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Bill as Theo with Imelda Staunton as Polly in the 2007 BBC production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream |
Bill’s part in the 1955 World Cup
One of Britain’s best-known actors Bill Paterson tells Matthew Lewin how it happened that he became a
best-selling author too
Tales from the Back Green.
By Bill Paterson. Hodder & Stoughton. £12.99
THE success of the project has taken actor Bill Paterson somewhat by surprise.
“It’s just a wee book with a few of my memories. It’s not as if it’s an exposé of the Queen Mother’s relationship with the Gestapo!” he protests.
He is talking about his book, Tales from the Back Green, which completely sold out its first printing in one week, and is already being reprinted. It is also available as an audio book on CD.
He is, of course, delighted, particularly as the book started out as a single 15-minute story that he contributed anonymously to the BBC with the intention that it be read by another actor. Back came the reply from the BBC accepting the story and suggesting that it should be read by the actor Bill Paterson…
That story sparked off a series of five that were broadcast to great acclaim in 2003 and another five commissioned for 2007.
“You see, they were never intended for the page, but purely to be read by an actor and then dropped in the bin. But once they were such a success on the radio, publishers pricked up their ears and they asked me to turn it into a book,” he told me at his home in Whitehall Park, Archway.
And it has turned into an utterly delightful book which recreates the lives of that immediately post-war generation of the 1950s whose Glasgow “back greens” (tenement courtyards) were the scenes of intense outdoor activity, adventure, mischief and pure fantasy.
“The back greens that I look out on to now when I visit my pals in those tenements are actually green nowadays. In my day they were black or grey, with scarcely a blade of grass. Now they’re urban gardens.”
The first story describes how the boys, inspired by Britain’s development of the H-bomb, found a way of creating their own mushroom clouds by dropping paper bags full of sand.
“The Cold War was getting colder and in our corner of the back green we had started our first tentative experiments to imitate the effects of nuclear fission,” he writes.
They decide to build their own “Big One” by filling a large packing crate with sand and dust and dropping it off the roof of the tenement building – with disastrous (and hilarious) results.
Another story is about the organisation of the 1955 World Cup on their Dennistoun back green, creating their own stadium seating with orange boxes, cardboard boxes and biscuit tins, and making their own tickets that could be torn in half like the ones at the picture houses. Did the whole of Glasgow turn out to watch the match? You’ll have to read the book to find out.
And it’s all seen through that unique prism of childhood, through which time and size and everything else is wonderfully distorted.
“I was worried that it wouldn’t translate to the printed page, but it seems to be fine. It will be very interesting when I go to Glasgow to talk about the book because some of my contemporaries will be there, and I wonder what they will make of it all.”
Towards the end of the book, young Bill has become a trainee quantity surveyor (he thought he would be surveying mountains in places like Patagonia, but ended up counting bricks in Glasgow) and witnesses the dramatic transformation of the city as many of the tenements and other old buildings were swept away in so-called slum clearance schemes. But some jewels, he notes with relief, were spared.
Thankfully, Bill did not finish his training as a quantity surveyor. He chose instead to go to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, after which he was invited to join the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre.
His first role was in their 1967 production of Brecht’s The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, which also launched the career of Leonard Rossiter.
Later he was one of the founder members of John McGrath’s famous politically pro-active 7:84 Theatre Company – named after the statistic that only 7 per cent of the population owned 84 per cent of the country’s wealth – and that gave him several stimulating and exciting years.
He went on to take a starring role in Bill Forsythe’s Comfort and Joy and significant roles in big films such as Hilary and Jackie, Sir Ian McKellen’s Richard III, Truly Madly Deeply, A Private Function, and The Killing Fields.
On television he has been seen in everything from The Singing Detective and Licking Hitler to Smiley’s People, Auf Wiedersehen Pet, Foyle’s War, Traffic and The Crow Road (for which he won a Scottish best actor Bafta).
His significant stage roles have included Harry the Horse in the National Theatre’s famous production of Guys and Dolls as well as Death and the Maiden (both opposite his Whitehall Park neighbour Juliet Stevenson), Ivanov, Misery (with Sharon Gless), and Whose Life is it Anyway? which he took over from Tom Conti.
He has also been heard on countless Horizon and other TV documentary voice-overs, and he has also read a number of novels for audio books.
“I have tended to drift around and do different things all the time, and I enjoy that,” he said.
“It’s been pretty consistent and I am pretty busy – although I don’t exactly have to fight my way through scripts that come through my door.”
He will next be seen in the latest 16-episode period costume drama, Little Dorrit, which will start being screened in October. Bill plays Mr Meagles (“a lovely part”) opposite Tom Courtenay among others. In fact, the final scene, a wedding, is being filmed at Hampstead Parish Church in Church Row at the end of this week.
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