Still Game star first made people laugh with his impersonations at school in Lanarkshire

Daily Record

05-06-2025

Gavin Mitchell is best known for his role as Boabby the Barman.
Still Game star Gavin Mitchell has revealed how being plunked in front of the telly as a child helped plant a seed for his acting career .
Originally from the 'lovely fishing village of Springburn' in the north of Glasgow, the 60-year-old is best known for his role as the acerbic Boabby the Barman in the sitcom's fictional Craiglang. His family moved around a lot when he was growing up and he spent a large part of his childhood in North Lanarkshire.
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Gavin's dad was a film projectionist in Coatbridge and the family had a spell living there as well as stints in Airdrie and Glenboig. He attended St Barbara's Primary, and Our Lady and St Joseph's Primary in Glenboig, before moving up to St Patrick's High in Coatbridge.
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'I was all over the place,' he admits. I didn't really have a lot of pals and was sort of plunked in front of the telly.
'I'm not formally trained [in acting] but I think partly through the moving about, it became a defence mechanism - I used to make people laugh a lot at school by doing impersonations.'
Gavin's first love was art and it was while working casual at a famous Glasgow theatre that the opportunity arose to take to the stage for the first time.
He said: 'It ended up it was a dare, a good mate of mine Iain Muir and I didn't know what we were going to do in life. He was a joiner but didn't finish his apprenticeship. I was doing casual theme painting at the Citizens Theatre and he was doing casual joinery work.
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"We had the skinny, peely-wally look, with black hair, and he was asked to be an extra in the next show. He told me he didn't want to do it. I said, 'What? I'd love to do that'.
"So, he said if you do it, I'll do it and we shook hands on it. That's how it started and from there on in I learned on the job, I was at the Citizens for four or five years, working with Glenda Jackson and Rupert Everett and people like that.'
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Look Who It Isnae – An Audience with Gavin Mitchell, is about to head to a number of theatres around Scotland this month. It will see the 60-year-old actor offer up behind-the-scenes stories and insight from his years of working in theatre, film, TV and radio. Top of the list will be his time as Boabby the Barman in Still Game, having first worked with the cast members in the mid-90s.
'I worked with Ford [Kiernan] and Greg [Hemphill} on a sketch show in 1996 called Pulp Video and that's sort of where the Still Game characters first started,' Gavin revealed.
'Greg and I played old men in a couple of the sketches, then out of boredom while we were waiting about we just started talking like two old men and making each other laugh, Ford thought there was something in it and wrote a couple of sketches.
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"Jane McCarry [Isa] was in Pulp Video as well and Sanjeev [Kohli - who played Navid] worked on it as a writer. I was Winston originally. We all kind of met then, almost 30 years ago.'
Although the last Still Game television show was recorded around seven years ago Gavin admits he is still often called a p***k by passers-by, a term often-used by Jack and Victor when greeting Boabby in The Clansman.
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'It's always done with a fondness,' he said. 'It's kind of weird as Still Game only took about two weeks out of my year. Despite the fact I'd been acting for about 15 years before that and all the work I've done since, I've done all sorts, but I'll always be known for Boabby.'
Gavin has taken on a variety of roles over the years, from film, telly and radio, right through to opera. He's been playing Humphrey Bogart's role in Cassablanca on and off for 15 years, a role he'll revive at this year's Edinburgh Festival and at Oran Mor in Glasgow.
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He has no regrets over the roles he's taken on over the years, in fact it's the opposite.
'That road leads to madness," said Gavin. "It's more about the things you didn't do that you think, 'I wish I'd taken that, I shouldn't have bottled that'. Sometimes it's just down to nerves and confidence.
'It's all about confidence and actors take a lot of rejection, there's lots of things can affect you that people forget. We live in a society now that's so based on fame, success and celebrity that people think everyone just waltzes about going 'Hey!'.
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Despite his own success Gavin says he would advise anyone thinking of taking up acting as a career to think carefully.
He continued: 'It used to be around 80 per cent unemployment in acting, it's now something like 98 per cent. There's only around two per cent working at any time, and there's more and more actors.
'You don't need to have a union card anymore, so anyone can act, but a lot of younger actors are undercutting each other - they're doing it for less money and worse conditions.'
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