Fervour Pitch

Shortly to arrive in Dublin for a two-night stint at the Olympia, the play Singin’ I’m No A Billy, He’s A Tim is a comedy based on a thorny subject; the intense – and nakedly sectarian – rivalry between Glasgow Rangers and Celtic football supporters. The play, which has been enjoying growing international success, focuses chiefly on two characters; Billy, a die-hard Rangers fan, and Tim, a faithful Celtic supporter, who are locked up together on the day of the Old Firm Match.

Singin’... was written by Des Dillon, a Glaswegian who grew up loving all things Celtic. Discussing the inspiration for the piece, he says that, “Years ago, in the Sheriff’s Court in Glasgow, they arrested people for non-payment of fines, because they knew what pubs they would be in. They took about 200 guys into the court, and they’d go, ’Right, how much does he owe?’ It could be £100, but the guy might only have 40 quid.
“I thought to myself, ’My brother-in-law was at that game’,” Des continues. “He had to collect £400 off his relatives to pay the fine. Then I had the idea, what if a Celtic fan and a Rangers fan had been disowned by their families, and they couldn’t get out? That’s where it started.”
Des first conceived the play in the build-up to Euro ’96, when the BBC were looking for football-themed programming to play between the matches.
“My stepson is genetically an Irish Catholic, through and through,” he elaborates. “You can trace his family tree right back. But he hates Catholics – he’s an Orangeman and the biggest fuckin’ Rangers fan you’ll ever meet in your life. He had a grandfather who was like that. I keep saying, ‘But you’re Irish’, and he goes crazy! I mean, it’s not as bad as that, but you know what I mean. So, I thought, ‘I’ll base one of the characters on that’, and that’s one of the big revelations in the play – that the Rangers fan has that Catholic background.
“They start out talking to each other in the prison cell in the dark, about how they’re both in for non-payments of fines and so on. Then when the lights come on and they both realise who they’re talking to, they attack each other. Because they don’t have the money to pay their fines, they get the police officer, or screw, to place a bet on the outcome of the match. It’s a mad play – if you don’t laugh from start to finish, you’ll get your money back!
“Hopefully in the end your perspective has been altered a bit, because they leave with swapped tops, and you’re going, ‘He’s a Catholic, but he was a Protestant a minute ago. Who the fuck’s who?’”
Des suggests that the relatively inconsequential nature of bigotry in Glasgow – as opposed to the bloodshed in Northern Ireland – perhaps encourages males to buy into the more thuggish elements of football culture.
“We get to be sectarian, but we don’t pay for it,” he observes. “That’s why it’s so easy in Scotland – we get to shout ‘Up the IRA’ and all this fucking shite, but you don’t pay an ounce in blood. Maybe now and again, but generally not, and that’s why it’s lived so long and been so big in Glasgow. There’s really no reason to shut it down, apart from the fact that it hurts people’s feelings, if you like. That’s all it is.”
Is the rivalry between Celtic and Rangers as intense as ever?
“It is, but they’ve stopped certain songs being sung,” replies Des. “You can’t sing ‘Up To Our Knees In Fenian Blood’, for instance. But they find new ways of doing it. The most recent one was ‘Hokey Cokey’ – you know that song? Seemingly, someone used to sing that song hundreds of years ago to slag the Catholic Church. Or so I heard, I don’t know if it’s true. But the Rangers fans were singing it. They just looked fucking stupid! (Laughs)
“I knew every Irish song in the world by the time I was five. My mother would stand by the washing machine and sing about Kevin Barry, James Connolly and so on. But if I ask my son, ’Do you know who Kevin Barry is?’, he isn’t aware of him. Kids of his generation, they are of Irish descent, but they’re kind of disconnected from the background. Not that that was sectarianism in any way – but it can be seen as that. Anyway, he and his peers are distanced from it, and their kids will be disconnected from it even more. So, I think it’s on its way out.”