ONE of my earliest TV memories is not being able to sleep as a six-year-old. Faced with that restless child on a cold Friday night in an English council flat, did my Scottish mother make me a cup of warm milk and send me back to bed? No. She invited me onto the sofa to enjoy the late-night comfort of a Rab C Nesbitt episode.

She was 400 miles from home but it was watching comedy that drew her closer to Scotland and allowed her to share a sense of home with her young son. On another night it would be a repeat of An Audience With Billy Connolly. A few years later – at the urging of my Caledonian cousins – it was to be Still Game and Chewin’ The Fat.

Comedy is an art form every bit as life-affirming and essential to the human spirit as music or drama or literature.

Yet the pandemic has brought it to its knees, threatening the very existence of comedy clubs as essential to the circuit as The Stand.

I breathed a sigh of relief on Friday when First Minister Nicola Sturgeon confirmed that a Scottish Government injection of £15 million to save nightclubs and music venues would include comedy clubs like The Stand.

It’s absolutely right that it should do so. These days it’s an episode of Scot Squad, a series that I created, which serves the same function as those comedy shows from my childhood.

Far from a negligent act of a young single mother, letting a child stay up to watch Rab C was a calculated risk that paid off by setting her son on the path to comedy success.

From that moment on I was initiated into the art of a national scene that would change the course of my life forever.

The reason I’m referencing TV shows in an article about a live comedy institution is because these cultural touchpoints don’t exist in a vacuum. The BBC doesn’t conjure talents such as the cast of Rab C Nesbitt or performers like Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill from thin air. Each of these shows is filled with people who cut their teeth in the live comedy world.

Scot Squad is now the longest-running Scottish sitcom still in production and its success is in no small part down to harnessing the talent of the live comedy scene.

Specifically it was The Stand Comedy Club that served as a starting point for finding new talent for the show. When we began developing the series we wanted to create a show that had a more accessible casting model, one that allowed unconventional comedy talent to thrive. TV casting is elitist and out of reach for many people.

This is a pattern we were looking to break and from Scot Squad’s inception we wanted to allow new comedy voices who might otherwise have to wait years – if ever – to reach a TV audience. When we started the long process of putting our main cast together, we wanted comedy performers who might go unnoticed by traditional casting agents to appear alongside trained actors like Jordan Young and Sally Reid.

It was on that very first night visiting The Stand’s new talent show Red Raw 10 years ago that I saw an unknown comedian called Darren Connell. Fans of Scot Squad will now know Darren better as Bobby.

Darren is one of the most naturally talented people alive, with a sense of comic timing that cannot be learned. Yet despite such supreme skills he had no clear route into television. It was only through performance time at The Stand that he came to my attention and it was only because of the club’s willingness to talk to me after the show that I was able to reach him.

If it wasn’t for The Stand I wouldn’t have met Darren. Without The Stand there’s no Bobby in Scot Squad because that role didn’t exist until we set eyes on Darren’s mercurial talent.

AT the time we only intended to fill the main cast with core police officer characters but when I saw Darren at The Stand, I brought him to the attention of my bosses. When they saw him they agreed that he belonged in the show so we made a part just for him.

When the BBC saw the pilot they agreed that this had been a great casting choice.

The audience was the final ratifier of our choice, returning to the series in ever-increasing numbers. A decade on from that fateful night of talent spotting at The Stand and we’re now on the sixth series of Scot Squad.

In every one of those series The Stand has been a source for talent in the show. Sometimes this talent is found simply by attending Red Raw (which, by the way, at £2 a ticket is the greatest value single item you can buy in Scotland).

Helpfully, The Stand’s staff have always been forthcoming in their recommendations. In these instances there’s no ulterior motive. In series four of the show they put me in touch with an aspiring comedian who had performed only three gigs and was still enrolled in school.

There was no tour to promote, no weekend gigs planned. The comedian’s immediate success in getting a TV role would not have any clear financial benefit to The Stand. They just recommended him because they like seeing new talent get noticed. Their instincts were right. He made us laugh very hard in the audition and we ended up casting him in the show as a teenage funeral director. That comedian was a boy called Liam Farrelly. He’s still in his teens but I’ve got no doubt that he’ll be a big name one day. Keep an eye out for him.

This interest in developing talent for no reason other than the sake of doing it is vital in a society where the arts are increasingly a plaything of people who are already rich. With The Stand on the scene new comedians have things a little bit easier than aspirants in other arts. Their fringe financing model is refreshingly transparent for a comedy promoter and unlike most other commercial venues in Edinburgh during August they don’t leave acts liable for losses.

I know about this aspect from personal experience. In 2018 I performed a run of a fringe show about television with The Stand. The show had niche appeal and in the end few people attended. Yet the club backed me all the way and to my surprise they were transparent with the earnings, giving me a small but welcome payment at the end of the run.

I KNOW of several other performers at the other main venues who sold many times more tickets than me but who thanks to opaque accounting were thrown into debt.

An honourable mention here should go to Edinburgh’s Monkey Barrel. I don’t have the same relationship with that club to the one I have with The Stand but I’m assured by friends in the know that their contracts are also fair come Fringe time.

These arrangements are rare but it seems like the common factor here is the integrity of comedy businesses who continue to invest their money in local talent long after the circus has left town. These businesses don’t leech off the starry-eyed with unfair hire charges that fund houses in the Cotswolds for the other 11 months of the year. Back them.

If the arts are to become anything other than a hobby for the elite then we are dependent on well-intentioned businesses like The Stand to offer people who do not have a financial cushion the opportunity to fail creatively. Letting it fail because of an unprecedented crisis after it has proven itself to be a financially self-sufficient major contributor to the arts in normal times is an act of cultural vandalism.