Interview: Jack Docherty, actor, comedian and star of Scot Squad

JACK Docherty, back on our TV screens 
on Monday as a bumbling police chief, has made a successful career out of comedy by ensuring he only does the things 
he enjoys, he tells Stephen McGinty

JACK Docherty is a man of physical stature and keen intellect who once thought of devoting his life to the law. While his grandfather rose to the rank of Chief Constable of Hamilton, Docherty has risen a few ranks higher and taken on the role of chief constable of the new Police Service of Scotland. As the brightest 
star in a comedy pilot from BBC Scotland, Scot Squad, he regales viewers with a moving tribute to the figures that inspired him most in his police work: Lulu and the Dalai Lama.

Speaking as he strolls by the River Thames, near his home in Kew, Docherty says his latest role has almost made his mother proud. “My grandfather was the chief constable in Hamilton. I didn’t meet him, as he died when I was one, but he was the chief constable during the war and then for a few years afterwards. What is spooky is that, in uniform, I look absolutely the spit of him. So I think my mother was going to have the photo framed on the mantlepiece of me in uniform, as if I had finally gone legitimate and got a proper job.”

The prospect of a proper job dissolved in 1982 when Docherty, a former pupil of George Watson’s College in Edinburgh, abandoned a law degree at Aberdeen University in favour of a career in comedy. While Docherty is perhaps best known for the comedy series Absolutely, he’s had a successful career as a scriptwriter and producer, developing a range of sitcoms and radio plays over the years, while his company, Absolutely Productions, has produced such shows as Trigger Happy TV and The Armstrong and Miller Show. For Docherty, the appeal of Scots Squad, which was developed by The Comedy Unit for BBC Scotland, was that the actors were encouraged to improvise.

“The director would interview me for two or three hours and I just had a little bit of background to go on, with a rough outline, and then they just let you get on with it. It is so much easier to do now, with digital cameras – in the past you couldn’t afford to waste film. It is a fun way to work, it just takes all the pressure off you – it doesn’t matter what you say because they will only use what works.”

The “polis” provide a rich seam in which to mine for laughs, but in the past their treatment has been hit and miss. The Thin Blue Line, starring Rowan Atkinson, and written by Ben Elton, lasted two series on BBC 1, while Snoddy, with Gregor Fisher as a Glaswegian police detective, survived for only six episodes on BBC 
Scotland. Whether Scot Squad makes it to a full series will depend on the popularity of Monday’s pilot, but Docherty is hopeful.

“Anything to do with authority is funny. Comedy history is about undermining authority. The jester is about saying the king is a f***ing idiot, but only the jester was allowed to say that back in the day. Fortunately, we are all allowed to say that today. It is about checks and balances. That is one of the gifts of living in a democracy. Uniforms are funny. When people are trying to be serious and failing it is always comedic and that is what my character is like. He has this belief that he is really important, but he’s not. With all great comic characters, it is about the distance between who they are and who they think they are. That is where comedy lies.”

While it is a truism in the world of light entertainment that should you hang around long enough, eventually you will be shoehorned on to a sofa and the words “The” and “Show” draped around your name like parenthesis, it is not necessarily guaranteed that you will enjoy the experience. A few years after the end of Absolutely, Docherty was given his own five-nights-a-week chat show on the new Channel 5, the first time in British television that a chat show stretched across weeknights, as in America.

For two years, Docherty glad-handed the guests and cracked jokes, but eventually he realised there was something missing: fun. During his holidays Graham Norton would sometimes act as his stand-in, and the Irish comedian’s success in the role eventually led to multi-million deals, first with Channel 4 and now with the BBC. Did Docherty ever envy Norton the success, or regret that his show, which ended in 1999, didn’t last longer?

“No. There is no part of me that regrets it. I would love Graham’s money, don’t get me wrong, but it just wasn’t for me. I didn’t enjoy it and so there is no point. I found it such a frustrating job. You would be speaking to people who have actually done something, written a book, made a film, or a comedy show, and I found it frustrating because that is what I wanted to do. What I did love was meeting lots of my heroes, but no, it really taught me that in this business you have got to pursue something you enjoy doing or it’s a prison sentence.

“It wasn’t the money. If they had offered me a million I wouldn’t have kept doing it. Hmm now I’ve said that...hmm … once I’ve said it out loud, would I have done it? No. In the artistic realm you’ve got to do something you enjoy. I had to act the part of a chat show host, but I’m a grumpy, shy, dour Scotsman while guys like Jonathan [Ross] and Graham can just be 
themselves.”

To many Scots, Jack Docherty will remain comically entwined with Absolutely, the sketch show he created alongside Moray Hunter, Pete Baikie and Gordon Kennedy, and which grew out of The Bodgers, a troupe who first performed at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1980.

Broadcast on Channel 4 over four seasons from 1989 to 1993, it had a host of comic characters such as the members of Stoneybridge Town Council, whose bid to host the Olympics was voted one of the top 50 comic sketches of all time. The series was recently released on DVD and attracted a host of celebrity fans such as David Baddiel, Ian Hislop and Jo Brand. For Docherty, the show still conjures warm memories.

“When you do something like that it is so much a part of your life and it is so intense whilst you are doing it, but then you just walk away from it. You know the stuff really well at the time and then, ten years later, you can’t remember any of it. I would be in a pub in Glasgow and somebody would come up and say: “Have you sufficient underpants?” I would not know what they were talking about before I realised they were quoting Absolutely and they had watched it lots and lots of times.”

In fact, Docherty is currently thinking about reviving one of show’s most popular characters, McGlashen, the extreme Scottish nationalist and playwright whose every opportunity for success is undermined by his hatred of the English.

A recurring motif was McGlashen cycling to the border with England, hurling an insult over and then pedalling furiously away. The rise of the SNP and the prospect of the Independence referendum in 2014 is an opportunity, Docherty believes, to pan for comic gold.

“I always really enjoyed doing McGlashen because he was just so unhinged and so violent. He was a lot of fun to do, particularly live – you could really push the boat out on stage.”

So what would be McGlashen’s take on the referendum, could he cope now that his dream is so close?

“I think he would probably die of a heart attack as it gets closer and closer,” says Docherty. “He would be terrified, because deep down he would believe that it’s not going to happen. The comedy of a character like that is that it’s almost best to keep having the dream, and never face up to the reality that it might never happen. I was thinking of doing something with that character. I was thinking of maybe doing a live show or McGlashen’s take on what is happening in Scotland. I haven’t got that far with it, but I’m thinking about it. The time is right.”

The character was inspired by an encounter in a pub. “I was in the George pub in London, in Wardour Street. It was one afternoon when I was having a pint on my own and this rabid Scotsman came in and he actually said, “see what you are sitting on there, if it wasn’t for the Scots you would be sitting on the f***ing floor”. He was going on about how the Scots invented the chair and it was just a gift. It was a case of: “Thank you, I’ll take this and go with it.”

• Scot Squad is on BBC2 Scotland on Monday at 10pm.