REVISITING lapsed sitcoms is often fraught with danger, as many who have seen Christmas specials of The Office or Only Fools and Horses will attest. When a programme has been off air for almost a decade, as is the case with Rab C Nesbitt, the known unknowns regarding its return to our screens are enough to concentrate the best minds down at the Two Ways.
In case you are wondering - and Rab's long absence means there is a generation who know not the Govan street philosopher - that's the Two Ways bar, where our hero is wont to spend much of his time, and his dole money. But what's this? Early reports of the forthcoming one-off destined for BBC Two this Christmas indicate that Rab is a reformed man, that he is off the drink and even ventures into the kitchen on occasion. It will come as a shock to those of us who remember him best stoating along the road with a fish supper in one hand and a bottle of Buckfast in his pocket that he has become that most gentle of creatures, the house husband.
Any suspicions that the show will have lost any of its confrontational edge are surely dispelled, however, by writer Ian Pattison, who explained recently how the impetus for a revival came about. He was watching the news in a hotel room in Hungary last year when it was reported that terrorists had crashed a jeep through the front window of Glasgow Airport. His immediate reaction: "I wish Rab was back now. He'd have something to say about that." There was, indeed, something oh-so-very Rab-like about John Smeaton's interventional instincts.
Rab C Nesbitt, played by Gregor Fisher, first appeared as a character on the sketch show Naked Video in the 1980s. A full-length pilot episode was made in 1988 and a first full series followed in 1990. Over the next nine years and 52 episodes the often savage exploits of the Nesbitt family regularly attracted audiences in excess of five million across the UK.
The programme's makers, The Comedy Unit - responsible for other much-loved Scottish shows including Only an Excuse and Chewin' the Fat - have suggested that broadcasters nowadays would be much more reluctant to commission anything like Rab C. They have a point. You can almost hear the shrill cries of politicians and they people they pay to tell us how to live healthy lives now, descrying the depictions of heavy drinking, smoking and obesity. Neither was Rab a flag-bearer for political correctness, while even in the 1990s there were plenty of complaints that the programme portrayed a negative image of Glasgow and Scotland to the rest of the world.
It is worth pointing out that alcoholism and obesity have hardly been on the decline since 1999, while such things weren't exactly ever romanticised. Rab C Nesbitt was bold and brave insofar as it dared to depict members of the so-called underclass at all, giving television comedy a shot in the arm in the process.
As for being politically incorrect, it is also worth remembering that in Mary Doll, Rab's long-suffering wife, Elaine C Smith played an extremely feisty woman who was far more likely to hit her husband with a rolling pin than stand for his drunken advances. And besides, it has always struck me that Rab, as well as being an unreconcilably sentimental soul, was, politically-speaking, an anarchist. Not in the sense of smashing things up - although there was sometimes a bit of that - but certainly in his philosophical free-thinking, his come-what-may attitude and the fact that he had it in for just about everyone: Tories, Labour and Scottish nationalists; rich and poor; his fellow "scumbags" and the crowds flocking to Glasgow during its European Year of Culture in 1990.
It remains to be seen whether Rab C Nesbitt can recapture its former seamy glory - there is now word as yet as to whether another full series is planned. However, it's unlikely that any other sitcom will satirise so many aspects of Scottish life - or visit such dark topics as suicide, mental illness, unemployment, murder, cancer, police brutality, transsexuality and ringworm - to such joyous effect any time soon.