DES Dillon's face is as delighted as any of his theatre audiences have ever been as the writer announces his latest success story; he's now qualified as a kayaking instructor.

 

So what, Des? You've come up with 14 books, six poetry anthologies, several screenplays and over twenty plays in your career. Your new sectarian/football comedy Billy, Tim and the Holy Ghost is set to premiere in Glasgow in April. And another new play, The C Word, will tour Scotland in the summer. And you're excited about being able to steer a little boat that looks like a kazoo?

"Ah, but there's a real significance to this certificate," he explains, his blue eyes twinkling. "Thirty years ago, social workers in Coatbridge deemed I was one of the 'dozen most likely' young men in the town most likely to go to jail for a very long period. So the Dirty Dozen were sent, as a last resort, on an outward bound course to learn kayaking and rock climbing. Now, I didn't turn my life around straight away. It was a snakes and ladders situation for quite a long time. But what the kayaking stint did give me was a box of possibilities. And when the right time came I went back to that box."

Dillon, one of nine kids, admits he was 'a ned', a 'pointless waste of space' full of anger, adrenalin, drink and drugs. Yet, he's clearly very intelligent. (He'd go on gain a Honours Degree in English Literature. His novel Me And My Gal made the Top 100 list of Scottish books ever published.) Why did he move towards the dark side in the first place.

"Lots of reasons," he shrugs. "I wrote poetry as a kid. I told stories. I heard great stories growing up in the town. But Coatbridge was a violent culture. Fear was always a companion in the schemes. And there were bigger guys than me. So even though I was First in my class at Maths in first and second year, I never picked up a prize because I was expelled for different things. By then, I had already started drinking and sniffing glue. You see, it wasn't good to be clever in Coatbridge. To survive, you had to be seen to be a nutter, and I became a very good nutter." He adds; "I was hyperactive nutter."

He's still hyper. Dillon still speaks as fast as his brain can create words. He still punctuates sentences with swear words that would make a pirate's parrot blush. Back, then the energy was channelled into creating mayhem. He carried an axe for self-defence. He once held up a milk-float armed with a hammer, angered on discovering his Gold Tops had been broken on his doorstep, and exacted a crate in exchange.

"It was about survival. But it was also about ego. "I have to admit, I enjoyed going into school on a Monday morning boasting of my mad exploits. I was becoming a legend and I loved that."

And he loved the drink. "It was an anaesthetic. Drink sort of tightened up the loose bolts in the head. As for drugs, I wanted to get into another world, try to find Utopia, happiness."

Dillon was jailed more than twenty times for various crimes and misdemeanours, such as breaking into pubs. Along the way, he became a fruit machine engineer, a joiner, a DJ, and a bouncer. But he'd dream of an alternative life, one in which perhaps he could write, or climb mountains. He took Highers and sailed through them. He wrote poetry, a he'd done since he was a kid. But then he'd slide down the ladder again, back to the bottle. Along the way he married. Twice. And then in 1991 came his nadir; the day he shoved Wife 2 into the canal. Why? "Well, she was shouting at me," he says, delivering the line in deliberately unapologetic voice for comedy effect. And he dived in to save her?

"After a while," he says, grinning. "When I realised she was drowning I got in there. Then I got stuck, I got caught in a supermarket trolley. And when I came up for air she began throwing rocks at me." He reflects, shaking his head; "I knew when I climbed out of that stinky canal I had to change my way of life."

He did. He gave up the drink and the drugs. He got his degree. Did university instil him with confidence. "No, the opposite," he says. "I was still seen as a working class ned. In my Higher English I got the highest marks recorded in Scotland. At Stratchlyde uni I was marginalised, got zero encouragement."

He proved his tutors wrong. It took seven years to get his first book published, ("Critics called me 'A ned writer'") but his second was a success. Then he wrote plays and was now described as 'one of the most authentic Scottish voices in literature'. Dillon wrote about the world he knew. "Coatbridge has a real Irish culture, with lots of storytelling, and a lot of my work is based on my family and people I know; true stories but fictionalised. My play Six Black Candles, (a very black comedy) is about six sisters getting together to do a witchcraft spell to kill the girlfriend of one of their husbands. My sisters actually do witchcraft."

It was while writing for TV soap Take The High Road, Dillon came up with a play set in a courtroom cell and featuring a Celtic and Rangers fan who kick verbal lumps out of each other. "It's a theme reflected in movies such as the 1958 classic The Defiant Ones, the prison escape drama starring Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier; two angry, suspicious convicts chained together on a journey towards enlightenment."

The BBC were keen until they saw the swearing in the script. But Dillon took it to the theatres and it's been a high scoring hit for ten years.

Now, he's written the follow up, Billy Tim and the Holy Ghost, which looks to be even funnier. "Think Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), but with a ghost that loves the bevvy and has a mouth like a Victorian public toilet."

Meantime Dillon married Joanne (he proposed after two days; still hyper, even in love matters) and the couple life in the tiny village of Garlieston in Dumfrieshire. He writes in the morning, and in the afternoons he heads for the sea to kayak, or to the mountains to ski. He still has the same searching mind he has as the altar boy who once put his hand in the tabernacle to see if God actually lived there.

But he also retains some of the powerful no-compromise principles that don't sit always well with authority; he wrote for the BBC's River City for a period until he walked out, after script editors reduced his lines to 'stupid levels.'

And why should he compromise? Des Dillon is an international success story, his plays, for example, produced regularly in eastern Europe. "One of the reasons my stuff does so well in the Ukraine is because the area is just one big Glasgow," he says, grinning. "They have the same dark sense of humour as us, but less of a class structure."

Dillon's own story is the stuff of movie plots; think Good Will Hunting with a backdrop of tenements, crisp pokes and glue. The Non Educated Delinquent is now an educator, "the Bruce Springsteen of Scottish writers", a stand-up comedian, a powerful man whose a powerful example of how a wasted life can be turned around, even if it takes as long as oil tanker. But what's his answer to the current generation of young Des Dillons. How do you negate the nihilism, turn anger into good?

"You get the boys when they're at school and give them real physical challenges, like kayaking," he says. "You help them deal with fear. You give them a chance to compete against each other in a positive way. You give them the adrenalin surge their bodies crave. And you let them have a positive shared experience."

He adds, grinning; "They won't all become playwrights, but they'll stop kicking the s**** out of each other."

*I'm No' A Billy - He's A Tim, The Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow from.

The C Word