Is it nicer up north? Cult film celebrates 20th anniversary
IT IS now more than 20 years since English comedy actor Graham Fellows, as the character John Shuttleworth, travelled to Shetland to find out if it really is nicer up north.
The end result was the comedy film It’s Nice Up North, a spoof travelogue where Shuttleworth mingles with unsuspecting locals.
It has gained something of a cult following, and having been released in 2006, Fellows is now taking the film on a 20th anniversary screening tour around the UK.
But it is only going as far north as the Central Belt, for screenings in Edinburgh and Glasgow – with a date in Shetland said to be ruled out for logistical reasons.
“It feels good,” Fellows says when asked by Shetland News how it feels to be revisiting the film two decades on – although there is a bittersweet backdrop to it all.
“I was going to do a little tour anyway, or was talking to my agent about doing it, then in December a very tragic thing happened – Martin Parr, the cameraman [of It’s Nice Up North], died suddenly.
“And then in January I was thinking, well what better way for me to remember Martin than to do this tour, and just tilt it towards Martin and his memory?”
The film sees Shuttleworth, a fictional singer-songwriter and radio presenter from Sheffield, travel around Shetland alongside the noted photographer Parr to test the theory that people are friendlier as you head north up the UK.
Grabbing the views of folk on the street in Lerwick, as well in shops and other places including Yell, it serves as something of a snapshot in time from the early 2000s.
As featured in one of the clips uploaded to YouTube, the amateur musician also finds time to perform with a kitsch-sounding keyboard in a care home, leading to some bemused looks from residents.
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Fellows says the idea came after he performed as Shuttleworth on a comedy tour at the Garrison Theatre in Lerwick, back in the early 2000s.
“I fell in love with the place,” he says. “My family came with me and we combined it with a holiday – three young kids and my wife.
“We went up to Unst. It did seem that people were getting nicer, and that’s where I got the idea for the film.”
Fellows and Parr shot the crux of the film over around five or six days in December 2003, with help from local photographer Keith Morrison, before coming back the following year for a concluding scene alongside the late Elma Johnson.
The storyteller and tour guide ended up being one of the stars of the film. “One of the things I noticed watching the film again, was what a good comic actress she is,” Fellows says. “She was very good at timing, it was brilliant. I think she gives John a very good run for his money.”
Despite the passage of time, it appears Fellows remembers a lot from the shoot, and remembers it fondly; Tommy who ran a garage in Yell, for instance, or the island’s ‘haunted’ Windhouse ruins, the Priest brothers from Unst, the street cleaner and a drain pipe up a lane in Lerwick.
The film was also soundtracked by tunes from local group Fiddlers’ Bid. Music has long played a part in Fellows’ work, not least the tongue-in-cheek punk song Jilted John which reached No.4 in the UK singles chart in the 1970s.
He says he still has friends in Shetland, including Jane Macaulay in Unst, who ended up having a part to play in some unusual John Shuttleworth merchandise.
“For a while she was making biscuits and gingerbread and things that we were then able to sell on the Shuttleworth website,” Fellows recalls.
“Shetland shortbread was one thing, and she would work frantically through the night and package them up beautifully and post them down to me, and we’d take them to gigs and we’d sell them.
“They went…I was going to say like hot cakes, but they were more like cold biscuits.”
A lot has changed in Shetland since Fellows was in the isles for It’s Nice Up North in the early 2000s, and while an anniversary screening is not planned in the isles during his tour, he has not ruled out coming up in future.
“I would like to come back sometime,” he says. “When I next do John Shuttleworth, I could maybe come up and maybe combine it with a screening.”
Reflecting on the film 20 years on, Fellows said they got a good response from locals – “we were very lucky with what we got”.
“The only thing we didn’t get was bad weather really,” he adds, “which I really wanted because it would have helped the idea that people might be nice up north, but the weather is terrible.”
Copies of It’s Nice Up North DVD can be bought from the John Shuttleworth website – but people might be pleased to hear that the full film may be added to YouTube later in the year.
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