'The Stanley Baxter Show' was the Scottish comedian's launching pad to stardom. Here he performed traditional sketches with a talented supporting cast as opposed to the costume based sketches he later did for LWT.
It was here we were first introduced to the spoof educational show 'Parliamo Glasgow', in which Baxter, alongside Doris McLatchie would take a well know English phrase and translate it into Glaswegian. A perfect example being ''has he taken the night offwork?'' being translated into ''Izziafiz wurk?'' or ''is he behaving strangely?'' translated into ''izziafiz bloddy chump!''. These items, written by Alec Mitchell, were the best part of the show, proving popular on both sides of the border.
Another funny item had Baxter as a woman in a clothes boutique trying on a pair of slacks with a very pronounced seat in them, giving her the appearance of having a large bum ( which rather put me in mind of the famous sketch peformed by Kenny Everett as Rod Stewart whose backside expanded so much he ended up floating away! ) and another item had a common as muck couple eating fish suppers whilst seducing each other. In what was probably a parody of the Walt Disney classic 'Lady & The Tramp', we see them with a chip in both their mouths, eating it until their lips meet romantically!
A talented supporting cast was made up of Doris McLatchie ( as I earlier mentioned ), Joan Sims, Mary Millar, Una McLean, Patrick Newell, Roy Kinnear and Victor Carin. Baxter wrote sketches alongside Ken Hoare, Hector Nicol. David Cumming and Richard Waring.
Sadly, not much of 'The Stanley Baxter Show' is left in existence and it has not been made commercially available, which is sad as it is vastly superior to the shows he would go on to do for ITV in my view. I regard this as the best of Baxter's solo work though for me the best thing he did was his guest appearance on 'Rab C. Nesbitt' in 1990 in the 'Fitba' special in which he played a dying ex-footballer who Rab takes to Italy to see his home team play in the World Cup.
It was here we were first introduced to the spoof educational show 'Parliamo Glasgow', in which Baxter, alongside Doris McLatchie would take a well know English phrase and translate it into Glaswegian. A perfect example being ''has he taken the night offwork?'' being translated into ''Izziafiz wurk?'' or ''is he behaving strangely?'' translated into ''izziafiz bloddy chump!''. These items, written by Alec Mitchell, were the best part of the show, proving popular on both sides of the border.
Another funny item had Baxter as a woman in a clothes boutique trying on a pair of slacks with a very pronounced seat in them, giving her the appearance of having a large bum ( which rather put me in mind of the famous sketch peformed by Kenny Everett as Rod Stewart whose backside expanded so much he ended up floating away! ) and another item had a common as muck couple eating fish suppers whilst seducing each other. In what was probably a parody of the Walt Disney classic 'Lady & The Tramp', we see them with a chip in both their mouths, eating it until their lips meet romantically!
A talented supporting cast was made up of Doris McLatchie ( as I earlier mentioned ), Joan Sims, Mary Millar, Una McLean, Patrick Newell, Roy Kinnear and Victor Carin. Baxter wrote sketches alongside Ken Hoare, Hector Nicol. David Cumming and Richard Waring.
Sadly, not much of 'The Stanley Baxter Show' is left in existence and it has not been made commercially available, which is sad as it is vastly superior to the shows he would go on to do for ITV in my view. I regard this as the best of Baxter's solo work though for me the best thing he did was his guest appearance on 'Rab C. Nesbitt' in 1990 in the 'Fitba' special in which he played a dying ex-footballer who Rab takes to Italy to see his home team play in the World Cup.
