FLASHBACK: RUSS ABBOT, SCUM OF THE EARTH

(This has a couple of expletives in it, and discusses bigotry. Clear off now if you don't like it)

I was watching a Channel 5 documentary the other night - I'm not proud of it, but it's a sad fact - about Kenny Everett. It was entitled The Cancellation of Kenny Everett. Kenny was an artist whom I used to love watching on the telly in the 80s - I would probably say that my love of his work, mixed with a very young viewing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, may have helped inculcate a lack of homophobia in me to this day. 

In the doc, as is usual these days, Channel 5 had predictably gotten three young middle class English women on to cluck and tut and ooh and ahh at the 'questionable' material in the old Everett sketches. One was white, one was black, and one was Asian; all the major colours on the Dulux skin shade chart represented, basically. And no men, of course. Predictably, they all found the irreverent and hilarious material grievously offensive, clutching metaphorical pearls and spewing tired feminist dogma about racial and sexual stereotypes. 

You know the sniffy, attitude-laden platitudes I mean, of course, parroted without thought or examination. The usual. That's why they were on there in the first place, of course. What is life without manufactured, societally divisive grievances these days? And, being honest, some of the material was pretty damned offensive. But...so what? Different times, different thought and comedy crimes.

But it's funny. Seeing them excitedly and animatedly moan and groan about whatever aspect of a decades-old programme made me think about representation in the media. More specifically, it made me think about how Scottish people were represented on the telly when I was growing up in Scotland in the 80s. There wasn't much telly made in Scotland - there still isn't. It was mostly made in London, with various English (and occasionally Scottish) regional offices punting local fare over the parochial airwaves. 

But it was the London stuff that was the most contentious, and offensive. Any time you ever saw a Scottish person in dross like, say, Eastenders, they were always a drunken, incoherent caricature of a wrecked human being, blatant and disgusting bigotry of the most direct and unhidden kind. They just didn't - don't - like sweaties ('sweaty socks' = 'Jocks' = 'Scottish people') down there. They still don't, unless it's sniffing their way through lobotomised children's comic The Guardian to look for short breaks in 'North Britain'. 

                                                             

There was a total prick named Russ Abbot (real name: Russell Roberts) on the telly in the 80s. He had godawful alleged comedy programmes like Russ Abbot's Madhouse and The Russ Abbot Show on the box, and they were uniformly risible. The 80s was the great era of bland, unthreatening Saturday night mainstream light entertainment, back when television itself still meant something, before the internet. Abbot was one of the worst offenders during the Era That Culture Forgot. Surrounded by a feeble spluttering galaxy of comedic never-gonnabes and unfunny tollie tamperers, he would have 'hilarious' characters named things like Basildon Bond and Miss Funnyfanny (cringing just writing that) during his James Bond parody sketches, as well as Cooperman, Fatman, Julio Doubleglazias and Dirk Handlebar-Moustache...

...and C U Jimmy.

Now. This vile excuse for a racist anti-Scottish caricature was quite the bigoted creation. He was played by Abbot himself with red hair, wearing a kilt, boots (which are what a Scotsman wears under his kilt), a teeshirt, and rainbow braces. This is the obnoxious bastard character here:

Jimmy was a stereotypical drunk Scot, speaking to his bemused, condescending, horrified 'cultured' English superiors way too fast, utterly incomprehensible through alcohol and a 'funny' Glaswegian accent. He truly was one of the most utterly obnoxious and repellent caricatures to ever be minted for a mainstream cultural production, and it was teeth-grindingly grim and hateful to witness. Want a flavour? Well, here's the long and short of the slurred turd in just one clip. It's all there: incomprehensibility, unchecked alcoholism, willingness to drink anything laid in front of him (the Irish suffered the same televisual fate at the hands of the metropolitan entertainment scum as well during the same time frame, it must be said), falling around wasted - just a totally unlikeable buffoon from start to finish:

Man, even watching that swill decades later gets me angry. This freshly-nose-picked snotty sneering dross is what passed for Saturday night entertainment when I was growing up. It's actually ripped straight off from Harry Lauder's cringe-inducing stereotypical Highlander vaudeville character from the early part of the 20th century, though at least he was actually Scottish:

Here Russ (short for 'Hernia Truss', I do believe) massacres an old Scottish singalong comedy classic:

I think this was the first disgusting appearance of the worthless caricature character:

I mean, abject, grim lack of laughs aside - isn't that just depressing and pathetic? The fact that this man, and his pack of unfunny clownbag buffoons, would no doubt have been handsomely paid at the time to pull this shite from their Satanic Verses ('erses' = 'arses' - 'Satanic Verses' is my contribution to Scottish rhyming slang)(you're welcome, Scotland)(and I had it before Salman Rushdie got stabbed onstage) is quite literally mindblowing. The fact that this oaf had the shrivelled balls to stand in front of a crowd doing a crap jig and pretending that this vomitus was in any way funny or entertaining should be studied in universities (if they weren't cutting Scottish cultural studies, that is) as an example of how not to write something to be broadcast to the general public, well, ever.

Take a look at the start of the following video and tell me this bigot doesn't need slapped about the face with a wet fish. Full of marmoset shit. And rusty razor blades.

Anyway, you get the idea. I remember a sketch from one of Abbot's televisual atrocities where a black soul group, played by the mentally deficient horse molester and his crappy co-dependent enabling acolytes (looked for it, but can't find it online) sang about being black, but becoming white because they walked home in the rain and the colour was washed off their skins! Creative genius without equal.

I am not particularly somebody who cares to dig up something to take offence to, in a modern world so boring and frightening and grim at the same time. It hardly matters, and all this bigoted idiocy was decades ago now. Except it still has a real-world legacy, to this day. A few weeks ago, I was at the Leith Short Film Festival in a chi-chi area of Edinburgh. Which could be basically any part of that now-English city these days. But still. In the food area, there were a few faw-faw young middle class English student type guys, loud and abrasive and obnoxious as ever, always letting anybody within earshot know that They Were There. They were all wearing kilts and 'C U Jimmy' hats and wigs. You know the disgusting shite I mean, I'm sure:

I confess, I grit my teeth and stopped myself from wading into the pisstaking bastards, fists flying, knocking the Scottish equivalent of blackface off their braying heads. Of course, I just moved away to an area where I couldn't hear them. But I had a thought. I wondered if they even knew what those worthless rags on their heads symbolised. I mean, Hernia's worthless shows are now round 40 years old. That hideous headgear has now unfortunately become a stereotyped Scottish trope. Maybe the clowns wearing it didn't even know where it had originated from, though they were still clearly taking the piss like a catheter. 

Looking at photos and videos now, I don't even know where the tammie came from; Abbot doesn't wear one when playing the character. It's odd. That scabby cheap dustrag has now become visual shorthand for being 'Scottish', even being embraced by some deluded Scottish folk. Talk about the Scottish cultural cringe! There are clowns in the comments section for C U Jimmy vids saying they are Scottish and they are not offended by the videos. If they had half a brain they would be. They just didn't get the hatred behind the portrayal, it seems; there's certainly nothing affectionate about it at all. But it hardly matters, really. It's all a long time ago, anti-Scottish hatred from the English has completely died out, and all is well in the world. 

Laughing out loud here.

No idea what Abbot is up to these days, don't care. Long may he languish in oblivion. Hope his next strained-after pensioner shite's a piles-shredding hedgehog.

Still ripping that rag off the head of the next idiot I see wearing it, though...

Hernia Truss and his lobotomised candidates for the 80s light entertainment Nuremberg Trials. 

Hang them all!

THE END