Paddy Higson obituary

The Guardian

24-04-2025

The film and television producer Paddy Higson, who has died aged 83 from cancer, was Scotland's pre-eminent fixer and facilitator. She helped capture the nation's sensibility in the early films of the director Bill Forsyth, among them the hit romantic comedy Gregory's Girl (1981). Of this cultural predisposition toward the wry and whimsical, Higson observed: 'Perhaps it is the old Scottish feeling that if we didn't laugh, we'd cry.'
But her portfolio also included episodes of the crime series Taggart, as well as the harrowing Silent Scream (1990), about the poet and convicted murderer Larry Winters, who died of a drugs overdose in HMP Barlinnie's special unit in Glasgow in 1977. Iain Glen won the Silver Bear at the Berlin film festival for his lead performance.
David Hayman, who directed Silent Scream, called Higson 'the mother of the Scottish film industry'. Her ethos as a producer, he said, was: 'Everything is possible until proven otherwise.'
That philosophy came in handy on projects where the entire budget would not have paid for the doughnuts on a studio film. This was true of Forsyth's disarming debut That Sinking Feeling (1979), a comedy about a group of unemployed Glaswegians who plan to get rich by stealing and reselling a consignment of stainless steel sinks.
Shot for just £5,000, the picture made it into the Guinness Book of Records on account of having the lowest budget of any theatrical release at the time. The cast was drawn largely from the Glasgow Youth Theatre, and some of the crew members had no film experience. Higson was production supervisor. 'Everybody was prepared to work their guts out,' she said.
The Observer's Philip French, who compared That Sinking Feeling favourably to the Ealing Studios comedies, later said the film was 'among the happiest surprises of my years as a movie critic'.
It received a retrospective commercial boost and a US release on the back of the international success of Gregory's Girl, in which a gawky schoolboy (John Gordon Sinclair, who made his debut in That Sinking Feeling) becomes infatuated with the footballer (Dee Hepburn) who replaces him on the school team. Higson was production supervisor on the film.
She was born Patricia Frew in Belfast, where her father, Gordon, a civil engineer and later hotelier, was briefly stationed during the second world war. Her mother, Winifred (nee MacIntyre), was a florist.
Raised in Glasgow, Paddy was educated at Laurel Bank school. Her hopes of going on to Glasgow School of Art were stymied by her father. Instead, she spent a year in France as an au pair. On returning to the UK, she got a secretarial job first at the Savoy and then at the BBC, where she later became personal assistant to the radio producer John Gray. It was he who first encouraged her towards film-making.
At BBC Scotland, she met the editor Patrick Higson, who in 1965 became her first husband. She left the BBC in 1967 to have their children. After Patrick set up the independent film company Viz with Murray Grigor, Higson began to help with catering and booking accommodation for crews. Early productions included Big Banana Feet (1977), a documentary following Billy Connolly on tour in Ireland. On its recent re-release, the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw called it 'a 70s time capsule as pungent as a brimming pub ashtray'.
Also in 1977, Viz was asked to produce the Scottish side of a New Zealand television period drama, The Mackenzie Affair. As the only person at the company who was free at the time, Higson stepped in, overseeing a crew of 40 for five weeks in the Highlands village of Ullapool. 'We got through by winging it,' she said. The experience set her on the path to producing.
Following her double whammy with Forsyth, she chose to spend time with her children rather than working on the director's next film, Local Hero (1983). She was back on board, though, for the glorious Comfort and Joy (1984), in which a radio DJ, played by Bill Paterson, is unwittingly caught up in a war between Glasgow's rival ice-cream vans.
She also produced Charles Gormley's comedy-drama Living Apart Together (1982), starring the pop singer BA Robertson as a musician whose life is in turmoil. In 1983, she and her husband established Antonine Productions, but Patrick died later that year.
Antonine's first film, The Girl in the Picture, was released in 1985. Directed by Cary Parker on a modest budget in the leafy West End of Glasgow, this was another romantic comedy starring Sinclair as a lovelorn young man – a photographer in this case – pining over a woman (his ex-girlfriend, played by Irina Brook, daughter of the theatre director Peter). Keen not to be accused of recycling Gregory's Girl, Higson said: 'We tried very hard to come up with someone other than John Gordon Sinclair for the star part. But no one else could have done it so well.'
Her most challenging production to date, released in the same year, was Restless Natives, a comedy about modern-day bandits in the Scottish Highlands who become a tourist attraction in their own right. At £1.25m, it was Higson's largest budget. 'There was a big crew and quite a large cast, and it was a bit like moving an army without the time to do it,' she said. The film has now been turned into a stage musical, currently touring venues in Scotland.
Higson next bought the old Black Cat cinema in the Parkland district of Glasgow and transformed it into Black Cat Studios. As well as being used for Antonine's projects, it was hired out to others and became Scotland's largest independent film and TV production centre.
Business grew scarce. In an interview with the Scotsman in 1989, the producer Andy Park called Higson 'a real ambassador for all the film-making world' but pointed out that 'the trouble is that in terms of work she has a drip feed, she doesn't have a water supply'. The company went into liquidation in 1991.
In 1993, the Scottish Film Production Fund appointed her to the board as one of its directors. That year, she worked on Taggart, where one of her proudest achievements was to see to it that the show's star, Mark McManus, was given a trailer. 'They were doing his makeup in a pub,' she said in dismay. Other TV producing credits included Dalziel and Pascoe (1997) and Monarch of the Glen (2000).
Among her later work were two films by the actor-director Peter Mullan: the absurdist black comedy Orphans (1998) and The Magdalene Sisters (2002), a gut-wrenching dramatisation of the brutal treatment by the Catholic church in Ireland of young women considered 'fallen'. The latter won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival. Both were produced by Higson's daughter Frances, whose career in the industry began as a runner on The Girl in the Picture.
Higson had married the motor businessman Graham Harper in 1984, and in her spare time she enjoyed sprint racing (motor racing against the clock rather than other cars). She also prided herself on rebuilding car engines. 'Her 1931 Alvis is a tribute to her skill,' wrote the Glasgow Herald in 1986.
Her marriage to Harper ended in divorce in 1991. Her long-term partner, the artist Norman Kirkham, died in 2021. She is survived by her three children from her first marriage, Michael, Christopher and Frances, four grandchildren and two sisters, Jennifer and Susan.
Paddy (Patricia) Anne Higson, film and television producer, born 2 June 1941; died 13 April 2025