Even when he’s onstage performing stand-up, actor and comedian Paul Riley can’t escape his role as luckless chancer Winston Ingram in the classic BBC sitcom Still Game.
“Aye, a lot of the questions in the Q&A are about Still Game,” he confirms. “’What’s your favourite episode?’ ‘What’s your favourite scene?’ ‘What was a time you couldn’t stop cracking up laughing?’.
“The questions get so random though, that’s what I love about it,” he continues.
“A guy one time, he puts his hand up and goes: ‘What was I going to ask you again?’ I don’t know! I’ve no idea, mate.
“Another one goes, ‘Why do you keep shaking your watch?’ I said, because it winds it up, I had to explain why I was winding up my own watch. Just mental.’
Not that Winston is a character Riley ever wants to get away from.
“Playing him was the best honour you could ever get, because everybody loved Winston,” he says. “He’s totally relatable, right? It always rains on Winston, he can never catch a wave, and everybody knows what that’s like.”
They do – and not just in Scotland, it turns out.
“I was in Bermuda one time, and this guy says, are you Winston from Still Game?” recounts Riley. “In Bermuda! Are you having a laugh?
“It turned out he was the caddy at the golf course. He said to me, come and play golf. I couldn’t, I had a slipped disc.”
Paul Riley: ‘I could get a Porsche stolen to order’
Between his stand-up career and his role in the Auld Pals stage show, in which five Still Game cast members reminisce, Riley is kept busy.
On the day we speak, he’s just returned from a work trip to Ireland, then he’s off to Blackpool with the Auld Pals crew the day after, then on to Dundee and after that Northern Ireland.
This follows his appearance in Perth last year, where he enjoyed a few post-show pints with punters at the Old Ship Inn.
“It all just works itself out, it’s good fun,” he says.
Riley has “technically always been a stand-up”, he tells me, or at least as long as he’s had a stage career, having tried it aged 19.
He grew up in Milton in Glasgow, which he explains with a strange sense of pride is “the European capital of car theft”.
Wait, is that because it’s a rough place, or because they’ve got all the best cars there and everybody wants them?
“I don’t drive a Porsche, that’s for sure,” he laughs. “But I could get one stolen to order for you.”
‘I was in Taggart – I didn’t even have a name’
He’s joking. The naughtiest thing Riley admits to in our interview is lying about his age so he could get into drama school.
“When you’re 19, you don’t know what you want to do,” he recalls. “I spent three years at drama school, then I came out and I started working in the theatre, I did radio, I did a bit of telly.
“I was in Taggart – I didn’t even have a character name, I was just ‘Student in Garage’, I had three lines or something, but it grew exponentially from there.”
In 1999 he began appearing in Chewin’ the Fat, the sitcom from which Still Game originated, and eight years later he wrote and produced his own sitcom Dear Green Place.
Both this and his role as Winston won him BAFTA Scotland awards, but as the stand-up show will reveal, he has plenty of other screen stories to tell in his solo stand-up show, The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot.
When Winston inspired Robin Williams
“Parts of the show are autobiographical, that’s for sure,” he says. “Like working with Robin Williams. When I put that up on the screens, people are like, no chance, but I did.
“Funnily enough, me and Gavin Mitchell, Boaby the Barman, worked with him on a movie called Being Human.
“It cost 42 million dollars to make and it took in two, but the movie he did after that was Mrs Doubtfire.
“She was supposed to be English in the script, but because he’d been working with all us Scottish people, he said, no, I’m going to make her Scottish.
“That’s worth the ticket price alone, right?”
As well as the revelation that Mrs Doubtfire was based on Winston and Boaby the Barman, many more stories will be told.
“It’s a good night out, it’s great fun,” says Riley. “It’s probably the most enjoyable time I’ve had in my career, to be honest.”
Paul Riley brings The Little Boy that Santa Claus Forgot to the Gardyne Theatre, Dundee, on Saturday October 5.
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