WE reckon this is the definition of fame - in Glasgow anyway. Actor and writer Ford Kiernan, whose BBC series Still Game returns next month, parked in the city's west end yesterday, and was confronted by a traffic warden. After a few desultory words about whether he could park there, the warden whipped out his notebook, but instead of writing the expected ticket, asked Ford for his autograph.
After watching Ford, once known for his mercurial temper, scribbling a quick message, the warden anxiously asked: "You haven't written any B' words in there have you?" Jet set INCIDENTALLY, the first episode of the new Still Game series on July 12 features a Glasgow heat-wave - well, it is fiction, after all. Director Michael Hines had to have an authentic pavement and water main built to make it look like a huge jet of water erupting when the mains are interfered with by vandals.
Alas, driving through Glasgow's Summerston the next day, he saw some kids producing exactly the same effect with a real mains that his team had painstakingly rigged up in the studio the day before. Always ask a vandal if you want to know how to do a job properly, it seems. OUR story about BT warning staff that a piper in the foyer was not the fire alarm going off, reminds Peter Curran of when the chairman of Goodyear was visiting the company's then tyre company in Glasgow.
It was decided to take him for a haggis dinner, which would be piped in, and then the chairman and the piper would be given a glass of whisky to toast the haggis. The American PR executive who came with the chairman quickly pointed out that his man was teetotal and must only be given ginger ale. So he watched anxiously as the toasts went ahead and then told the hotel manager: "Thank God that went off OK - think of the awful consequences if the drinks had got mixed up, and the chairman had got the whisky!
" "That's nothing," replied the manager. "You couldn't imagine the consequences if the piper had got the ginger ale." Play it by ear NO more workplace nicknames we said, but Bill Lavety tells us: "There was a pipefitter employed at Shaw Petrie, the now defunct pipework fabricator in Hillington Estate, who had lost part of an ear in an accident.
He was nicknamed Eighteen Months." ALL ended well at the Royal Highland Show at Ingliston yesterday when a young lad from a Glasgow primary school went missing. The youngster had been having his face camouflaged at the Army's stand, then felt he had to hide from the school staff until they finally winkled him out.
It reminds us of the girl who told her pals: "I went to the shop to buy a pair of trendy camouflage trousers. But I couldn't see any." ACTRESS Melanie Wilson, appearing at the Edinburgh Fringe with her show Simple Girl, really does bear the scars of previous festivals.
Appearing as a clumsy magician's assistant in a play four years ago, she trapped a finger in the letterbox of her Edinburgh digs and underwent emergency surgery to repair the severed nerve. The show went on with Melanie sporting a large bandage, which the audience assumed was a comic prop. It was good for the box office though - every member of the hospital theatre staff arrived to see the show.
Giving him stick WE read in James Crosbie's book of prison tales, Peterhead Porridge, that Glasgow gang boss Arthur Thompson once worked in Barlinnie's mailbag shop with a chap with a bad leg who needed a stick to get around. Every few days, Arthur would borrow the chap's stick, take off the rubber tip, and saw a bit off the end before replacing the tip. After a few weeks the chap was noticeably hunched over his stick, and demanding medical treatment for a bad back, much to everyone's amusement.
The poor chap hirpled on for weeks until Arthur was being transferred to Peterhead and presented his victim with a new full-length stick which effected an immediate cure for his bad back. The Royal Scottish National Orchestra was phoned by a prospective concertgoer who asked if there were any other ex-footballers performing with the band in June. The bemused receptionist, on asking for clarification, was told by the chap that he had seen a poster for The RSNO Big Band with Peter Grant, had confused the young jazz vocalist with the former Celtic midfielder, and said he would prefer if there was a night with an ex-Gers player instead.
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