Jack Docherty brings Scot Squad Chief back to the Fringe

Jack Docherty as the Chief in Scot Squad.

He has become one of Scotland’s most popular – albeit fictional – authority figures.

Chief Commissioner Cameron Miekelson is the unapologetic police chief who can’t stop saying sorry and has proved to be such an engaging character that he has interviewed leading politicians and delivered a state-of-the-nation address.

Following the end of spoof police series Scot Squad last year, the hapless Chief will return not once but twice this year – first on the live stage and then in a BBC sitcom spin-off in the autumn.

For Jack Docherty, the man underneath the uniform, the character reminds him of someone close to home.

“I’m not really like him, but he’s very like my dad,” Jack said. “My dad had all those traits about him – never being wrong, having large opinions. It’s drawing on my dad and his generation, all those Edinburgh boys of that age who believed life had to be lived in a particular way.

“It’s a bit freaky for my mum. My dad died 16 years ago, but I’m starting to look more like him. I’ll be walking down the street and see my reflection in a shop window and think it’s my dad.

“The material I did in Absolutely was based on them as well. He always used to say he should sue me, and that he deserved half my money. ‘It’s all me,’ he would say.

“I do worry I slip into the character too easily. John Cleese said the comic character you play best is the person you would have been if you didn’t have a sense of humour, so that’s what saved me.”

Jack credits having the Fringe on his doorstep while growing up in Edinburgh for inspiring him to join the profession. He was a fixture at the festival from 1980 but stepped away for many years until the Chief character’s success inspired him to return.

He played the bam-busting cop at the Fringe in 2018, but his two most recent shows at the festival have been changes of pace – semi-autobiographical monologues about his younger days. “I fell in love with doing live shows again,” he said.

“I was getting so well-known for playing the Chief, so the challenge was to also become known for something else, which is why I did the other two shows, which were so far away from that character,” he explained.

“I like doing different things – I couldn’t do the same thing over and over. I know that’s the way to build an audience, but that wouldn’t interest me as much.

“When I did Nothing But a few years ago, there was definitely a sense that people had turned up expecting me to be the Chief. After 15 minutes, I could see them whispering to each other – ‘what’s this?’”

The new live show, called The Chief: No Apologies, will be a mix of old sketches from Scot Squad that he knows the audience expects to see, alongside new material.

“The hook of the show is he’s launching his autobiography, which is called No Apologies, and he’ll do a bit of reading, but keep breaking away from the readings,” he said.

“It works because he’s been told to apologise but he veers off from the apologies to say none of it was his fault.”

A four-part series, filmed earlier this year, will be shown on BBC Scotland in the coming months. “It looks at his life – his climate activist daughter comes to stay with him – and his work life with his senior management team, which includes a head of diversity, equality and inclusion, and how he negotiates that world,” said Jack. “It’s different from Scot Squad because it’s a narrative. I like it, I think it’s good.”

In the 2019 general election, Chief Miekelson interviewed each of the party leaders in Scotland. While he didn’t get the opportunity to do so in the build-up to the recent election, he still holds fond – if somewhat surreal – memories of those interviews five years ago.

“They could all handle themselves to varying degrees – you don’t end up leading a party if you can’t think on your feet to an extent,” he commented.

“Those best at it were the ones who were most natural. You could see some had been told by their advisers to get this or that in, or they came with a prepared joke, but it didn’t work if they were trying too hard. The surreal thing was, they treated me like I was really the chief of police and a legitimate character in the world.

“It’s amazing how quickly you can go down the rabbit hole. Nicola Sturgeon was playing along with a story that we’d been away for a weekend at my Arisaig but ‘n’ ben and got drunk on Midori. She even brought me a bottle of Midori during the interview.

“I was halfway through interviewing the First Minister, as she was then, and I was thinking, ‘She’s going along with this story that we went away and had an affair’. It was crazy.”

The Chief: No Apologies, Gilded Balloon, Patter Hoose – Big Yin, Aug 2-15