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My pal Ewan stars with Scarlett. . .I get Blythe Duff! TAGGART Colin McCredie on his megastar friend, the death of his mum and why he hates TV police shows In our second look at popular Scots TV series Taggart, stars Colin McCredie and John Michie tell BR
(Evening Times Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)DCI STUART FRASER
COLIN McCREDIE
TAGGART star Colin McCredie smiles as he recalls how he once punched Ewan McGregor - and admits that he feels mad jealous as he's watched his old pal soar towards super-stardom.
One of Colin's earliest roles was in Shallow Grave, a thriller in which Ewan and two friends accidentally stumble across a fortune.
Colin played one of the hapless people rejected by the trio as a would-be flat-mate - but later in the film he thumped McGregor's character, Alex.
He and Ewan first met while both were in youth theatre. "You knew he would do well, " says Colin. "He was good-looking and had lots of personality.
"We're still in touch but, of course, I'm jealous.
"He gets to work with the gorgeous Scarlett Johansson . . . and I get Blythe Duff!"
As you talk to 33-year-old Colin, it's clear that this is a man who speaks his mind.
The television detective says that he'd have to be handcuffed to an armchair before he'd watch a detective series on television.
And just for good measure the Irn Bru-haired actor, who has played DCI Stuart Fraser for the past 10 years in the Scottish crime series, reveals how comedy legend and panto star Rikki Fulton was, in fact, a nightmare to work with.
What's also refreshing about Colin is that he's prepared to open up about the saddest period of his own life.
His mum died when he was 11 years old. She had been ill for some time but that didn't make it any easier for a little boy to cope with.
"It was very hard. I wouldn't wish that sort of experience on anyone. And now I realise I was still a wee boy.
"But I had a great family support system - I have two brothers and two sisters and I was the youngest.
"And of course my dad was great. He went through a great deal, having lost his wife and then having to cope with five kids. He could so easily have crumbled."
Colin coped in the way most kids would, given the circumstances. He blanked out reality.
"You didn't talk about it. You'd try to forget that it happened. But then the older you get, the easier it is to reflect.
"And then, when you have a kid of your own, you start to think how great it would have been if they could have seen their grandmother.
"But I suppose the whole experience makes you stronger, if you can deal with it."
Colin's sister, Annie, introduced her wee brother to a new environment where he could lose himself and have fun in the process - she ran the Scottish Youth Theatre in Perth. Her husband was comedy star Andy Gray, who starred as Chancer in BBC Scotland comedy City Lights in the 1980s, and he became "a great inspiration" to Colin.
Colin landed his first panto in Perth at the age of 12, alongside Forbes Masson, writer and star of BBC Scotland's The High Life, in Peter Pan. The show starred Rikki Fulton as Captain Hook.
It was a fantastic experience but Rikki was almost as scary as his Hook character.
"He didn't like children, " says Colin, "which was quite ironic, considering the panto was for kids.
"I realised I was given the chance to work with a huge star, and he really was a brilliant actor.
"But I got the feeling he was not a happy man at all. There was a sadness about him."
"I remember once getting pulled into his dressing room for a telling off.
"But, interestingly, I was being told off for the way I had been delivering a line - a line, incidentally, that got a big laugh.
"He told me how he thought it should be done. And I did it that way the next night and he was happy enough - although it didn't get a laugh.
"It wasn't until years later that I realised the reason I was told to change my delivery.
"Rikki probably thought all the laughs should be his."
Colin was barely out of drama school when the work began to appear.
Apart from Shallow Grave, he had a role in Small Faces and a couple of small parts in Taggart, first as a car thief and then as a farmer's hand.
Then came the major role of Stuart Fraser.
"Since I didn't know he was gay when I signed up I never played him camp or anything like that.
"He's a policeman who happens to be gay rather than a gay policeman."
Colin's TV character has had one on-screen partner, but the actor is happy the plot-driven show doesn't focus too heavily on its characters.
"I don't think I'd like to see Stuart go through a civil ceremony, for example. You don't want it to become like a soap.
"And in any case, the fact it's not on every week would make it difficult to follow the personal relationships of the characters."
He adds: "The show works. And ITV have woken up to the fact Taggart is fashionable."
He has enjoyed the breaks that come with working on TV specials, using the down-time to appear in theatre - "where you earn GBP350 a week, buy your own lunch, and there's certainly no car to pick you up in the morning, " he says. "It's back to reality with a bang.
"But it's great. I get scared when I go back on the stage because there's so much to re-learn. But you need to be scared, you need to remind yourself what it's all about."
Taggart has brought security for him, his wife Simone and daughter, Maisie, who was born last August.
They live in the west end of Glasgow in a three-bedroom 1930s terraced house.
When he's not working he's researching the life of comedy icon Peter Sellers. What he doesn't do is watch British crime dramas.
"I can't, " he says. "It's a busman's holiday. I either know some of the cast or the director or I'm looking at the film process.
"I can't even watch Sea Of Souls because I know all the actors and locations. Maybe that's why I enjoy American shows like The Sopranos or Desperate Housewives. There's more escapism for me.
"When I turn on the TV I need to forget what I do for a living."
THE CREATOR
GLENN CHANDLER
GLENN CHANDLER, 54, was one of the writers on Angels, the popular BBC series about hospital nurses which was first screened in the mid-1970s.
Early in the 1980s, Glenn was approached by the then controller of drama at Scottish Television with an idea for a series about a Glasgow detective.
Chandler, seeking inspiration in Maryhill cemetery, stumbled across names for his characters on the gravestones. The result was Killer, a three-parter screened in 1983, featuring Mark McManus as Taggart.
Glenn's later projects included TV dramas The Life And Crimes Of William Palmer, and The Brides In The Bath, and a film, Deadly Advice, starring a host of well-known British actors.
Amazing story of the man behind rebel cop Robbie
DI ROBBIE ROSS
JOHN MICHIE
JOHN MICHIE is as much a mystery as the Taggart plots. A glance at his background - the son of a banker raised in postcolonial Kenya and sent to public school in Edinburgh - would suggest a rather superior, well-to-do character.
But instead, the 49-year-old who plays roguish, rebellious cop Robbie Ross is as grounded as a corpse.
For example, he lives with wife Carol (an ex-Hot Gossip dancer) and their three kids in a north London suburb that could fit comfortably into a Taggart storyline.
"A short while back there was a shooting in our street and more recently I got involved with a couple of locals. One of them was kicking his pup, a bull mastiff.
"The street is actually nice, a quiet Victorian street but you have to be careful who you come across."
He adds: "Every 10th house is owned by someone you wouldn't want to be next to."
So why live there? "I really like it here, " he says. "I bought it when I didn't have very much money but the kids go to the local school and they've grown up here. I wouldn't want to take them out of that.
"And you have to consider that acting has never been an easy way to make a living. If I'd followed my father into banking I'd be living in a nice house in the suburbs right now.
"But that was never my choice." Michie can easily convince as the angular character Ross because he has more than enough life experience.
The rebel in him saw the then 19year-old set sale on a cargo ship to Australia via China where he worked as a cattle herder and picked fruit and tobacco.
He says he couldn't fail to become an actor, despite the fact he only ever saw one film while growing up in Africa. It starred Hayley Mills. Michie fell for her - and the idea of acting.
Living in Edinburgh, at 15, he would delight in the school trips to the Citizens' Theatre.
"We'd come over to see Shakespearean plays, performed by actors with long hair. I loved it.
"I wasn't allowed long hair at school, and I thought it all looked so exciting. Then later I went to London saw Glenda jackson in Heda Gabler and The Rocky Horror Show and thought, 'This is what I want to do.'
"That weekend I knew I'd never enter the world of accountancy."
Michie began at The Traverse as a stage hand, then he was an assistant stage manager in London before taking a job with a theatre company in Kenya for a year, changing plays every two weeks.
This was his drama school, where he learned his craft.
Then came the big break, starring in the film To Walk With Lions alongside Richard Harris and Scots legend Ian Bannen.
"Success is very much down to luck and I was really lucky to get Walk With Lions when one actor pulled out.
"But at the same time, once that happened I worked hard to make the part mine. For the audition I learned the script, I knew every scene backwards, added some lines and threw in a bit of Swahili."
HOWEVER, work was never a constant. "The money, or lack of it, is the big problem in the business. It's not a worry that the spotlight isn't on you. It's all about having no money in the bank.
"So you take whatever jobs you have to do and I've done the lot, from selling things to driving a truck for a safari company.
"But then most actors have to do this at some stage."
It's poetic justice he landed the role of Robbie Ross, the contrary cop with an eye for an opportunity and a female in a short skirt.
"I'd served my time in the obscure plays, I'd done Shakespeare and the new plays, I'd been a jobbing actor for 20 years with three kids to bring up."
Michie's Robbie Ross is a character of questionable integrity; but perhaps it takes a principled person to play someone so lacking.
The actor, for example, reveals not only would he never appear in a reality show, he wouldn't even do a holiday show. He had to be dragged on to a Paul O'Grady Show to promote Taggart.
"When I see cameras I think about acting. I'm not at all comfortable going on and being asked inane questions. It's not for me."
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