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In Part 2 of our exclusive interview, Stuart talks table-tennis, Little & Large, Mickey Weir, Perth panto, Mark Hateley's dress sense, Mabel Townsley's lucky white heather, and Keiran McAnespie's socks...
Back to the mundane questions. We were told to ask this one, but do you feel that Tam Cowan is football's very own "Oor Wullie"?
Oor Wullie? You know what I think it is with Tam? He's a really really funny guy, but he's also an obsessive football fan, and a really big Motherwell fan, long preceding the shows we did and he goes to their games at home and away.
The funny thing is, he really prefers jokes. He can never really get wound up about football - I can get wound up and angry about Saints and things, but he can barely get angry because he only sees it as another means of getting a gag - so there maybe is a bit of him like Oor Wullie in a sense of being a Scottish urchin and all that, but he really is a serious hard-working guy who works like hell at his comedy and stereotypes and the rest of it, but if Motherwell were closed tomorrow - and we can but hope - he would definitely change sides to Saints.
Another part of it is with him and Jim Weir going all the way through school together, and there's a fantastic photo of Jim and Tam as Strathclyde Table-Tennis Champions - so there's Jim with his huge 'wally dug' ears and they're both skinny as hell.
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Jim Weir... table-tennis champ
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When Tam started writing, he started writing stuff for Little and Large and sending comedy scripts into the TV, kidding on he was 23 when he was 14. And of course Little and Large thought they were going up-market, buying these scripts from a boy in Motherwell.
Let's get this right - Little and Large, notoriously uncool guys, and Tam was writing their stuff?
Aye, that's right - irrespective of jokes, he wrote for Little and Large, Bobby Davro, Hale and Pace. A total rogues' gallery. He was sending in scripts when he was in sixth form and so on, and from there on he ended up doing stuff for the Comedy Unit at the BBC.
The thing is, I remember Jim (Weir) telling me Tam had come into school with a cheque for £500 one day, and the two of them went round Motherwell putting money in slot machines and buying stuff up. Of course Tam always says "James," as he calls him - "James and I were never exactly in the same class - I was always slightly brighter." Jim's reply was always "at least I've had a ride!"
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Fred Macauley... Celeb!
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Who have been your best and worst guests on Off the Ball?
Good question. Probably a best type of guest is like when we had that singer Christian, who's a blues singer and once a director of Motherwell, because you could talk to him about just about anything from panto to the soul music, to Motherwell and football, but in lots of ways he also reminds you how dire it all is in Scotland, how you're scraping about for Christian, as your celebrity Motherwell fan. And he's not the worst - you've got St. Johnstone with me and Fred Macaulay.
You go down the clubs, and you can obviously discount Stephen Hendry, who's obviously a Hun, do Hearts actually have a celebrity fan? Unless you count Ronnie Corbett of course!
We're always working really hard to get people on - a lot harder - we've got Mickey Weir on today, so we try to find out a lot more about the guy coming from certain angles, and we found out that someone once broke into his house and stole his jockstrap, and that's of far more interest to us than whether he trained with John Collins or whatever.
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I remember - it's painful, we went to Hibs and we got a complete doing - and he pulled John McClelland's shorts down. One of our researchers had been at a party where Mickey Weir had done a rendition of Sam Cooke's "Soul Chain Gang" or whatever, so we take things like that and build it up from there.
The frustrating thing, and there's still a hell of a lot of this goes on in Scottish football, is that there's a lot of backstabbing and you get the feeling that they'll say something in the hospitality over a beer but when you get them on the radio they'll just inhabit this Scottish footballer's voice, how "he's a good blend of youth and experience", "he's a quality player", "you don't become a bad team overnight" etc - and you'd have thought they were all taught it down at Largs.
Some of them are getting better at it though - we've had most of the SPL managers on the show with the exception of O'Neill and Advocaat, and now McLeish. The Old Firm never co-operate with the show and in a way we don't want them to, so it suits us, but it's great to get someone like Jimmy Calderwood on and he'll tell you thinks about Advocaat playing in the Second Division, and things you wish you could get him on for - like "Dick, we hear you were only a sub at FC Nijmegen, and very poor", since all these guys are up there in Scotland talking as if they were legends!
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Now that George Duffus has sadly passed away, would you consider taking the place as Tayside's main pantomime dame?
Actually to be honest it would be a good gig, but the only thing is I'd have to pack in the Channel Four job and that pays my wages, but if I was getting to that kind of mid-50's thing, looking for a gig, then why not?
In actual fact I used to go to the panto in Perth every year, and there was always a dire Saints gag in there, you know - "did you hear the one about the boy who phones Muirton Park and asked 'what time's the kick-off'...'what time can you make it'" etc.
The one thing I remember about panto is that I was in Barnsley, while I was at university down in Yorkshire, a place called Monkbretton, and Mick McCarthy was the local 'celeb' because he was captain of Barnsley FC - and the team were full of Scots so I got into supporting Barnsley. One Christmas we went to Barnsley to see the panto. It was Robin Hood, and there was miner's strikes going on all over the place. The opening line was "The Sheriff has arrived from Nottingham," and the whole crowd shouted "SCAB" so I do like panto.
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Hoods-man... The infamous Cosgrove dress-sense
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You're famed for your dress sense - who do you think is the most stylish dresser in Scottish football?
I've always thought that different people have different styles. At the worst end you've got Mark Hateley - his style was laughable. I remember when he came back to Rangers for a crunch game against Celtic, he arrived at Glasgow Airport and it was the first time in the history of Glasgow Airport that the customs had put stuff back in a bag, so he was definitely the worst.
Funnily enough, what I quite like - and this won't go down too well - is the kind of scruffy, trendy designer stuff - and actually (Ivano) Bonetti is quite good at that. Tam thinks he's a tramp but doesn't realise it's expensive trampery. Maybe it's 'Nouveau Dundee' with all these Burberry Scarves and Armani hooded tops, but he sits there picking his nose and stuff, so it's almost as if he's kind of genetically programmed as part Milan, part Mid-Craigie.
They do spend a lot of dough. The famous one is a friend of mine who owned Kennedy's and Manifesto and he sold Beckham a pair of gold jeans for five grand - he rang me the day after he sent them saying, "wouldn't have been great to leave a note in the pocket saying "get it up ye, ya wanker!!"
The Muirton Suite or the Polo Lounge?
Well there you go, I'll go for the Muirton Suite. But have you noticed at McDiarmid how you get these kind of "Saints bores"? You just think that 'no matter what happens, I'm not getting to that bar now, because that guy's in the road'. I tell them I have absolutely no control over what Murdo MacLeod thinks of Keigan Parker, and they have absolutely no logic at all, but they say "oh, you're wrong, you're wrong" so if I can get to the bar then it's OK.
What's all this about only getting a license for an hour though? We'll need to sort that one out...
Have you ever bought white heather from Mabel Townsley?
Well I have to say that when I was at school, the Townsleys were at school with me. I remember back in the days when Saints were utterly pish, when we were right down the bottom with crowds of 250 and all that, it broadly co-incided with a team called Fair City, who were a junior team and were great at the time. They did fairly laudible things like setting fire to dressing rooms in Dundee and things like that. It was basically minks in football strips.
They used to play up at Hunters, on that pitch next to the dump - and they recruited loads of Townsleys to play for them - and I remember this guy who was a left back, and a complete monster, going in at neck height with the studs open and stuff.
I can honestly say I've never bought heather, I'm too busy buying Diamond Whites off Jean Rattray?
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Keyring... Old socks
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Do you have any videos of the Channel Four Christmas party?
Yes I do - do you want any? Tell you what though, the best video I've got is a copy of the Monaco game which I got from a French broadcaster, because it was on digital TV in France that night. The players were on my case as soon as they got a copy of it, and I had a converter at work so I could make copies of it in VHS format - I must have made hundreds of copies of that.
What happened to Keiran McAnespie though? I'll tell you, one of the greatest days of my life was travelling to London and Keiran was on the same plane, going down to sign for Fulham. Keiran got out, got his bag and the rest, and we were talking about John Collins recommending him and stuff - and he walked out with a wee swagger with his Burberry cap on - then said "I think that's my car," - and sure enough, there was a Fulham club car there with the "McAnespie" sign, so I said "take a leaf out of Princess Di's book - never take a lift in a car driven by the Al Fayeds" and I've never seen Keiran since!
I did get a pair of his socks that I got off his mum, the socks he wore when he was playing for Scotland against the New York Jets or something in a friendly, so he scored for Scotland while he was still a Saints player. I am a complete obsessive - you should see the shit I've got lying about in my house related to Saints.
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The one thing I'm really keen on, going back to your question about the Champions League, is looking back through the history books, and everyone always says "who's your favourite St. Johnstone player" - there was a guy called Bobby Davidson, and I've never seen him, although my Granddad did, because it was maybe 1936-37. If you look back, at the time, he was the British record transfer, playing in Arsenal's famous Herbert Chapman team, winning the league five times on the trot. The guy went down there as the top Scot and the biggest transfer in the history of British football, he plays for Arsenal for a year and then the war breaks out.
If you think about it, it's unthinkable that St. Johnstone could produce a player of the calibre of what was the Man United of their day - maybe the van Nistelrooy of their day - and I think sometimes that although we joke about the history of the club, I'd always like to imagine that if it wasn't for the war he could have been one of the great Scottish players of all time.
continued...
Coming up in the third and final part of our interview, Stuart talks going bust, the "Houston Four", the Marrs, and getting jaiked in Vaasa.
Read Part 1 here and Part 3 here...
Interview: David Low
Stuart Cosgrove is the author of "Hampden Babylon: Sex and Scandal in Scottish Football", which is available to buy on-line here.
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