Ford Kiernan writes and plays old men who have stopped pretending to be nice, and with Greg Hemphill he made a Glasgow sitcom that stayed funny across two runs and a nine-year gap. The later series lean on our fondness; the early ones earn it.
Fi1m perspective
Jack Jarvis leans on the bar, hears something he disagrees with, and answers it with an insult so offhand it takes a second to register. Ford Kiernan plays him that way and, more to the point, writes him that way. In a Kiernan script nobody waits for the laugh. The line is offered as if it cost nothing and lands exactly where the other actor needs it.
He came up through Glasgow's comedy clubs, starting stand-up in 1990, going full-time in 1993 and reaching the Edinburgh Fringe in 1995. The partnership with Greg Hemphill began on the sketch series Chewin' the Fat (1999–2005), where Jack and Victor first appeared as characters, and then took over both their careers. Still Game ran from 2002 to 2007, stopped for nine years, and came back from 2016 to 2019, made through their own company, Effingee Productions. Around it he has taken supporting parts in other people's films, a cameo in Gangs of New York (2002) and a voice in The Angels' Share (2012), but those are footnotes. The work is the pensioners.
What he does well is write for a crowd. Kiernan has compared the show's method to The Simpsons: a fixed set of supporting characters, each with their own habits, so that an episode can run three stories at once and let the pub join them up. It is why the scheme feels lived in rather than built for the joke. And he is not sentimental about age. His own phrase was that pensioners can be as subversive as anybody, and the best episodes prove it, letting two men in their seventies scheme, lie and swear with no interest in being adorable. We laughed harder than we expected at Jack and Victor simply agreeing that something was rubbish, and it was the timing that did it, not the complaint.
The weaknesses are the ones that come with staying. We noted in our review that the later series carry softer punchlines that depend on our already liking the people saying them, and that is a writing habit, not an acting one. A live stage version in 2014 met with mixed reviews from critics who found a pub sitcom hard to fill an arena with, which is a fair point about the material as much as the staging. Kiernan and Hemphill have said they would not want to make something that was received worse than Still Game, and one can see the trap in that sentence.
Since the last series he has worked on an animated version of the show and on music. Both are ways of not writing a new comedy. He has the ear and the ensemble sense to do it; what he needs is a pub with different people in it.
Biography
Ford Kiernan is a Scottish actor, comedian and writer. Born on 10 January 1962 in Dennistoun, Glasgow, he began performing comedy in the early 1990s after working as a tailor and barman.
He is best known for his long collaboration with Greg Hemphill. Together they created and starred in the BBC Scotland sketch series Chewin' the Fat (1999–2005) and the sitcom Still Game (2002–2007, 2016–2019), in which Kiernan played Jack Jarvis. He also wrote and produced Still Game, and co-owns the production company Effingee Productions.
Kiernan has appeared in films including Gangs of New York (2002) and The Angels' Share (2012), and in other television roles such as Dear Green Place (2007–2008) and Happy Hollidays (2009).
