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. [READ MORE]