THE BALDY MAN T-SHIRT

Gregor Fisher’s Comb-Over King of British Television Comedy

Some comedy characters arrive with a catchphrase. The Baldy Man barely needed to open his mouth. With his heroic comb-over, permanently misplaced confidence and extraordinary ability to turn the most ordinary situation into a minor catastrophe, Gregor Fisher’s near-silent creation became one of the most instantly recognisable faces of Scottish television comedy.

The character first appeared on Naked Video, the BBC Scotland sketch show broadcast on BBC2 between 1986 and 1991. Created by Colin Gilbert, the programme assembled an unusually strong generation of Scottish comedy performers including Fisher, Elaine C. Smith, Tony Roper, Andy Gray and Jonathan Watson. Its collection of recurring grotesques and eccentrics also produced Fisher’s considerably more talkative creation Rab C. Nesbitt, who would go on to become one of Scottish television’s defining comedy characters.

The Baldy Man worked differently. He was essentially a piece of visual comedy: vain, optimistic and apparently oblivious to both his appearance and his own spectacular incompetence. His elaborate comb-over became inseparable from the character, but Fisher resisted reducing him to a single joke. The humour came from watching a man approach everyday life with absolute confidence while events quietly conspired against him.

His most famous appearance outside Naked Video came through the celebrated Hamlet cigar advertising campaign. In the best remembered commercial, the Baldy Man enters a photo booth hoping to capture a flattering portrait. After repeated attempts to arrange the precious strands of hair across his head, the booth’s adjustable stool unexpectedly drops beneath him just as the camera flashes. The combination of Fisher’s wordless performance and Jacques Loussier’s familiar arrangement of Bach made the advert a miniature piece of television comedy in its own right.

By the mid-1990s the character had become sufficiently familiar to receive his own ITV series. The Baldy Man began in 1995, produced for Carlton Television by Working Title Films, with Colin Gilbert producing and directing and Naked Video script editor Philip Differ writing the series. Across two series and thirteen episodes, Fisher’s character stumbled through subjects including exercise, DIY, pets, reunions, barbecues, babysitting and, inevitably, hair.

The programme was unusual even within British sitcom. Dialogue was largely dispensed with, leaving Fisher to build scenes through expression, movement, timing and physical embarrassment. In that respect the Baldy Man belonged to a tradition stretching from silent comedy through Jacques Tati and Mr Bean: characters whose elaborate solutions to simple problems invariably create problems far larger than the ones they were attempting to solve.

Fisher’s performance also demonstrated something easily obscured by the enormous success of Rab C. Nesbitt. The two characters came from the same performer and the same television programme, yet operated at opposite ends of comedy. Rab was argumentative, philosophical and relentlessly verbal; the Baldy Man communicated almost everything through a hopeful grin, a nervous glance and the slow realisation that another perfectly ordinary situation had gone horribly wrong.

Today the character remains a particularly vivid piece of British television nostalgia. For viewers who encountered him during the original Naked Video years or through those endlessly repeated Hamlet commercials, one glimpse of that comb-over is often enough. No explanation required.

💬 FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (FAQs)

Q1: Who played the Baldy Man?

A1: The Baldy Man was played by Scottish actor and comedian Gregor Fisher, who is also famous for creating and playing Rab C. Nesbitt.

Q2: Was the Baldy Man originally an advertising character?

A2: No. The character originated in the BBC Scotland sketch programme Naked Video before becoming particularly well known through a series of Hamlet cigar advertisements.

Q3: How many episodes of The Baldy Man were made?

A3: The ITV spin-off ran for two series and produced thirteen episodes, beginning in 1995, with the final episode broadcast in 1998.