We must admit, we find this piece of Cumbernauld schtick increasingly difficult to take. A film can be just too whimsical for its own good after all. Still, one aspect of it we never tire of is the great and sadly now quite very late Chic Murray who played the Headmaster of the school, contemplating confectionary orders and insisting that little boys go off. Despite being the Greatest Comedian Who Ever Lived – FACT! – Chic didn’t have much of a film career which was a shame as he had a definite presence which he managed to transmit in even the most bizarre vehicles, even proving to be at least of note in shit like Secrets of a Door to Door Salesman and Confessions of a Handyman. In fact, he became as much a fixture of the British sex shitcom as much as Alfie Bass or his ilk ever were with titles like I’m Not Feeling Myself Tonight and Can I Come Too? so by the time Bill Forsyth roped him into this he was lucky to have been given the chance to gain some credibility at all. Of course we know that he already had buckets of credibility to spare as a result of his very early doors involvement in Casino Royale in which he played the deeply disturbing hitman who at one point reaches out of the telly and shoots Orson ‘peas’ Welles, a scene which kept us up for hours on the night of the first Easter Bank Holiday we saw it on. The last telly appearance we saw of chic was when he appeared on Tarby & Co. Not the best material he had on show unfortunately but he made up for it by appearing on national primetime television doing his routine wearing a dark blue tie with the Strathclyde Regional Council logo on it.
