scotland which imbues in him a world view like those of the great Chic Murray or the marvellous Arnold Brown, tending to the school of rueful reflection and deflation of expectation. Asked if wizards can sense each others' presence he replies, "No, I just look out the window." He knows how to disarm a dragon and what to do when the binmen don't arrive. Every urban village needs a Mordrin. I hope this one stays longer on Radio 4 than his four allotted episodes. His chances of doing so are enhanced by good casting and strong production (by Gus Beattie, for independents The Comedy Unit).

Rab C Nesbitt, who has been played by Gregor Fisher for the past two decades, has retained much of its grungy, cooncil-hoose ambience - the men wavering between fantasy and uselessness, the women unillusioned and razor-tongued. Some of the sting has been drawn, though: Rab, an unemployed drunk for the past 20 years, is now off the booze, his son off drugs. Scotland, still the place to go for these prompters of illusion and hasteners of death, is striving to be proper but can, in this show, still provide soil for good wit.

It is no disrespect to the show and its star, nor to its writer and creator Ian Pattison, to say it rests on and draws from the comic traditions of Glasgow, a city that saw, in a long postwar glory, the maturing of the talents of Stanley Baxter, Rikki Fulton, Jimmy Logan and the master, Chic Murray - as well as the later blaze that was and is Billy Connolly. They were acid, fantastic and in hateful love with their city and its culture, which they helped create. Fisher recalls them at their best when, in a moment of park bench amorousness towards his inevitably long-suffering wife, Mary Doll, Rab C suggests that they "nick intae the lavvie and gi'e ye a belt up the knickers fur auld times sake ... we cud gae intae the disabled, it's roomier noo we've filled oot a bit". When he waxes romantic about his own past, she reminds him that he had become a "psychotically disabled alcoholic". "Ah'm frae Govan," he snaps back. "It wudda happened onywey."

How taking a Stand saved Scottish comedy

It hosts the world's biggest arts festival and has produced a string of world-class comics from Chic Murray to Billy Connolly.