The main event: Scottish Royal Variety Performance

Published on Saturday 3 October 2009 18:45

Scottish Royal Variety Performance

EVER since the music halls gave way to picture houses, and they in turn to bingo halls, we have been proclaiming the death of variety. In Scotland, the variety tradition has fared better than elsewhere thanks to the rude health of pantomime but, even there, the days are long gone when a show would keep packing them in all the way to March. And most of us get by perfectly well without taking in a seaside summer show at a Scottish resort.

Yet there is something about a mixed bill of entertainment – where tumblers line up next to balladeers, and magicians follow on from can-can girls – that audiences cannot resist. Just look at the success of Britain's Got Talent which, for all its premium phone lines and baiting judges, is as old school as showbiz gets. Variety is not dead, it just got weirder.

And if surreal juxtapositions are your thing, look no further than the first Scottish Royal Variety Performance this Thursday in Glasgow. The event, in aid of the Royal Blind School Appeal and before the Duke of Gloucester and the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry, brings together a bulging bill of acts which, however exemplary in their own right, were surely never meant to share the same stage.

Not even the makers of Stella Street, the BBC2 comedy that imagined Jack Nicholson living round the corner from Jimmy Hill, could have dreamed up the scene backstage at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall in which Alasdair Gray, celebrated muralist and author of Lanark, will rub shoulders with the Sugababes, the much mutating princesses of perfect pop.

And you'd have to be deeply immersed in the all-celebrities-together world of Hello! magazine to regard it as normal to see singer Daniel Bedingfield, stand-up Danny Bhoy and aerialist Robert Foxall from Zippo's Circus sharing a backstage joke. Life on Planet Celebrity can rarely have seemed more strange.

This is especially the case because the producers have chosen to give the event, which they hope will become an annual fixture – and is being filmed by STV – a distinctively Scottish twist.

They've done this not by calling on the usual variety suspects – no sign of Dean Park, The Krankies or Allan Stewart – but by picking artists who excel in their fields, however disparate. Thus we'll get to see composer Craig Armstrong, folk favourite Dougie McLean and the singers from Scottish Opera as well as Irish comic Jason Byrne and South Africa's Soweto Gospel Choir. "My job was to do a modern take on a variety show," says producer Simon Mallinson, moonlighting from his commercials production company MTP, and out to raise 4 million for the Royal Blind School Appeal. "I didn't want it to be like some English variety show, I wanted a Scottish version. We agreed it would be about what Scottish people would find fantastic, which is different to being about Scottishness. And to me the Soweto Gospel Choir are a symbol of Scotland's internationalism."

Not only is the line-up surprising in its eclecticism, it's also adventurous in its choices. Sandi Thom and the Red Hot Chilli Pipers have a mainstream appeal, but a band such as Selkirk's indie hopefuls Frightened Rabbit will be new to many in the audience. As Mallinson and creative director Andrew Panton see it, the key criterion is quality and if they're happy to enjoy the b-boy moves of the Flyin Jalapenos – more commonly seen busking outside on Buchanan Street – as well as the a cappella harmonies of the Magnets, then there's no reason other people shouldn't do too.

"We looked at every genre – classical, pop, theatre – and tried to pick something excellent from each," says Mallinson, who is still hoping to add acts to an already jam-packed list. "Frightened Rabbit are a great up-and-coming band; Sandi Thom's a great Scottish pop singer. I'd like to see Alasdair Gray and I'd also like to see Sugababes – both have hit a standard in their fields. Those breakdancers are just as good as Dougie McLean. When I grew up, if you liked one band, you couldn't like another. Now people are more willing to say they like different genres."

Mallinson's greatest challenge is to get so many acts on and off the stage and keep everyone happy in the wings. But whatever else happens, this will be the only place you'll ever get to see Alasdair Gray performing an extract from Fleck – a rewritten Faust in which God and the Devil argue over the soul of a university lecturer – on the same bill as the Scottish Rhythmic Gymnasts giving a display of "agility, artistry and physical co-ordination". In the mix-and-match universe of variety, it doesn't come more various than that.

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, Thursday www.srvp.co.uk