Elaine C Smith’s latest live comedy show 65, her first since before the pandemic, is an exclusive, likely to only be seen by the audiences of Glasgow and Aberdeen.
The idea, in fact, came from her daughter, 29-year-old actor and writer Hannah Elizabeth Morton, whose show Sad Girls Club is appearing at this year’s Glasgow International Comedy Festival.
“She said to me, Mum, you should do your show at the Festival,” says Smith, speaking from her kitchen a few days before warm-up dates in community centres around Glasgow, for the price of a food bank donation.
“I was like, no, I’m not interested, I’m too old. Nobody cares, nobody wants to listen to an old git me. Then I started thinking about it and thought, maybe… I turn 65 this year, maybe it’s time to take a wee retrospective?
“There’s a line in the Barbie movie where Rhea Perlman says, as mothers we have to stand still to let our daughter see how far we’ve come. And I burst into tears! I thought, what’s that about? I realised, that’s what I’ll be doing here. It’ll be funny, but it’s also me thinking about how it’s been quite a climb.”
It turns out people were interested – the GICF show at the city’s King’s Theatre sold out in a matter of hours. “I was thinking, don’t open the gods, my audience is too old to get up there!” laughs Smith. “But they sold out the whole thing.”
A trip down memory lane for Elaine C Smith’s latest show
As far as Smith was concerned, with an increasingly busy year shaping up, the Glasgow dates would be the only outing for this new show. Then Ben Torrie, Director of Programming at Aberdeen Performing Arts, asked her management if she had anything coming up.
“I’d been in Aberdeen doing Annie, but I haven’t done my own show there for ages, since before the pandemic hit,” she says. “So I said yeah, and then it turned out it was happening on international Women’s Day, the 8th of March. The stars aligned.”
A storytelling show as much as a comedy one, Smith will be going down memory lane with the help of photographs and videos, including clips from her roles in shows like Naked Video, Rab C Nesbitt and the current sitcom hit Two Doors Down.
Aberdeen is special to Elaine C Smith
“Christine may well make an appearance,” she says, referring to her deadpan, no-filter character in the latter. “A lot of it is basically saying, how the hell did I end up doing this? I’m from a mining village in Lanarkshire, I’m supposed to have been a good girl, got married to somebody local and lived round the corner from my mother. It didn’t quite work out that way.”
The reminiscing has also reminded Smith how special Aberdeen has been to her, with an eight-year stint at His Majesty’s Theatre’s panto in the 2010s. “When I came to Aberdeen in the beginning, I was walking along the street,” she remembers. “A guy stopped me and said, ah, Elaine, you’re coming to do the pantomime! Welcome to Aberdeen… Elaine Paige, isn’t it? Aye, that’s me, I said.
“There was a terror of going to Aberdeen, though. I thought no-one would like me because I’m a Weegie, but actually it was one of the most special times of my life. It really made me step up, and grow up a lot about pantomime and see what a privilege it is to do. I loved it.”
‘Everybody knows a Christine’
Smith’s big birthday year is unlikely to see any more performances of 65, because she has an as-yet-unannounced drama, a fast-growing slate of personal appearances and then next winter’s panto in Glasgow to get through. Around that, the huge success of Two Doors Down means she’s arguably more widely famous than ever.
“It’s about ordinary people,” she says of the sitcom hit. “It’s not Oxbridge posh boys doing frightfully highbrow comedy, like every game show you watch. My big claim to fame is that Tom Jones said from the stage of a show in Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh that he loves Two Doors Down, and that everybody knows a Christine.
“When he was next playing in Glasgow, I sent him a note saying, I’m sorry I’m not there tonight, but I’m on stage as myself – Christine sends her love! I probably terrified him, actually.”
When is 65 at HMT?
With Tom Jones giving her shout-outs, can there be any more ambitions left?
“When you get to 65, your ambition is just to keep going,” laughs Smith. “I’ve got a new grandson who’s nine weeks old, I’ve got a granddaughter who’s nine, so time to see them grow and flourish is what I wish more than anything. The older you get, the more you realise how short time is, so you hang onto the good bits as much as you can.”
Elaine C Smith: 65 is at His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, on Friday March 8. For more information go to aberdeenperformingarts.com
