Still Game stars in stroke awareness advert

Sanjeev Kohli: Co-stars in hard-hitting stroke awareness advert. Picture: Johnston Press

Screen veteran Ian Sexon plays stroke victim Donald who falls ill and collapses while ordering a drink at a bar.

But his friends fail to recognise the vital signs until the barman realises he is seriously ill and calls for an ambulance.

Ian stars in the advert alongside actress Jane McCarry and Sanjeev Singh Kohli, who plays the shopkeeper Navid in Still Game.

The video uses Scottish humour and will be broadcast on social media to make sure it reaches a younger audience.

Jane and Ian were in Aberdeen at the launch of the Think FAST? campaign at Cineworld in the Union Square shopping centre today.

And the actress revealed that her own father, James McCarry, 90, suffered a stroke himself shortly after the cast finished filming the video in April.

She said: “We all had different reasons for wanting to be a part of this and we were really aware of the serious side of it.

“Just after we made this my dad had a stroke which of course at the time I didn’t know was going to happen.

“He was in the stroke ward for a few weeks.

“He’s okay. He is back home so that is good.

“He’s home and that is what matters.”

Jane said humour helped her family get through one of the toughest of times when her father fell ill.

She said one of his friends had visited him in hospital with a newspaper tucked under her arm sporting the headline: “A Death Sentence”.

Jane added: “It was just the paper folded so that was all we saw and my dad was the first to laugh.

“We laughed and we laughed. That was the worst possible circumstances and I think we do use humour.

“The day that my dad had his stroke it was quite serious so it was a bleak day.

“People in Scotland laugh, even in the most disastrous circumstances.”

The Still Game actors said they hoped the advert would highlight how important it was to get help as quickly as possible for stroke victims.

Ian said he carried out research at the Southern General Hospital in Glasgow and met with patients who were recovering from a stroke.

He said the production company which filmed the advert was inspired to use the cast of Still Game because of the gallows humour that exists all across Scotland.

He said: “I’m sure it happens up and down the country where people have attacks in their social club or whatever and other people think perhaps that maybe they have had a bit too much to drink.

“You have to really tune into the signs. With this campaign people might think to get an ambulance rather than just leave it.”