Rikki Fulton's Rev I M Jolly never failed to cheer us up

Jolly was the creation of the late, great Scottish comic and actor Rikki Fulton – doubtless the subject of a future Icon in his own right – and became a Hogmanay institution, with his lugubrious messages of cheer.

Exhibit A: “I don’t know about you, but looking forward to another year with its new challenges and problems always gives me a feeling of – what’s the word? – nausea.”

Deep down, though, he knew how helpful his sermons were, noting the beneficial effect of a previous talk: “Many of you decided, after listening to me, that your own lives were not nearly so bad as you had been thinking.”

That mission to help was also a boon to his parishioners, one of whom wrote saying he was so depressed that, if he’d had the money, he would take the bus to Erskine Bridge and jump off. Jolly sent him the bus fare.

From his legion of admirers, he received only one piece of fan mail, a postcard from Ayr’s Auld Kirk cemetery bearing the words: “Wish you were here.” He himself attended many funerals, not in an official capacity, but just as “a wee kind of hobby”.

His origins were obscure until, in a talk called Deck Of Cards, he revealed that his father worked in a mill at Luncarty, Perthshire. He provided few other details other than that the family lived in a little cottage with an outside toilet near the edge of the River Tay. 

Jolly’s face almost lights up – almost – he can’t get his face “to work that way” – as he recalls the day a storm blew the cludgie into the water with faither sitting therein. Jolly jnr got belted for it.

Elsewhere, he talks of ministering to a mining area, possibly in Fife, where an elderly parishioner took part in a grass-cutting competition with a Flymo and had to be “shot down over Pittenweem”. He also recounts services in Falkirk and Motherwell.

Hogmanay heaven
Jolly’s spiritual home was the BBC Scotland comedy sketch show Scotch & Wry, which began in 1978 and ended in 1993, drawing in more than two millions viewers every Hogmanay. 

Fulton was the star of the show, which also featured a revolving ensemble cast including Gregor Fisher, Tony Roper, Claire Nielson, Juliet Cadzow and John Bett. 

It gave early exposure, too, to emerging Scottish talent Gerard Kelly and to British-Australian actress Miriam Margolyes (whose father was a GP in the Gorbals). Producer Gordon Menzies recalled that the idea of including a Last Call monologue “came from the then up-and-coming writer, John Byrne”. 

Byrne submitted a Late Call by the Rev Angus McKnocker, nicked for nicking knickers. The Beeb folks renamed it Last Call, bunged the words into the mouth of Fulton, R, and the rest is comedy. As for the name, Jolly was christened thus by a dresser in the wardrobe department, who overheard Gordon speak of their troubled search for a moniker.

Jolly wasn’t the only person of the cloth to feature in the Last Call spot initially. There was the Rev David Goodchild, whose water decanter was accidentally spiked with gin, causing him to get increasingly inebriated as the monologue progressed.

The Rev WE Free, you will be surprised to learn, was a Free Presbyterian minister who denounced the “sins” of his parishioners, before revealing how he envied them. 

Father Kevin Dulally, a Roman Catholic priest, had his cameo appearance ruined by failing to go to the bathroom before recording, hence having to focus more on holding his bladder than holding forth on moral matters.

A Jolly bunch
OTHER characters in the show included Dirty Dickie Dandruff, Alky Broon, and an officious motorcycle cop who stopped alleged bad drivers with the words: “OK, Stirlin’, oot the car!” Those intercepted included Batman, an extraterrestrial, Taggart, Dr Crippen, and … the Rev IM Jolly.

After Scotch & Wry, Jolly went on to feature in several Hogmanay spin-off specials during the 1990s. A Jolly Life, in 1999, marked his farewell appearance. Several book collections were also published, with his fictitious memoir, How I Found God And Why He Was Hiding From Me, the best-selling book in Scotland in 2003.

Not everyone found Jolly a joke. The Church of Scotland initially felt Fulton’s dog collar because it regarded the epilogues as blasphemous. 

But Rikki defended them as parodying the STV epilogues rather than the Kirk itself. Heaven forfend!

The sketches opened and closed with an excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 (in which the composer envisioned “a complete resignation before fate”) and, in them, the good Rev often had occasion to mention his wife Ephesia, his helpmeet who, on being told that a parishioner had died intestate, opined that he probably hadn’t had enough roughage in his diet.

At one point, the Rev reported that Ephesia hadn’t been feeling herself for a while, adding: “It was great while it lasted.” 

He also had occasion to mention Mrs Agnew at the organ, “quite the strongest pumper we’ve ever had in the church”.

Fisher hooked
THE only person who might feasibly have followed creditably in the Rev’s shoes after Rikki was his friend Gregor Fisher, a fine actor of Rab C Nesbitt fame, and it was indeed he who took on the role at Hogmanay 2018 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Scotch & Wry.

Colin Gilbert, original script editor for the series, described Last Call as “a sketch that has a real place in the hearts of Scotland and [that] was such a fixture of Hogmanay”.

Ach, wha’s like us, eh? Only Scots could love such a c, someone for whom, as one internet commenter put it, there was always a tunnel at the end of the light.

I think it’s one that’s done the rounds, but I leave you with my favourite line that no-one could deliver better than the Rev IM Jolly. 

Masseuse in dodgy parlour: “Would you like super sex?” Jolly: “Oh, if it’s all the same to you I’ll have the soup.”