Original travellers: Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson

Words: Craig McLean
Photography: Antony Sojka

As airport delays go, this one takes some beating. 

Three decades after it taxied into a hangar, The High Life is taking to the air once again. The cult BBC sitcom about “tatty” fictional Scottish airline Air Scotia – the creation of actors/writers/comedians Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson – is finally in flight once more, as a stage production. The High Life: The Musical – Still Living It is currently touring Scottish theatres. Best of all, in these pages is proof that, 31 years after its six-episode run, the show has really arrived: The High Life in High Life.

Straight out of an also fictional terminal at Prestwick airport, the all-singing, all-dancing, wholly camp theatre show reunites Cumming and Masson’s characters Sebastian Flight and Steve McCracken, Air Scotia’s high-flying, high-farce cabin crew, with their imperious boss Shona Spurtle. The pursed-lip purser is played, then as now, by Siobhan Redmond, with Patrick Ryecart also back as directionless pilot Captain Hilary Duff.

The sitcom’s winking innuendo is still present and incorrect, not least in the new songs created for the stage, as is the show’s deeply tartan DNA. A spurtle, for example, is an implement for stirring porridge. And that’s as inoffensive as it gets, with the pair gleefully using Scottish accents and slang to sprinkle their scripts with rudeness and insults aplenty. 

“There’s such affection for the series in Scotland,” says Cumming. This pair of lifelong friends, who met as students at Glasgow’s Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, were reminded of that homegrown enthusiasm when they wrote their 2024 book Victor & Barry’s Kelvinside Compendium, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the beloved cabaret characters who directly influenced the creation of Steve and Sebastian.

“Doing that book, it was so amazing to feel that love for those characters and just the daftness of it. And we feel that’s why this new show works,” Cumming, 61, continues as he and Masson, 62, take a break from rehearsals at Dundee Rep. Even given how their respective careers have taken off and diverged – London-based Masson a respected playwright and stage actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Cumming a man in demand on stage in the UK and US – they found it easy to get back into the mindset of comic creations they came up with in the early 1990s. It was a period when their nascent careers meant they were flying up and down to London for meetings, auditions and screen tests.

A ten-minute (yes) pilot for the BBC’s Comedy Asides strand became a 20-minute short, then a 30-minute episode. Masson remembers writing “daft storylines about the stewards taking old-age-pensioner passengers’ teeth out because there’s going to be turbulence, and putting them in the microwave so they don’t freeze. And then you have a whole ridiculous thing of: ‘Hot teeth, sir? Hot teeth, madam?’

“And the funny thing about that was,” he adds, cracking up all over again, “once it screened, Alan and I would get on a plane and the cabin crew would go: ‘Oh, it’s great! It’s so like real life!’”

Following the rules of sitcoms, the comedy came from the fact that Sebastian and Steve are trapped in their situation. “They were aspirational figures in a world that was a little more tatty than they would like it to be,” says Cumming. “That’s what interests us, people who are making the best of things. That’s quite a Scottish trait as well.”

Cumming is also currently leaning into his genes in another ambassadorial role for his homeland, as plaid-twirling host of the American edition of The Traitors, which, like the smash-hit British version, is set in the Scottish Highlands. And he can see a tartan thread linking these two beloved TV shows at either end of his soaraway career.

“When The High Life came out in early 1995, everyone was going: ‘What the hell is this?’ In a funny way, it’s a similar thing to The Traitors.  When people don’t know a show, and then they see it, they’re like: ‘This is insane!’ Forbes and I had the same reaction, in that we were doing something that was so weird, different and totally idiosyncratic to us.”

The new musical is a co-production between Dundee Rep and the National Theatre of Scotland. Hence, the rehearsals taking place in this East Coast city – away, as the locally raised Cumming puts it, “from the prying eyes of the grown-ups in Edinburgh and Glasgow”. But Dundee has been having something of an artistic renaissance, much of it centred on this vibrant theatre.

That commitment to local and regional theatre explains, in turn, why The High Life musical is going on tour around Scotland – and also why it isn’t travelling south of the border. “Doing the show only in Scotland feels like a real mark of confidence. Although we were initially talking about maybe doing a national tour,” admits Masson. “But it became apparent that there were going to be limitations put on the show if we went further afield, in terms of: ‘It’s a bit too Scottish’. So we just went: ‘Naw’.”

The ordinarily New York-based Cumming is now in his second year as artistic director at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, located in the small town some 50 miles away in Highland Perthshire, not far from where he grew up. He’s been busy putting together an eclectic programme of theatre and performance, drawing in part on his fabulous address book.

Before the pair have to return to the rehearsal room for final pre-flight checks: what does this larky musical revival of their sky-scraping comedy tell us about the invaluable work of cabin crew?

“It’s a documentary into the trials and tribulations of their job,” jokes Masson, before adding seriously: “People don’t realise how stressful it is.”

“I think people would be shocked by how much real cabin crew love this show,” adds Alan Cumming. “I also love the fact that British Airways named their magazine after our show. Nice of them. And finally, we’re in it.” 

Have any royalties been forthcoming? “Not a penny,” Cumming concludes with an affronted sniff. “Maybe we’ll get a few upgrades and a warm towel.”

The High Life: The Musical – Still Living It is touring Scotland until 23 May