For It Was Mary
I was at the Glasgow Film Theatre on Rose Street this afternoon watching the recording of Watson's Wind-Up. A packed house and very funny material aided by one of the most bizarre news weeks in a long time. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
I watched the show with Sharon Mair, who is the Editor responsible for all the independent productions on Radio Scotland. Afterwards we went for lunch with Colin Gilbert and April Chamberlain, the top executives at the , the company that produces Watson's Wind Up. We had a lot to talk about, including the new series from Karen Dunbar that will be introduced into the morning schedule while Fred MacAulay takes a summer break.
Colin revealed his special connection with the GFT which stretches back to the days when it was known as the Cosmo cinema. Apparently his Mother was watching The African Queen in that very cinema when she went into labour and, some hours later, Colin appeared on the scene.
Later, back at Queen Margaret Drive, there was another Hollywood connection when I joined Fred's team to say goodbye to Mary Begley. Mary is one of the producers on the team and, in her farewell speech, she played a very funny piece of audio recorded during last year's Edinburgh festival. She had secured a backstage interview with who was in town performing in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. On the tape we heard Mary coaching Christian on how to pronounce Edinburgh in a Glaswegian accent. She then talked him through a very complicated joke about a mail-order catalogue and persuaded him to do take after take until he was word perfect.
Mary told us that she had been a bit star-struck and nervous while doing all this, but you wouldn't have known. Apart from the fact she was speaking so fast we thought there had been a technical problem with the recording.
