'The hard man image of Glasgow was shifting': Victor & Barry return

“So, we’re having the neighbours round to my new place in Scotland,” the star of stage, screen and his, ahem, eponymous fragrance, continues, “and one lady down the road came up with her husband,” he begins. “And we were chatting and I was saying what I was doing. I said, ‘Do you remember I used to do these characters called Victor and Barry?’ And the lady said, ‘Remember? I used to come and see you in the Tron Bar.’”

Thursday afternoon and we’re all travelling in time and space. I am in Falkirk, where Masson is originally from. Masson is at home in north London and Cumming is in New York’s East Village (so it’s still morning for him).

But today’s real destination is the day before yesterday. We’ve come together to talk about the past, specifically their past.

The time before, well, everything really. The time before James Bond, before the Spice Girls and Cabaret and Marvel movies and American telly and singing Caledonia with KT Tunstall and hosting the US version of The Traitors. The time, in other words, when Alan Cumming was best known as Barry McLeish.

Alan Cumming is made an OBE by the Princess Royal for services to film, theatre, the arts and to activism for equal rights for the gay and lesbian community. He later handed it back (Image: PA)

And the time before EastEnders and Catastrophe and the Royal Shakespeare Company and the West End and the Tron pantos and Scottish musicals, when Forbes Masson was Victor MacIlvaney.

Victor and Barry, the founding members of the Kelvinside Young People’s Amateur Dramatic Society, “the foremost amateur musical company in the whole of Scotland, if not Glasgow,” are back.

Cumming and Masson have a new book out. Victor and Barry’s Kelvinside Compendium. Masson has just been sent a copy. He proudly shows it to Cumming, who hasn’t seen it yet, over our Zoom link.

“It looks like the Beano annual,” Masson suggests approvingly. “It’s great. It’s just what we wanted.”

The book is just one of the multimedia strands in which the duo will be celebrating their 1980s alter egos. There’s a new Victor and Barry song coming (more on that later) and both Cumming and Masson will be in Scotland this August for events in Glasgow and Edinburgh (the latter at this summer’s Edinburgh International Book Festival).

Some 40 years ago (and counting) Victor and Barry were Masson and Cumming’s vehicle into showbiz. What started as a casual student collaboration would take over their lives for a decade and set them up for everything that would follow. To The High Life and beyond, you might say.

Victor and Barry (Image: free)

They were both still teenagers when they created Victor and Barry. Now they are men in the early autumn of their lives. Masson is closing in on 61 and Cumming is fast approaching his seventh decade. He already has plans for his 60th birthday.

“My husband Grant is going to be 60 a few months after me. When we were 50 we rented Typhoon Lagoon at Disney World and shut down the water park and had a f***-off party. This time my plan is to have a big dance party, like a big ‘no phones, just come and dance your tits off’ party. I’m thinking of doing it at Studio 54 if they’d let me.”

Masson’s own 60th passed in a slightly more restrained fashion. “I downplayed it. I went on holiday with my kids to Norfolk and the only thing that I did that I’ve never done before was to swing on a rope and jump into a river. It was so ridiculous. I’m not a very good swimmer. And the river was probably full of sewage.”

You could, I suppose, read those two stories as a marker of difference between the two men. But spend any time in their company and what strikes you is the connection between them. If they drifted apart in the late 1990s, they have clearly grown close again. In our time together they talk as much to each other as they do to me.

“It’s a weird thing coming back to it,” Masson suggests of their renewed collaboration. “It’s like we’re brothers in a way. There’s a sort of a fraternal thing. There’s a lot of love there.”

Today is about tracing that love back to its source. So, come with us back to the early 1980s when Glasgow was beginning to shake off the dour insular 1970s and discovering its peacock feathers.

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Cumming and Masson met at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, as it was then, in 1982. Cumming, then 17, had come from Aberfeldy, escaping a childhood controlled by an abusive father. Masson had started off studying to be an accountant before quickly realising it wasn’t for him.

“Forbes seemed a bit older and worldly,” Cumming recalls. “He was 19. I thought, ‘Oh, he’s very sophisticated.

“And then we got to know each other and realised we had more in common. We were both strangers in Glasgow. That was the initial bond, being outsiders I suppose.”

“I don’t think we’d really spoken that much until we were in the same room to do Victor and Barry,” Masson adds.

“Obviously, when we started doing Victory and Barry we just had that click. That similar sense of humour meant we could feed off each other. It was just that weird synchronicity.”

Cumming agrees. “That indefinable, magical it.”

That outsiderness that Cumming mentioned is interesting, I think. Glasgow was changing in the early 1980s, becoming more chichi, as it were. Parts of it were even becoming gentrified. But maybe it needed someone coming in from elsewhere to notice that change.

“I definitely think it helped,” suggests Cumming. “That’s the thing about change. When it’s happening all around you you don’t really notice it. I feel like that with Scotland. When you come back you’re aware of the shifts more.

“So, when we came to Glasgow we were experiencing somewhere completely new.

“It was so different to anything either of us had experienced, don’t you think?”

“Definitely,” Masson agrees. “Also, the thing about us being drama students and not being west of Scotland football males; that image of Glasgow, that hard man thing. Glasgow was shifting.”

In their blazers and cravats Victor and Barry were undeniably, unashamedly camp. Masson and Cumming were drawing on their love for Stanley Baxter and also poking fun at the city’s West End.

Alan Cumming at a Los Angeles award show in February (Image: free)

Cumming had moved to Kelvinside and was struck by his landlady’s accent. That was one of the starting points, they say.

“It was just the weirdness and the poshness of the Scots who don’t want to be Scots,” Masson recalls. “It was no mistake that Victor and Barry started off in a wine bar in the West End, which was an unusual thing for that part of the world.”

A vegetarian wine bar, Cumming points out. “I was somewhere recently, Forbes. I think it was when I was doing that travel thing for CNN. It was somewhere in Scotland and … I know, it was at Findhorn. I was in a cafe in Findhorn. And there was this smell and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, Hallibees and cafe cabaret 1983. It was that smell of fake cheese. Everything had a cheesy topping and it just took me back.”

Masson laughs. “Victor and Barry had a cheesy topping.”

Victor and Barry did indeed make their first professional appearance at Hallibees in Ruthven Lane on May 14, 1983. What’s remarkable, I suggest, is that something that began as a skit in a student cabaret then shaped their lives for the next decade.

“It did,” agrees Masson. “It started off as a way for us to get our Equity cards and then it was a way to supplement our incomes as we tried to make forays into theatre and the other stuff that we really wanted to do. And then there was more and more demand for them.”

“It’s like The Traitors for me,” Cumming adds, a nod to his current presenting job. “Doing this thing that’s easy peasy, sounds a laugh. And all of a sudden it’s like, ’What?’

“It’s the same with Victor and Barry. When it was happening we were so, ‘Oh my god, this is something we wrote when we were a bit pished.’ And then the whole country is loving it.”

But what’s been great about doing the book, Cumming adds, is the realisation that their Victory and Barry material may have been written when they were, in his words, “ a bit pished,” but that doesn’t mean it was poor quality.

“Just because something’s easy for you doesn’t mean it’s not good for everybody else and that was a bit of a lesson to learn, I think.”

From this distance it may be difficult to recall just how ubiquitous Victor and Barry were through the 1980s (and into the early 1990s). They were constants at the Fringe (Andrew Marr gave them a sniffy review), and Glasgow’s Mayfest, had their own Radio Scotland show, as well as a Radio 2 pilot, and were regularly booked on TV variety and comedy shows. On one they watched Cher, in what they describe as “a fallow period” in her career in their book, steal all the flowers, vases and cookies from the set.

When you worked with her on Burlesque, Alan, did she remember Victor and Barry?

“She didn’t talk about it. I think the fact that she had stolen so much from that [show] …It was not a good thing to bring it up.

“I saw the other day that Cher came out and said Burlesque is not a very good movie. Hold the front page.

Alan Cumming with Forbes Masson. Picture: Mark Runnicles (Image: free)

“I remember my first conversation with her. It was so funny … The first conversation I had with her when I went on the set was about olives. We had a long conversation about olives and drinking. And she said she doesn’t really drink. And I said, ‘What do you drink when you do?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know what it’s called. All I know is the bottle comes in a velvet bag.’”

By the 1990s both men were beginning to forge their own acting careers; careers that would ultimately take them in very different directions. But before that happened they collaborated on their short-lived but much-loved sitcom The High Life, in which they played a couple of camp flight attendants, Steve McCracken and Sebastian Flight, alongside Siobhan Redmond and Patrick Ryecart.

There is currently a musical version of the sitcom in the works. Masson and Cumming are working on it with the writer Johnny McKnight.

“We’re not supposed to talk about it, but it’s out there now,” Masson says when I bring it up. “I haven’t told you this Alan, I’ve just got act one from Johnny to have a look at. He’s done a lot of work on it. I’m still working on some of the songs for act one. We’ve got a workshop in the autumn.”

“Johnny McKnight is the greatest torch carrier for The High Life,” Cumming adds.

“Johnny is like Victor & Barry’s nephew.” Masson continues. “He’s such a genius. It’s great fun to be in a room with him. We’re going to have a laugh. That’s the main thing, we kept saying.”

Cumming nods in agreement. “Why bother otherwise?”

What’s striking all these years later is, despite everything else they have done subsequently, both Victor and Barry and The High Life still have a hold on the public imagination.

“I think both Victor and Barry and The High Life both have this glorious bright moment in our lives,” Cumming agrees. “We killed them both off at their peak, and though the detritus of that was a bit difficult, actually now, looking back on it, The High Life and Victor and Barry are the two things people hold so dear in Scotland and Britain.

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“I think they loved the fact that we were young and silly and sort of didn’t seem to care. We just went for it. We had a chutzpah about what we were saying and how we did it.

“So, I think it’s got this amazing sort of place, not just in our lives but in the public’s lives. It was this thing that shone very brightly and then went away. So it’s really nice to look back and celebrate it.”

Let’s set aside the work for a moment though. What about Masson and Cumming? Where are they in all this? In the 1990s they stopped working together. Was that inevitable?

“I don’t know,” Masson says. “It just happened. Looking back we were maybe apart for too long in a way, but it’s just the way it went. Life took us in different directions.”

How has their friendship changed? Are they still much the same as those young men at the RSAMD back in the 1980s?

“I think we are and we are not,” Masson decides. “There was that point in the nineties that was difficult for the both of us. It’s about success as well. Success can affect you. Sometimes you have to make changes and you have to prune things in order to grow.

“But I think we’re both in very good places just now. And it’s just lovely to come back to this. The love is stronger, the trust in each other is stronger, it’s great. It’s a lovely place to be.

“It’s been very special to come back to do this.

“And we’ve written a new Victor & Barry song. We recorded it a couple of weeks ago and it’s coming out soon. It’s just great being in a little recording studio in the Trongate again and it was just fun, it was a laugh. And quite emotional as well.”

“It was emotional,” Cumming agrees. “I was very moved by that, Forbes. We had a little moment on Argyle Street.”

He is still thinking about whether or not he and Masson have changed. Maybe the hair is a bit greyer these days, he says, but not much else has altered, Cumming decides.

“When we wrote the introduction to the book it was like we had gone back 40 years, just making it up and having an absolute laugh. I think we are essentially the same. I think you don’t really change as a person inside. Your circumstances change and your life changes.

“But, actually, at your core, you’re still the same person. And I think we are the same people and I think our lives have gone in very different directions. But they’re actually coming back together. It’s so crazy.

“I love that about getting older. You do come home in all sorts of ways and doing this with Forbes is definitely like a homecoming. Absolutely.”

Ladies and gentlemen, Victor and Barry are once more in the building.

Victor and Barry’s Kelvinside Compendium, is published by 404 Ink, priced £12.99. Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson will discuss the book at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on August 8 in an event organised by Aye Write. They will also appear at the McEwan Hall, in Edinburgh, in discussion with Jackie Kay, as part of the Edinburgh International Book Festival