HAVING fluffed the chance to appear in the huge blockbuster hit, Alien, at least Bill Paterson hung on to his original script.
He muses that it might be worth a bit of money now as he reflects on how he turned down the offer of a meeting with director Ridley Scott.
“I was sent the script and it was about a sort of old freighter kind of spaceship cruising through space and some creature coming out of a guy’s stomach and I thought ‘nobody’s going to watch that’,” he told the Sunday National.
The 1979 film went on to gross $188 million worldwide.
“So if you want any advice on whether you should do a script or not, don’t listen to me,” said Paterson.
He may have turned down that opportunity but he is still one of Scotland’s most successful actors in film, TV and theatre and was a founder member of the radical 7:84 company.
Its famous play, The Cheviot, The Stag And the Black, Black Oil, is being repeated tonight on BBC Four on at 22:15, preceded by a special new introduction by Paterson.
It was originally broadcast in 1974 and in 1976, Paterson was cast in his first TV series as a police sergeant in The Flight Of The Heron.
A brush with the law came much earlier however – when he was a boy growing up in Dennistoun.
How this came about is recounted in a hilarious story in Tales From The Back Green by Paterson, which has just been reissued and brilliantly evokes 1950s tenement life.
First written as a series for radio, the often very funny tales are true to the harsh realities of the time and stand as a social history of a lost Glasgow.
Paterson says he was keen to set his boyhood tales in the context of what was happening in the world beyond the back green where the tenement children played.
This is particularly evident in a story about how the kids were fascinated by the mushroom clouds caused by the nuclear bomb testing in the Pacific that they would see on cinema newsreels.
They were so mesmerised by these images, they wanted to make their own mushroom cloud so gathered all the dust and debris they could scrape up from the back green in order to chuck it from the highest close window in one of the tenements.
They chose a warm summer evening to drop their crate of dirt so, when it exploded, it sent clouds of dust and debris through the open windows of the ground floor flats just as the unsuspecting inhabitants were sitting down to their tea.
“I’m led to believe that the damage we had caused was pretty extensive,” says Paterson. “They say that some of the items escaped but the creamier, stickier ones were a write-off. The Carnation milk, the salad cream, the lemon curd took the brunt and had become filthy grey health hazards in a matter of seconds.
“More than five decades later, those choking angry faces at their dust streaked windows still haunt me.”
He adds: “My memory is pretty hazy as to whether the police put our names in the book or let us off with a warning and a few remarks about something called the Luftwaffe but we were left with a very strong impression that fallout from mushroom clouds was ‘a very bad thing’.”
Not many years later, Paterson went on his first Ban the Bomb march after the US Navy brought the Polaris submarines to Holy Loch, a mere 30 miles from Scotland’s biggest city.
“By that time, I was truly convinced that nuclear fallout was ‘a very bad thing’,” he says.
He’s incredulous that the nuclear submarines are still there, with Westminster seemingly intent on spending more than £8 billion on new ones.y
“It’s not without its values in terms of employment but it amazes me that we ever allowed a nuclear base to be situated so close to Glasgow,” says Paterson.
Like the dust bomb story, the other tales refer to much of what was occurring outside the back greens of the tenements.
“I didn’t want to do Just William stories – I wanted the context to be bigger issues that were happening around us,” Paterson says.
This includes the disappearance of Glasgow’s beloved trams and the demolition of swathes of old tenements to make way for new roads and high rise flats, a planning decision that pulled the old close-knit communities apart.
It upsets him that Glasgow is still losing some of its most historic buildings and is particularly distressed about the two fires at the art school.
“There are not many cities where the most famous and most loved building isn’t a cathedral or a palace,” Paterson points out. “Glasgow had a school of art which was loved even by people who would never have stepped over the door as students there. To have lost that and for it still to stand as it does, to me is absolutely heartbreaking. At my age, I don’t think I’ll ever see that resolved and that saddens me.”
Although his home is now London he is often in Glasgow but feels it has “lost its way”.
“I’m not happy in Glasgow at the moment,” he says. “I feel that the voice of Glasgow seems to be utterly muted compared to what it was. The greatness of Glasgow holds on but it’s not kicking with its full strength these days.”
Paterson suspects the chattering and influential classes are reasonably content living in a West End bubble, whereas the city centre and other parts are deteriorating due to a “lack of love”.
“I’m probably going to get into trouble saying that since I live in North London but I do feel Glasgow has lost its way.”
At 81 years old, Paterson may be gloomy about seeing a rebuilt Art School but considers himself lucky to be still around and in demand.
He is also delighted Birlinn have decided to reprint his book, although he is quick to stress that it is a reissue with an updated introduction by himself.
“If people bought the book before, they don’t need to buy it again.”
His preface tells how the stories started out as short tales for radio, with the first one sent to the BBC short story department under the false name of Tulloch Cameron.
Paterson kept his identity in the dark because after years of reading other people’s scripts, he thought it would be fun to hear an actor reading something he had written.
To his surprise, the BBC wrote back saying they would like to broadcast the story with the actor Bill Paterson reading it.
“Maybe Cameron Tulloch should have said he didn’t want Paterson anywhere near it because he would just ruin it,” he jokes.
Instead, he came clean about the authorship and agreed to read the story on radio which went down so well he was encouraged to send in more tales.
When people began to ask for them in bookshops, it was decided to publish them, with the book coming out in 2008.
“Even since then, the world has changed totally,” he points out.
While some aspects may be for the better, today’s children would possibly envy the great freedom of Paterson’s generation – even if ideas like their dust cloud did occasionally get them into bother with the adults around them.
Tales From The Back Green: A Glasgow Childhood by Bill Paterson is published on Thursday by Birlinn
