I apologise to Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson for The Scotsman's bad review of Victor and Barry


Forty years ago, author and broadcaster Andrew Marr - then a junior business correspondent - was dispatched to review the Victor and Barry show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
He gave it a very bemused write-up.
When I speak to Forbes Masson and Alan Cumming, I apologise on behalf of The Scotsman.
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“Well, you know, everything needs a bit of fertiliser,” says Masson. “We wrote a song about the review - a parody of Lucky Stars, with the lyrics ‘and we can thank you, Andrew Marr, because you’re not as smart as you like to think you are’.”
“It took us years to work out that it was THE Andrew Marr,” adds Cumming.
A cutting of this very review appears in the new book, Victor & Barry’s Kelvinside Compendium, which is released on Thursday.
It’s a fun read that’s packed with colourful anecdotes, lyrics, photographs of the pair in their signature monogrammed smoking jackets, and a decade’s worth of memories relating to the beloved characters. If you’re not au fait, this Eighties double act was a parody of a certain am-dram type that existed in Glasgow at a time when, as Masson says, “the city was shedding its hard man image and wine bars started opening up”.
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Hide AdThey ended up being precursors to the pair’s characters in the Nineties comedy television series, BBC Two’s The High Life.
The pair will be discussing the new release at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, on August 10 in conversation with Jackie Kay, as well as at Glasgow’s Aye Right, on August 8 with Kirsty Wark.
“We MAY sing a couple of songs,” hints Masson.
They will definitely be talking about the fact that Victor and Barry were a launching pad for two stratospherically successful careers.
Cumming as an Emmy, Olivier and Golden Globe winning Hollywood actor, and Masson as an actor, writer and associate with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
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Hide AdWhen it comes to the compendium, it was an unexpected message that got the ball rolling.
“The British Library got in touch to say they had a copy of our last show, Victor & Barry: In the Scud, and they were going to publish it, and that’s what got Alan and I back together to talk, and we realised it was 40 years since we’d gone to drama school,” says Masson, who turned 60 last year. “In the process of writing, we had such a laugh that it spurred us on to work with Johnny McKnight and the National Theatre of Scotland to do a musical production of The High Life, which will be coming in 2026.”
All these decades down the line, how do they remember so much of that time, which spans 1982, when they met as students at Glasgow’s Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and culminates with a final performance in 1994 at a charity gala at the London Palladium. After all, the book is absolutely packed with detail.
“It's a funny thing when you've got to research yourself to try and remember things but it was really great going back over that time,” says Cumming, who has his own collection in an archive at Boston University that he used as reference. “It was coincidental that some people got in touch and had photos and somebody posted a video that we’d done in 1984 on YouTube. Things like that were very fortuitous”.
Going over old recordings helped jog the pair’s memories.
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Hide Ad“There’s a lot of footage, because we did videos of the Victor and Barry show for the Edinburgh Festival and other things. Sometimes, I watched them and thought, I don’t remember being there. It doesn’t even look like me sitting there playing the piano. One of the things we did was a television series with Terry Neason, and Alan played a cactus and he’d forgotten he’d ever played a cactus in his multi-varied career,” Masson says. “The thing is, we did so much in a short period of time. We were drama students and it was a whirlwind. It took off as soon as we created these characters for a cabaret in drama school to get our equity cards. It was something that we loved doing, so every opportunity we got to do it, we did.”
In the book, Cumming says that the pair had “balls of steel” back then.
“We were scrappy and did crazy things. I always say that one of the great things that Victor and Barry taught me was not to hide your imperfections from an audience,” he says. “It's really important to be authentic. I have the nerve and the confidence to do that, because of those shows I did with Forbes. It was a baptism of fire and I guess the rapport we have gives you bravery.”
They’d get up on stage, sometimes with minimal preparation, and still manage to dissolve the audience into hysterics, with their silly songs, posh Glasgow accents and acerbic put-downs.
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Hide Ad“Now I’d have second thoughts about going out on stage having written a song just two minutes before,“ Masson says. “At the time, it was about finding our own voices. At drama school, we were encouraged to lose our accents and become Anglicised, and we had to find our Scottishness and strength and confidence.”
Whenever Cumming and Masson get back together, they have a tendency to slip back into Victor and Barry mode. It must be like muscle memory.
As Masson says; “There’s a very thin line between them and Alan and Forbes. I think our drama student friends got a bit sick of it, because once we’d started it, we were Victor and Barry a lot of the time, speaking in this faux Kelvinside accent.”
You might imagine that the real life iteration of these characters might have died out in Glasgow. It seems not.
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Hide AdMasson recently bumped into TikTok star and comedian, Zara Gladman, who does an excellent parody of a Kelvinside mum, which definitely - unintentionally, as Masson says she didn’t know about the duo - has echoes of Victor and Barry.
They remain relevant, and their fan base is still dedicated.
“It’s still very fondly thought of, which is great. I think we were old-fashioned in some ways because the act was harking back to Francie and Josie, and music hall double acts, but we were also modern and quite progressive,” Masson says. “A lot of our stuff is quite surreal, so we had quite a wide fan base because of that, and because it was quite witty and political with a small ‘p’, but old-fashioned and genteel too. And the music brought others in. Back then, a lot of alternative comedy was happening, mainly in London, and it was all quite aggressive and anti Thatcher but Victor and Barry were soft as well as nippy.”
The book features plenty of guest writers, including Nicola Sturgeon in the foreword, as well as Karen Koren, Janice Forsyth, David Morrissey and many more, who talk about the duo with great affection. The piece from the late Michael Boyd was a ‘bittersweet’ addition for Masson. Theatre director Boyd was instrumental in getting the pair on the stage, especially at The Tron, and was a “really important man” in Masson’s life, but died before publication.
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Hide AdCreating the book has obviously been an intense journey. It makes you wonder if they would have got so far, if they had never met.
“I wouldn’t have been confident enough to do what we did on my own. Absolutely. I don’t think Forbes would either. I think we were just a really good combo,” says Cumming. “Sometimes in your life, you meet people and you have a really great synergy. I did a film once with Jennifer Jason Leigh and I said, you know, together we were both one well-rounded person. Individually, we’re both a bit of a mess. And I think that’s the same for us.”
Victor & Barry’s Kelvinside Compendium: A Meander Down Memory Close is published by 404 Ink on Thursday, £12.99, www.404ink.com
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