Rab C. Nesbitt

I think I've mentioned before this colourful comedy character from the early-mid 1990s. He was a drunken Glaswegian layabout. He and his family lived in a tenement slum in Govan (pronounced "Guvven"), a deprived suburb of Glasgow. His local accent was so strong it was often impossible to understand this words, yet you were still aware he was being really funny.

His younger son, Wee Burney, was played by a grown man who was probably under 5 foot tall. Being small and vulnerable, the actor had been abused by paedophiles when he really was a kid, and was arrested for paedophilia himself. He was dead before he was 30.

There was an update programme this Christmas. Rab has given up drink. Govan is being gentrified. He and his wife are commemorating, each in their own way, the anniversary of Wee Burney's death in the ramraid of a sweet shop. Rab is outside the new BBC TV building, built on one of his old haunts. In this first clip, you see what language can be broadcast on the BBC in this day and age. (There are five clips, but they are all very short, and worth taking the trouble to watch.)



At the pub, Rab's friends are watching a replay of another ramraid, the one on Glasgow Airport by Muslims terrorists. There are also some Muslim women in the pub. This programme shows respect for nothing and no one.



Back at home, Rab tries to get back into his wife Mary's bed.
TO understand this clip, US readers may need to know that in the UK, "fanny" refers to a woman's front bottom - to be blunt, another word for "pussy".



Rab takes his pal Jamesie's advice on spicing up his marriage. When she gets home from work, lunch is on the table...



Rab gives up giving up booze, and reverts to the character we all knew and couldn't understand all those years ago.