sunday times column week eight

Sts wk 8 column version 2.

On Monday my eleven year old daughter went off to Camp Hollywoodland, an all girls sleepover camp. She said she was nervous about the spiders and the other kids, though I suspect that this might have been partly a ruse to get us to buy her more new stuff, torches, sleeping bag, suitcases, all pink of course.She is only actually gone until Saturday morning but she insisted on a ‘care package’ or goody bag which we sent off on Tuesday with more pink stuff. Meanwhile her six year old brother, possibly in an act of protest at this preferential treatment, has decided to cut his own fringe so that we had to take him to the barbers early the next day to try to fix it.

Until I was eight or nine my Uncle Paddy used to cut our hair, he lived downstairs from us in the same tenement and had us sit backwards on a chair while he attacked our hair with some kind of implement designed for shearing sheep. I remember being delighted when I finally went to a proper barbers and found out that getting a haircut didn’t necessarily have to be physically painful. God, I sound like Molly bloody Weir.

Ben Kingsley was a guest on the show, I call him Ben although he is Sir Ben because we are now friends. He was on plugging his latest film” Kill Me” in which he plays a hit man who goes to AA to stop drinking and become a better hitman.

He agreed to be in a recurring sketch called ESPN UK where Craig plays a sort of mad George Best character and I am the posh straight man, Sir Cecil Wellsley Hogg, glued on moustache and tweed suit, I look like my Geography teacher from the seventies. We cast Sir Ben as the new coach for LA Galaxy who was a former hard man who has renounced all violence In real life he seems so gentle and optimistic but when he turned nasty in the sketch and smashed a bottle over Craig’s head, it brought back memories of bar fights in Rutherglen. I really felt quite scared.

A relative of mine owned and ran a pub in Barrowland called the Clyde Vaults, it was what was know as a “wine shop”. I once heard a guy in Glasgow tell his pal, “see you, you’re that drunk, you’d get a knock back from the Clyde Vaults.” It was described by the Sunday Mail pub spy review in the following glowing terms:” this has to be the dirtiest pub in Scotland, possibly the world.” It had the nick name of Lourdes, because so many of its clientele would go in on crutches but later emerge singing and dancing, miraculously healed by the curative powers of “the wine”.

The big news here is of course Paris getting back out of the slammer again. She is on Larry King live on CNN today. Larry King is an old ham from radio who has a reputation for being easy on his subjects and astonishingly under prepared. He interviewed Paul Ringo Yoko and Olivia Harrison yesterday and kept on calling Ringo George.


The more reputable media covering Paris’ release are there supposedly to analyze the media circus surrounding her release, as if somehow their lights and cameras and crew are not really a part of it.

This is a kid who was drunk driving and then driving while banned but after three weeks in prison there seems to be this weird rush to canonize her, or maybe it’s just that Lindsey Lohan is still in rehab and it takes everyone’s mind off the war in Iraq.

We did more bits for the show shamelessly plugging the Ford Escape, where I play the host’s mad bekilted Scottish cousin. After tearing a seam on the thirty six inch waist kilt they hired for me, George in wardrobe took me aside and with all the discretion of a senior oncologist asked me in a whisper, ?” like this was a question that might wound me to the core. “Has someone put on a couple of L.Bs ?”

On Friday we’ll shoot a scene where we go horse riding which might be awkward for me as the closest I’ve ever been to a horse was a donkey ride on the beach at Saltcoats in the late sixties. Americans don’t call it horse riding but horse back riding, as if to distinguish it from sitting on the horse’s head, I suppose.

I took my kids to see Evan Almighty, the sequel to Jim Carrey’s Bruce Almighty this time with Steve Carrell as an anchorman turned congressman who is told by God to build an ark. It is reportedly the most expensive comedy ever made because the director tried to use real animals over special effects as far as possible. Having seen it I felt that they should have used a few more computer generated monkeys and spent the money saved on a couple of re-writes.