Doubled up

Greg Hemphill would make a terrific mad axeman. If he and his sidekick Ford Kiernan ever fall out and their sitcom Still Game comes to an end, he should get himself a job playing Norman Bates in Psycho. It’s his eyes. ("I hope you’re not going to talk about Greg’s eyes," Kiernan would say a little huffily when I met him a week later. "All the lassies talk about his eyes." But we won’t mind him because he’s just jealous.)

Actually, Hemphill’s eyes are a little spooky. It’s not so much the blueness, it’s the brightness. It’s like someone walking around with 100W bulbs in their eye sockets. I didn’t turn my back on his steak knife all through lunch.

Apparently, some woman came up to him recently and told him his eyes were beautiful and then turned to Kiernan and told him his were horrible. Surprisingly, it’s Kiernan who relates that story. But this is the point of interviewing them separately: hear what they really think of one another, about their squabbles, their petty jealousies. Find out what makes their relationship tick.

Because say what you like about professional partnerships, they are always competitive on some level, aren’t they? And bingo! Halfway through lunch Hemphill’s just called Kiernan a bastard. I ditch the fork and sharpen my pencil. What was that? "Fantastic bastard," says Hemphill lugubriously. There’s no compliment like a Glaswegian compliment.

But, of course, Hemphill is not pure Glaswegian. The slight transatlantic drawl in his voice is the legacy of a childhood split between Glasgow and Canada. He moved there when he was six. His father, Ed, was an accountant with a refrigeration company and he was called into the office one Friday afternoon - usually a sure sign that you were going to get what they called the Five O’Clock Walk, aka the sack. So Ed was a little bemused to be asked how he felt about Canada. Ehm, he didn’t know. Would he like to go there? Could he think about it? Oh yes, he could think about it. As long as he’d thought about it by Monday. Hemphill loved the immediacy, the adventure of it all.

"It was wagons west," he recalls. "My mother was a teacher, so she basically had to redo her qualifications, and Dad did a lot of travelling, so it was hard on her. There were three of us children, and we didn’t know anybody, but it was fantastic - we loved it. You know what you’re like at that age, just a blank sheet of paper."

Ask him now if he is Scottish or Canadian and he’ll say both. "I feel very Canadian still. But we came home every year or two and when we went back I used to feel, although I was away from Scotland, that it was all around me. You’d always get the strange feeling in Canada that you were an outsider as well. There’s none more Scots than the Scots abroad."

Hemphill had two brothers and says he suffered from middle-child syndrome. "The younger one was the one everyone wanted to beat up on, and the older one was the one who was all wise. I didn’t really have a role, so I just ended up annoying them both, really, trying to establish myself." He was shy as a child - still is.

For him, the best thing about being recognised is that you don’t have to introduce yourself. But as a child, performance was a liberation. "At school I remember getting a hard time from a couple of boys in the American football team. Then I won this competition for public speaking, and I thought, ‘Well, I’ve got something they don’t. I’ll guard this jealously.’ At school, I did a few plays and thought, ‘I like this.’ It was a bit of a release."

He returned to Britain aged 16 and, while his parents settled in London, he headed north to Glasgow University. "I wanted the big city, I guess. I remember thinking it would be nice to spread my wings, but it would also be nice to get a free Sunday roast at my granny’s."

He studied drama, and thinks of himself as an actor rather than a comedian, despite the fact that the first major success he and Kiernan had was Chewin’ the Fat, the comedy sketch show. Hemphill hosted Live Floor Show for a spell, but he only tried stand-up once himself. "It terrified the bejesus out of me," he says.

The first 15 minutes were awful. The last five minutes went well. He knew fate was telling him to stick in, but he preferred to tell fate to stick it. "It was too nerve-racking, it really was. It’s a mug’s game. I went on to do a cabaret act with three other guys and that wasn’t so bad. You lived together and you died together. It wasn’t such a lonely existence."

It’s interesting listening to Hemphill talk about professional relationships. Sometimes you wonder if people who are always regarded as a partnership get fed up being seen as half of something and want to assert their own individuality. But Hemphill genuinely doesn’t seem to feel that. He’s like his mother, he says; he likes companionship.

When they returned to Britain, his mother would periodically visit Canada. Two days before she’d leave she’d invariably say, "I’m going to take my friend Carol with me." Hemphill smiles. "It would infuriate Dad, but I could totally relate to that. He’d say, ‘Why do you need someone else?’ But, at the last minute, she wouldn’t want to go by herself. That’s kind of me as well."

He tells the story of Neil Simon, the American playwright. When Simon was in his 30s, he felt a mid-life crisis coming on and told his wife he was leaving to do his own thing. Fine, she said. No, no, he said, he meant he was leaving her. Yes, fine. Simon changed his mind. "After five minutes of being by myself, I hated it," he wrote later. Hemphill identifies with that. "I haven’t really felt the need to stick my head above the parapet and be a singular voice. The thing about being a double act is that it’s comfortable. I’ve always seen myself as a team player, anyway."

He was in his final year at university when he met Ford Kiernan through a mutual friend. Kiernan, a "business wizard" according to Hemphill, was running a phone chatline, and offered Hemphill some shifts to supplement his grant. "He knew I was skint, so he asked if I wanted to come and work in this place for eight hours a day," recalls Hemphill. "And no matter what he says about it, what a f***ing depraved existence that was! He’ll tell you it was a telecommunications business. It was a chatline, and a f***ing sleazy one at that. Like... Chinwag! Hey… wanna meet girls?"

His job was to monitor the conversations and stop callers exchanging telephone numbers, since that would allow them to call one another up without using the premium-rate line. "You can imagine the people who phoned up," says Hemphill, adopting a Glaswegian tone so simultaneously vacant and sleazy that he obviously really did listen in: "Hi, how yi daein’. Whit ye wearin’?" he wheedles. "I used to go home and have a shower," he shudders.

What made him and Kiernan click? "You can’t miss him. If you were in a room with him, you were aware of him. I mean that in the nicest possible way, by the way. I was quite taken with him. Ford is a great story-teller and we have the same sense of humour."

Can he put his finger on what that is? "I would say that it’s that we both see humour in really dark situations - like making a joke out of an old person falling on ice, for example. You lull the audience into a false sense of security, make them sympathise with the character, then pull the rug from under them. You know maybe you shouldn’t be laughing, but that’s what is funny. You soften up the audience, then knife them with the joke." Told you: the Norman Bates approach to humour.

But how does their partnership really operate? Do they feel in competition with one another? Hemphill seems genuinely puzzled by the question. "I’ve never really felt that, you know," he says, considering it. "I mean, we’ll be writing and one of us will come up with a great line and the other one will go, ‘Fantastic! You bastard.’ But I don’t think you could sustain a healthy relationship if there was too much competition."

Sometimes, he admits, they can have different views about a scene. "We do have arguments where one person tries to impose his will on the other. You might have an argument about a particular scene and think, ‘Right, walk around, take a break. Now go back and look at it.’ You have to clear the air now and then. But, generally, 99% of the time, it’s absolutely smooth sailing. I think that shows in the fact that we’ve been writing together for five or six years - that’s a long time." They have lasted because they believe in one another. "There’s a really strong sense of trust. I absolutely trust his judgement about what’s funny and what’s not."

Hemphill and Kiernan have such a close partnership that it confirms my belief that men should just forget women and marry each other. These two could appear on Mr and Mrs and get every question right. There would be none of those awful moments where the wrong answer comes and the wife tries to smile through gritted teeth without spitting, "Twenty bloody years you’ve known me!"

Since my interview with Ford is yet to come, I see how useful this could be. So, Greg, what is the killer question to ask Ford next week? He thinks for a minute. No, it’s too cruel. Oh, go on. Okay, but you’ve got to promise to keep a straight face, he says. He leans across the table, thinking out the right form of words. "Just say to him, ‘Does it feel funny being the smaller of the two?’"

I splutter into the mineral water. So Ford is delicate about his height, then? "When I want to wind him up," says Hemphill, "I just go…" and he disguises his next word with a loud cough into his sleeve "… Napoleon!"

In the interests of fairness, Hemphill says he’ll tell me what Ford would say his Achilles heel was. "He calls me middle class. He says, ‘We all know you were a little middle-class boy swinging on your dad’s electric gates.’ I’m like, ‘Shut the f*** up. That’s not my background! I don’t shoot pheasant!’ Ford thinks everyone who went to university shoots pheasant."

Still Game, their recent sitcom about two old men that captured 47% of the Scottish audience on a Friday night, has an awareness of social class. At its best, it is superbly observed. The humour is broad and robust, but underneath the comedy is delicately balanced with pathos. The viewer takes a real pummelling: it tugs at the heart-strings; kicks you in the teeth; turns the stomach; then engenders great big belly laughs. But despite touching on pensioner budgets and heating and loneliness in high-rise flats, it is not, insists Hemphill, political.

"There’s a socio-political aspect to it, political with a small p. There are issues there. But the soap-box is just not us. Neither of us can be arsed. I mean, I can watch Rory Bremner and not know half the people he’s talking about." Currently Rector of Glasgow University, Hemphill was nominated by Labour Party supporters, but insisted on standing on a non-political ticket. "Let’s face it, once they get to power, they’re all the same." He laughs. "That’s me sounding like my character… once they get to power, they’re all the same!"

His character, Victor, is loosely based on his grandfather, Sammy. When Hemphill was young, he thought Sammy a hilarious, black-humoured man. "He used to get away with saying outrageous things. He knew he was a cheeky bastard. My mother once said to him, ‘What do you think of my new trousers, Sammy?’ and he said, ‘You never did have much of an arse.’ My dad was for punching him, but all the grandchildren were falling about laughing."

Later, though, Sammy became more cantankerous. "Towards the end of his life he asked me to get some poison for him, because there was a cat pulling up his garden. I said I couldn’t do it. He started out very good-humoured, but he ended up beyond black." When his wife died, he became angry at the world and everyone round him. "He was very close to my granny. I think they’d been married 55 or 56 years. That’s an awful long time. There’s a lot of that in Still Game, too. Having to cope with losing your loved one must be awful. It must be like losing your arm - more than that, losing half of yourself."

Portrayals of old people in drama are often one-dimensional - nothing much beyond "oh, you pesky kids" with a lot of arm-waving, says Hemphill. In Still Game, he and Kiernan wanted to create old men whose characters were just as important as their age. And, unlike Chewin’ the Fat, the characters don’t rely totally on comedy. "We’re drawing the canvas a little more delicately, I think. You can have conversations that are not relying on a laugh, and that’s rewarding - invigorating, actually. It’s more adult."

It has, he agrees, made him think more seriously about his own old age, even though he’s still only 36. (Kiernan’s 40, he points out proudly, whatever else he’ll try to tell me. He’s like Zsa Zsa Gabor - knocks a few numbers off.) Will Hemphill end up like Victor? "No. I think Jack and Victor are individuals. Victor’s got a blacker heart - he’s a bit more grumpy than Ford’s character. Jack has a kind of child’s-eye view of the world that is really endearing. But I like to think I’d have more family around me than Victor does. You have to ask yourself - Victor’s son lives in Johannesburg, and you can’t get much further away from your dad, can you?"

Hemphill has a two-year-old son himself now. He met his wife, Julie, an actress, on a show and says they clicked instantly. He prefers duos to solos, both professionally and personally. "I am in a much happier place than I was wandering this earth by myself," he smiles. "I think some people like being single and others enjoy a relationship. I enjoy the companionship. With Julie, I don’t feel I’ve ever met anyone who is so close to what I am myself. I’ve met my doppelgnger. It’s a lovely feeling. I mean, when she says, ‘Oh, shut up,’ you don’t feel embarrassed or humiliated. You just go, ‘Aye, okay.’ You can’t argue with your doppelgnger. She’s a lovely girl," he says very sweetly. Look, I say severely, if I quote all this schmaltzy stuff, he won’t do a Hello celeb on me and announce his divorce, will he? "When is it coming out?" he asks.

But Hemphill seems genuinely contented. Life’s simple, he says. You need a job you like - that’s eight hours. A partner you really love - that’s 16. And a great bed - 24 hours taken care of.

He loves being a dad. His friends used to tell him not to leave it late to have kids and his eyes would glaze over. But they were right. "It’s very humbling. It makes you feel small in the nicest possible way. I remember the night he was born and I just felt my place in life now was to look after him. He’s adorable. I felt like I’d stepped through a porthole. And until you go through that porthole, nobody can tell you what it’s really like. Nothing comes close."

Of course, he’s given in on lots already, he says. But no Happy Meals. Yet. I bought a gun once, I confess. Said I never would. Well, says Hemphill, he had a friend who said his son just ran around with sticks instead. Exactly, I say, mine was using wire coat-hangers. There is silence while we both contemplate parental failure. "I take it," he says suddenly, "it was a plastic one you bought? Let’s be clear here. Or did you just use a silencer?"

He’s a funny man, Greg Hemphill. Very engaging. Doesn’t sound much like a mad axeman, I know. He was sweetness itself when I was late because my train broke down. He loves his wife. Loves his kid. Goodness, he even loves Napoleon. But you know, something is fuelling those 100W bulbs. Norman Bates ran that motel for years before Janet Leigh turned up. That’s the thing about psychos. They hide it well.