With Ford Kiernan, Greg Hemphill built two Glasgow pensioners out of grievance and good timing and kept them funny for the better part of two decades. He is a writer first, and Still Game is weakest when it asks us to love the men rather than laugh at them.
Fi1m perspective
Victor McDade does not do very much. He stands beside Jack Jarvis, lets a complaint run its course, and then tops it with something ruder in the same flat voice. Greg Hemphill played him for 62 episodes of Still Game, from 2002, when he was barely into his thirties and playing a man twice his age, and the trick of the performance was never the ageing. It was the patience. He waits for Ford Kiernan to finish, and the line lands exactly where Kiernan needs it to.
That partnership is the whole career. The two of them began with sketches at the Edinburgh Fringe in the 1990s, wrote Chewin' the Fat (1999) together, and lifted Jack and Victor out of it into their own series three years later. Six series in, they stopped. Both have said they did not want the show to run on for ever the way some British sitcoms do, and the break lasted nine years before Still Game came back in 2016 for three more series and a run of live shows. It is one of the few sitcom returns we can think of that did not embarrass its first run.
The method explains the sound. The scripts were built through long improvised sessions before anything was fixed on the page; as Hemphill put it, "We did all of our laughing in the writing stage and then they were set." That is why the exchanges feel overheard rather than performed. We laughed hardest at the lines that were nothing more than two old friends being unkind about a third, because the rhythm told us these men had been saying such things to one another for forty years. The flaw is the one we noted in our review: in the later series the punchlines soften, and the show starts to rely on our fondness for Jack and Victor to do work the writing used to do. Hemphill the writer is stronger than Hemphill the sentimentalist.
Since the revival ended in 2019 he has taken supporting parts in British and American series and films, including Ade MacArthur in Dinosaur (2024), and has written, directed and presented other comedy and factual programmes, among them a wild-swimming series with Julie Wilson Nimmo. None of it has the weight of the pensioners yet, and he seems content that it should not. He is in his fifties now, a good deal nearer Victor's age than when he first took the part, and we would like to see what he writes for a man his own age.
Biography
Greg Hemphill is a Scottish comedian, actor, writer and director. Born on 14 December 1969 in Springburn, Glasgow, he moved to Montreal, Canada, in the mid-1970s and returned to Scotland in 1988. He studied for an MA Honours degree in theatre, film and television at the University of Glasgow and made his stage debut at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1990.
Hemphill is best known for his long collaboration with Ford Kiernan. Together they created the sketch show Chewin' the Fat (1999–2005) and its spin-off sitcom Still Game (2002–2007, 2016–2019), in which Hemphill played Victor McDade. He co-wrote and co-produced the series through their company Effingee Productions.
His other credits include the film Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) and television roles in Silo (2023) and Dinosaur (2024–). He served as Rector of the University of Glasgow from 2001 to 2004 and is married to actress Julie Wilson Nimmo.
