Gregor Fisher: mistake to portray Rev IM Jolly

The Rab C Nesbitt star put on the dog collar and sat in the famous green chair to honour Rikki Fulton's most famous character for a BBC Scotland Hogmanay sketch. But the 65-year-old wishes he had not done the sketch, recorded to mark the 40th anniversary of Scotch And Wry, Rikki's famous sketch show that gave Fisher his TV break.

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Video: Stage show tribute to Francie and Josie

A new stage show will pay tribute to Jack Milroy and Rikki Fulton, one of Scotland's most popular comedy double acts.

Liam Dolan and Johnny Mac were not even born when Francie and Josie were at the height of their fame.

The Francie and Josie Show, which has its origins in Kilmarnock Youth Theatre 20 years ago, will open on Thursday and has already sold out.

Rab C Nesbitt, who has been played by Gregor Fisher for the past two decades, has retained much of its grungy, cooncil-hoose ambience - the men wavering between fantasy and uselessness, the women unillusioned and razor-tongued. Some of the sting has been drawn, though: Rab, an unemployed drunk for the past 20 years, is now off the booze, his son off drugs. Scotland, still the place to go for these prompters of illusion and hasteners of death, is striving to be proper but can, in this show, still provide soil for good wit.

It is no disrespect to the show and its star, nor to its writer and creator Ian Pattison, to say it rests on and draws from the comic traditions of Glasgow, a city that saw, in a long postwar glory, the maturing of the talents of Stanley Baxter, Rikki Fulton, Jimmy Logan and the master, Chic Murray - as well as the later blaze that was and is Billy Connolly. They were acid, fantastic and in hateful love with their city and its culture, which they helped create. Fisher recalls them at their best when, in a moment of park bench amorousness towards his inevitably long-suffering wife, Mary Doll, Rab C suggests that they "nick intae the lavvie and gi'e ye a belt up the knickers fur auld times sake ... we cud gae intae the disabled, it's roomier noo we've filled oot a bit". When he waxes romantic about his own past, she reminds him that he had become a "psychotically disabled alcoholic". "Ah'm frae Govan," he snaps back. "It wudda happened onywey."