Oran Mor: Stranger than fiction, John Bett’s life is as colourful as his play

Audiences can enjoy a delightful biographical piece featuring Fifties and Sixties comedy act Flanders and Swann, but perhaps a sense it has emerged from a writer with a fascinating backstory; tales of being stranded in Soviet Russia, growing up a fish out of water in Fife, even a past period of drowning in drink.

But first Bett explains how the comedy duo, famous for their sell-out revue, At The Drop of a Hat, seeped into his consciousness. “When I was at school in Fife (in the mid-Sixties) we all loved our music teacher Miss Arnold,” he says, as he recalls with a mischievous smile a woman with the physicality and presence to command a fifth year boy’s attention.

“Anyway, she got bored of teaching us Wagner and Schubert and brought in records such as At a Drop of the Hat. It was lovely, gentle satire from Flanders and Swann who had emerged just before the big satire boom of the Sixties, with Peter Cook and That Was The Week That Was.

“I learned they were privileged left-wingers who were at Westminster school with the likes of Peter Ustinov, Peter Brook and Tony Benn and I really loved their wit.”

Bett is perfectly placed to reproduce a vivid period in entertainment culture. Yet, while we may know of his theatre work over the years, his prominence as a founder member of 7:84 and his innumerable TV and film appearances (in which his Cowardly accent is played out to perfection), the early life story reveals even more layers.

Growing up in Cupar, his father was a plumber. (“Going back to a family of plumbers and tinsmiths since 1745.”) But Johnny Bett was never going to sort anyone’s u-bend. As as schoolboy he adored and performed Gilbert and Sullivan, translated Russian poetry by Yevtushenko for a Scottish broadsheet, and interviewed Hugh MacDiarmid for the school magazine. The poet gave the young writer a great line. “He spoke to me [he puts on a crackly Scots accent] of ‘some of the greatest poets in the world, and I myself am no exception’ and added ‘Burns was not a great poet. He was a minor poet’.”

Bett was 16 when he won a scholarship to study in Russia and took off on the train, alone, to Moscow. Along the way he was strip-searched in East Berlin (no visa), thrown out of a youth hostel, (he came in late and through a kitchen window, where he put his foot through a meat pie - and was thumped by the hostel warden.)

But the Ealing Comedy of the adventure gave way to desperation in Poland when he was abandoned after missing a train. And then he found himself both fascinated by and fearful of dangerous Russia where the KGB lived, it seemed, in every corner of everyone’s mind.

“Cafes playing Beatles music were shu down,” he recalls, with a little shudder. “Khruschev’s Russia was terrifying and corrupt and paranoid.” Meanwhile, in 1967, Britain experienced a summer of love. “None of that there,” he says, grinning.

Then came university. BBC work. But theatre called loudest. Right now he’s workshopping a BBC drama about addiction.

What is John Bett addicted to? Work? “Yes,” he admits, with a wry smile “But I did have a problem with booze in the past.”

How did he get over it? “With great difficulty,” he says, with a wry grin.

“You see, I grew up in an evangelical house, my parents were converts to Billy Graham, and when I tried AA I found it too evangelical, too much preaching.”

Which made escape to Russia a little easier. “My parents softened over the years,” he says of the couple who are coming to this show.

Despite the plumbing line being so powerful in his family was there any past connection with showbiz? “I was told that members of our family were trapeze artists in the late 19th century,” he says, with a wide grin, “but I’m not sure how this affected me because the truth is I’m not all that well balanced.”

Tipping The Hat, starring Gordon Cree and John Jack, Oran Mor, Glasgow, until Saturday.