Alan Cumming is sitting in his new Highlands home, a little poggled after a transatlantic flight. Boxes have still to be unpacked and the room is bare, but he does have one of his possessions already unwrapped. He holds it up to the Zoom camera and smirks. 

It is a framed poster from 1991 of a show called Victor & Barry: In The Scud. Cumming and fellow actor Forbes Masson are standing naked, hands in the air with expressions of terror, while their cravates blow wildly as if caught in a storm. Some way above their ankle socks, the title of that show judiciously covers their private parts. ‘It’s the first thing that was on the wall,’ Cumming jokes.

In a twist that seems to typify the unlikeliness of the Victor & Barry universe, the naked photograph was taken by David Morrissey who at the time was one of Cumming’s neighbours in North London. Long before small-screen fame, Morrissey fancied himself as a photographer and offered to take some full-frontal publicity shots of the pair in advance of their run at that year’s Edinburgh Fringe.

You can glean as much from Victor & Barry’s Kelvinside Compendium: A Meander Down Memory Close, a chatty anthology of reminiscences that charts this double act’s story from their first student Christmas cabaret in 1982 to a farewell gig at the London Palladium in 1992 (plus their reincarnation as Steve McCracken and Sebastian Flight in the BBC budget-airline sitcom The High Life, which is now being developed as a musical to be toured by National Theatre Of Scotland in early 2026).

Today, you will know Cumming as the Hollywood actor with a CV that stretches from GoldenEye to X-Men 2, not forgetting his star turns for NTS doing a one-man Macbeth and a dance tribute to Robert Burns. Masson has a similarly prestigious track record as an RSC regular and roles in everything from Shetland to The Crown. He was most recently seen in Scotland earlier this year, doing a chilling turn in a one-man Jekyll & Hyde.

But that is now. If you were a reader of The List in the 1980s, you would know the pair as Barry McLeish and Victor MacIlvaney, luminaries of Kelvinside Young People’s Amateur Dramatic Arts Society (KYPADAS for short). In their matching silk dressing gowns, slicked-back hair and kiss curls, they were camp amdram cabaret artistes with a distorted view of their own talents and a smug love of their own terrible jokes. They were from Kelvinside and the living was easy.

‘We were satirising a feeling we were getting from a new place,’ says the Perthshire-born Cumming. ‘Glasgow was changing so much when we arrived there.’

‘There was that huge shift from the hard-man city to all the wine bars starting up,’ remembers Falkirk-born Masson, joining us on the call. ‘Victor & Barry were the antithesis of what Glasgow had been thought of for all those years.’

Still in their early 20s, Cumming and Masson were cover stars in The List in 1987, only two years after graduating from what is now the Royal Conservatoire Of Scotland. By that time, they had already starred in the panto at Glasgow’s Tron (where they were championed by the late director Michael Boyd) and were starting to pick up straight acting work with Scottish theatre companies. Cumming even had a regular part in Scottish soap opera Take The High Road.

In those days before stand-up had turned into the slick circuit we know today, you would see Victor & Barry appear alongside future stars such as Craig Ferguson (as loudmouth Bing Hitler), Lynn Ferguson (in the Alexander Sisters with Carolyn Bonnyman) and a ferocious Jerry Sadowitz. With their fruity Glasgow accents and musical pastiches of the American songbook, Victor & Barry were an alternative to the alternative. Without being overtly political, they rode the wave of changing cultural attitudes. ‘I was watching some old Mrs Merton shows and it reminded me of Victor & Barry,’ insists Cumming. ‘It’s cute, old-fashioned nostalgia and then she’ll say the most biting things.’

Behind the daft songs and character comedy there was something like serious intent. ‘At drama school, we really fought against RP and tried to speak in our own voices,’ says Masson. ‘It felt like we were being so rebellious, but looking back it seems ridiculous that it was all about “no, you can’t be an actor if you have a Scottish accent.”’

Masson and Cumming were not the only ones. This was the era of ‘Throw The “R” Away’ by The Proclaimers, a song brilliantly pastiched by Victor & Barry as a protest against anti-Kelvinside discrimination. Sample lyric: ‘Milngavie no more, Bearsden no more.’

‘I remember a friend talking about The Proclaimers and going “oh, they’re not very good, they can’t sing in American accents,’” says Masson. ‘It’s ludicrous.’

Cumming agrees their drama school training was shaped by the cultural domination of the south. ‘We felt we had to be subsumed into that, otherwise we would be considered less than. Compare that to us discovering through Victor & Barry how important, how fun and how strong our real voices were. All the things we have done in our lives that have been the most authentic and the most of our own voices have been the most successful. Victor & Barry has been a metaphor for both of us for finding our own authenticity.’

‘It’s not just about Victor & Barry, but the confidence of the artistic scene in Scotland and what that led to,’ says Masson, taking up the theme. ‘There was no parliament in Scotland, but that whole movement was part of it. It’s why we all get so frustrated about the way the arts are treated in Scotland because it’s part of the whole lifeblood. It was tricky for Scottish actors to have a voice. Michael Boyd allowed that for writers and actors, and the Tron became a church for a lot of performers.’

Boyd, who died last year, instituted a Gong Show in the Glasgow theatre’s bar where Victor & Barry triumphed (Robbie Coltrane was the host when they won the Gong Of Gongs). Masson went on to appear in several Boyd productions and to write a string of Tron pantos as well as the musical Stiff!. Cumming starred as Malcolm in Boyd’s Macbeth before he had even graduated. 

‘We were really lucky that he came to the Tron just as we were leaving college,’ says Cumming. ‘Michael kickstarted Victor & Barry and also our careers. I did Macbeth, and it was revolutionary that everybody had Scottish accents. It was challenging because we’d had no training in that. I remember finding it really hard having to find a voice, because you didn’t have one. Michael was integral to us feeling confident about being ourselves.’

With its colourful pages and contributions by everyone from Nicola Sturgeon to Kirsty Wark, Victor & Barry’s Kelvinside Compendium has a scrapbook sense of frivolity that recalls the 1970s annuals of The Goodies and Monty Python. But from behind the snapshots, song lyrics, scripts and V&B paper dolls (designed by Cumming’s partner Grant Shaffer) emerges another story: one of a generation of theatremakers finding their voice, gaining in confidence and setting out to conquer the world. For younger readers as well as those of a nostalgic bent, it is a slice of pop-culture history.

‘There are some young people in the play I’m doing just now and I was explaining to them who Adam Ant was,’ says Masson as Cumming gives a look of shock. ‘It must be like explaining to me who George Formby was. It’s been great going back through it all, seeing all those old pictures. There are things we didn’t realise we did. There is video footage and I’m going “I’m not there!”’

Cumming chips in: ‘you know you’ve had a full life when you’ve forgotten that you once played a cactus.’

Their influence persists. When Cumming played the Emcee in Cabaret in London and New York, he repeated some of his Victor & Barry adlibs from their version of the song. These became built into the show. ‘Those lines are still being said,’ laughs Cumming. ‘It’s so hilarious that some Victor & Barry adlibs that we made up in the early 80s are now being performed on Broadway by Eddie Redmayne.’

‘The only reason we did it was because Vic and Barr–ay sounded like Cabaret,’ says Masson, never one to miss a rhyme.

They had the idea for their book in 2020 after an archivist unearthed an old Victor & Barry recording and wanted permission to use it. Listening back, Masson and Cumming remembered how good they had been. ‘In the course of writing this, it has been amazing for us to remember what a great rapport we have as writers, collaborators and friends,’ says Cumming. ‘There’s a special something we’ve got that we found in our sloppy, dopy, drunky writing sessions. Doing it again writing this book has been lovely.’

Victor & Barry’s Kelvinside Compendium: A Meander Down Memory Close is published by 404 Ink on Thursday 25 July; Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson discuss the book at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, Thursday 8 August, and McEwan Hall, Edinburgh, Saturday 10 August; main picture: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.