Gregor Fisher

He might be pushing 60, but Gregor Fisher's string-vested waster shows no signs of slowing down as Rab returns for a 10th series tonight.

In the first episode, he and wife Mary (Elaine C Smith) accidentally end up holding a government minister hostage in their lovely Govan home.

With guest star Richard E Grant hamming it up as suave MP Chingford Steel, this is a chance for some outrageous ransom demands as Rab decides to pass himself off as a terrorist.

Bad taste? Absolutely - although perhaps not nearly so off-putting as Rab's prostate check-up, which we're also lucky enough to witness.

Delighted to find himself at the centre of a siege, Rab isn't going to waste this once-in-a-lifetime chance. "This is Strictly Come Dancing for scum," as he explains to Mary.

Even if you only understand every other word, this sitcom is still in the rudest health.

Radio Times review

The work-shy Scot returns to our screens for a tenth series of this Marmite-flavoured comedy. Still a philosopher who lies in the gutter but looks at the stars, Rab (Gregor Fisher) proudly asserts his status as Govan scum, and even giving up the drink doesn't hinder him. Add an unrelenting stream - sometimes literally - of vulgarity and this sitcom is not for the pure of heart or for genteel softies.

Now he's pushing 60, Rab takes his wife Mary's advice to get himself checked out by the NHS, while we still have one. Be warned: nothing is left to the imagination.

Meanwhile, Minister for Work Chingford Steel (guest star Richard E Grant) happens to call, expecting to use the facilities of the Nesbitt household. He gets a great deal more than he bargained for. This is a comedy where the humour isn't just broad, it's wider than the Clyde.

He may have given up his psychosis to spend more time with the family, but Gregor Fisher's ageing rapscallion Rab is still capable of creating considerable mayhem. Tonight, that means being at the centre of a siege when Mary kidnaps the minister of work, Chingford Steel (Richard E Grant). Funny, but don't expect subtlety, especially when Rab goes to the doctor because he's worried about his prostate: "There could be pie suppers lodged up there from the summer of love."

Govan's favourite savant returns for a new series of armchair philosophising and lewd cracks better suited to the schoolyard. Tonight Rab (Gregor Fisher) worries about the state of his prostate before the plot veers from ridiculous to surreal. Rab's wife Mary (Elaine C Smith), upset at losing her job, assaults the Minister for Work (Richard E Grant) with a frying pan and takes him hostage. The skillet is an apt metaphor for the unsubtle comedy, but the programme is also shot through with the sort of astute social observations that are this sitcom's trademark.

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25 years of Rab C Nesbitt

Those seeking some light relief from the grim news in 1986 might have unleashed a guffaw or three at the BBC Scotland sketch show, Naked Video, in which Gregor Fisher wore a grubby string vest and glottal-stopped his way through a series of Buckfast-soaked stream-of-consciousness philosophy lectures. Later, when the character spun off into his own series, Rab C Nesbitt's mockit headband, disintegrating trainers and wino wisdom took the underclass into everyone's living room.

A starring vehicle for venerable Scottish comedy scribes Iain Connell and Robert Florence (whose credits include the unfairly overlooked Gregor Fisher sitcom Empty), Burnistoun is an amiable yet decidedly unremarkable sketch show. This is disappointing as they are clearly talented.

But at least they have the courage to produce sketches dependent on verbal playfulness and ideas rather than repeated catchphrases or lazy cruelty.

Their hit rate may be scarce (although I liked the parochial Scottish MP unwittingly elevated to the role of PM), but I cautiously welcome any sketch show in the approximate tradition of, say, Absolutely over the abysmal Little Britain. Maybe it will improve, although the idea is normally that you put some of your best material in the first episode...

I know, I know, television institution and that. But did he really need to make a comeback? It's not Rab himself that's the problem. Gregor Fisher, still in string vest and suit, is just as beguiling as the lazy, lovable drunken Rab. But it's like watching Robert Lindsay in My Family. Yes, he's good. But what about the rest of them?

Last night saw Rab and Mary welcome (if that's the word) their son Gash back to the home after a prolonged stint in a mental institution. Gash, meanwhile, gets to know his daughter, the foul-mouthed, chocolate-pizza-munching Peaches. Aside from that, not much happened, though Rab did manage to leave us with a rather wonderful little truism on romance: "The dreaded R Word! That's the worst thing a woman can give a man - respect!" he told his bemused wife. "You respect Vince Cable, you respect Alex Salmond... but you'd drop your draws for Daniel Craig."

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."