2002 - 2019
Still Game ran on the BBC from 2002 to 2019, with a four-year gap in the middle that felt, at the time, like the show was gone for good. Six original series aired on BBC Scotland and BBC Two between 2002 and 2007. Then nothing. Then, in 2014, Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill took Jack and Victor to the SSE Hydro in Glasgow for what was supposed to be four nights and ended up being twenty-one sold-out shows across three weeks, setting a world record for the longest comedy arena residency and playing to over 210,000 people. I was not at the Hydro but I know three people who were, and they all say the same thing. It felt like a city event more than a comedy show. That tour was the spark. Two years later the programme came back on BBC One, national this time, for three more series that ran until 2019.
The premise is simple. Jack Jarvis and Victor McDade are two widowed pensioners living in the fictional Glasgow high-rise scheme of Craiglang. They drink at The Clansman. They shop at Navid's. They wind up Winston, dodge Isa's gossip, and try to get one over on Tam, the tightest man in Craiglang. That is the whole show. Patter, pals, and a council flat.
Current Standing: {{show:still-game:rank_full}}
The whole thing starts and ends with the double act. Ford Kiernan as Jack and Greg Hemphill as Victor are the kind of comic pairing that only really comes along once a generation. Kiernan plays the wilier, slightly more chaotic half. Hemphill plays the straight man who is also somehow the softer of the two. They wrote the show together, and you can hear it in every line. The rhythms are theirs. Nobody else could deliver this dialogue the same way.
Around them is one of the best supporting ensembles in British sitcom.
Greg Hemphill
Victor McDade
Ford Kiernan
Jack Jarvis
Jane McCarry
Isa Drennan
Gavin Mitchell
Boabby
Mark Cox
Tam Mullen
Paul Riley
Winston Ingram
Agnes Kiernan
Winston's mother
Paul Young
Shug (Shug the Lug)
And in a small perfect detail: Ford Kiernan's own mother, Agnes Kiernan, plays Winston's mother. A family touch that tells you exactly what kind of show this is.
On the surface Still Game is a sitcom about two old men and a pub. Look at it a bit longer and it is a show about what happens after your working life ends, after your wife dies, after your kids move away, and you are still here, and the days are long, and the one thing you have left is your pals.
It takes old age seriously without ever being miserable about it. The characters are skint, bored a lot of the time, and occasionally lonely. They also have a laugh every single day because they have each other. That gap between the real hardships of pensioner life on a Glasgow estate and the cheerfulness of the lives being lived on top of those hardships is the engine of the whole show. It is why the programme lands harder than a sitcom this daft has any right to.
The thing I keep coming back to is that it is relentlessly, unrepentantly Glaswegian. The patter, the rhythms, the casual asides about Barras and Saltcoats and the rubbish end of the Clyde coast, all of it is Scots. The show never flattens itself for a Home Counties audience, and that refusal is part of why the Glasgow audience loved it so much and part of why, in the end, it travelled a lot better than you would expect.
Visually the show is anchored by three sets and rotates between them like a stage farce: The Clansman with its dark wood and half-empty pints, Navid's shop with its specific yellow light and narrow aisles, and the identical council flats where a tea cup is always on the go. It is shot multi-camera, in front of a studio audience, with a laugh track you can hear properly. Deliberately traditional for 2002, in a year that was already pivoting toward single-camera, no-audience comedy.
That old-school setup is part of the trick. Still Game is a sitcom in the proper sense. Set-up, punchline, laugh, scene ends. It is not trying to be The Office. You can draw a direct line from it back through a whole generation of British studio sitcoms (Last of the Summer Wine is the closest ancestor, with Only Fools and Horses and One Foot in the Grave in the same family tree), and it is comfortable being exactly that, with a thicker Glaswegian accent.
The ageing prosthetics that Kiernan and Hemphill wore as younger men playing pensioners were frankly a bit rough in 2002 and got progressively better. By the revival they are more or less invisible. By then the actors had aged into the parts anyway.
The show started as a spin-off. Jack and Victor first appeared as a recurring sketch on Chewin' the Fat, Kiernan and Hemphill's BBC Scotland sketch series that ran from 1999 to 2005. They were popular enough that BBC Scotland gave them their own programme, and the rest followed.
During the original 2002 to 2007 run it was a BBC Scotland cult, beloved north of the border, barely known south of it. The 2014 Hydro residency changed everything. Twenty-one sold-out arena nights in Glasgow for a sitcom is a figure that should not exist. It does not exist anywhere else in comedy. That success is what persuaded BBC One to put the revival on the network, giving the show its first proper national audience for the 2016 to 2019 run.
It is the rare British sitcom that plays equally well to a pensioner in Shettleston and a student in Brighton, and it manages this without compromising a single vowel.
The show ended on its own terms in 2019, with a final series that deliberately and carefully said goodbye. It won BAFTA Scotland awards repeatedly, filled arenas with its stage tour, and gave Glasgow one of its few genuinely beloved pieces of modern popular art. The Barras Market scenes alone are now part of the city's cultural furniture.
Still Game works because it is warm. That is the whole thing. There are sharper Scottish comedies if you want them (Limmy's Show for the surreal, Burnistoun for the absurd, Rab C. Nesbitt for a meaner register), and there are funnier British sitcoms on a gag-per-minute basis. Almost no shows, anywhere, love their characters the way this one does.
My own test for it is simple. I put on an episode expecting to half-watch it, and thirty minutes later I have phoned a relative. That's the effect. A programme that makes you want to ring someone up, or walk down to a pub that is probably a bit like The Clansman and probably smells of last night's carpet.
Quietly one of the most humane things on television, daft as a brush, with a laugh every couple of minutes and no interest in being cool about it. The fact that it ended properly, on its own terms, with Jack and Victor walking off into a credit-roll rather than being wheeled out past their welcome, is the last thing it got right.
Woke Rating: {{show:still-game:woke}}/5
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