Scotland At The Movies

10 April 2009, 19:51

By the time that Bill Paterson was asked to star in Bill Forsyth’s Comfort and Joy (1984) the Glaswegian born actor had been acting both on stage and the small-screen for over 15 years; receiving, along the way, a Lawrance Olivier nomination for his portrayal of Brecht’s Schweyk and becoming a founding member of the famously controversial theatre group 7:84.

“I was particularly attracted to Dicky Bird because to some extent I felt it was very autobiographical.  He was a man of my own age, in a city that I grew up in and was familiar with; it wasn’t like I was playing Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.”

Comfort and Joy was Forsyth’s third motion picture and arrived in the wake of his previous cult-hit Gregory’s Girl and the transatlantic, fable-like, Local Hero; both of which had cemented the Scottish directors credentials.

The master of skewing the mundane, imbuing it with a fairy-tale like quality, the plot of Comfort and Joy concerns a disillusioned radio DJ negotiating a truce during the Glasgow Ice Cream Wars; complete with a syrup guns and a trip down the rabbit hole.  All shot under the west coast’s mercurial skies.

“A big feature of Comfort and Joy was that it was shot in Glasgow in November and December.  I’m one of the great supporters of Scottish weather, it’s not as bad as you’re made to believe…But the one thing you can’t avoid is darkness and that’s a terrible time of year.”

It is attention to detail; this construction of a “filmic” Glasgow that paints the city is a golden glow.  Amid the drearier details, the high-rise tenements and the pot-holed roads, is a place romanticised by the camera and characters.

Comfort and Joy is a film that will be remembered fondly by audiences across the world, grown as it has over the years into a sleeper cult hit.  And it seems that it still holds a special place in Paterson’s heart; even if nowadays he rarely revisits it.

Last updated: 16 April 2009, 16:14