Johnny Beattie
Scottish variety and TV star, who led campaigns to save Ayr’s Gaiety Theatre and Rothesay’s Winter Gardens
Billed at the height of his fame as “Mr Happiness”, Johnny Beattie was a hugely popular variety and television star in his native Scotland where he led campaigns to save Ayr’s Gaiety Theatre and Rothesay’s Winter Gardens.
He could also claim, as he revealed to the Daily Record in 2012, to have written a speech celebrating the quincentenary of the Scottish whisky industry at six hours’ notice for former American president Ronald Reagan in 1991.
Born in Govan, Glasgow, he began performing with amateur groups while apprenticed as a shipyard electrician. After serving with the Royal Marines in the Far East, he was spotted in 1952 by the tenor Robert Wilson and toured with him for six months.
Establishing himself as a comedian, in 1959, he made his first visit to the Gaiety for its summer-season Gaiety Whirl. Over the next three decades, he achieved the most appearances by any artist at the venue.
Beattie appeared on the radio in 1960 in the variety series Highland Hotel, in which The Stage described him at the Glasgow Empress as “a smart-aleck type of Scots funny man with plenty of attack”. Soon a force to be reckoned with on the Scottish touring circuit, within three years he was being hailed as “Scotland’s sophisticated comedy star”.
By the end of the decade, he had become a regular in panto, a familiar face on BBC television with Johnny Beattie’s Saturday Night Show (1964-70) and had toured North America and Australia.
In 1978, he branched out into acting, playing Willie to Roy Boutcher’s Al in Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys at Perth Theatre. He returned to the venue in 1980 with Una McLean in Double Scotch, a celebration of Scottish music hall. Directed by Andrew McKinnon, it was, The Stage declared, “a triumph for all concerned”. With singer Peter Morrison, he revived it on tour in 2002.
Regularly referred to as “the hardest-working man in Scottish theatre”, Beattie took over as host of STV’s quiz show Now You See It in 1982 and went on to earn a television personality of the year award.
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Beattie’s commitment to variety was matched by sporadic battles with the Scottish Arts Council over its refusal to fund the form, a decision he decried as “artistic apartheid”.
In 1989, he was seen in Just a Verse and a Chorus, Roy Hudd’s tribute to music hall veterans Bob Weston and Bert Lee, at Perth Theatre. He presented his first one-man show, From Broadway to Cowdenbeath, in 2000, later appearing in An Evening of Scottish Variety (2004), both at the Gaiety in Ayr.
A fixture in light entertainment and Hogmanay programmes, in later years he was seen in crime dramas The Chief and Taggart, and alongside Liam Neeson and Billy Connolly in the 1990 film adaptation of William McIlvanney’s The Big Man.
There were also appearances in the cult comedy series Scotch and Wry, starring Rikki Fulton, and Gregor Fisher’s Rab C Nesbitt, as well as a long spell in Scottish soap River City before he retired in 2015.
A DJ with Radio Clyde and local BBC stations, he enjoyed moderate chart success with The Glasgow Rap in 1983.
John Gerard Beattie was born on November 9, 1926 and died on July 9, aged 93. Appointed an MBE in 2007, he is survived by four children, among them actor and current Equity president, Maureen Beattie.
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