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Bob Doolally revisits Argentina '78

Bob Flynn
Monday 11 August 2003 00:00 BST
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It left the deepest scars on the Scottish psyche since Culloden, but maybe we have finally come to terms with the national football team's disastrous World Cup campaign of 1978. Twenty-five years on, it is safe to commemorate our greatest sporting humiliation with Bob Doolally - part of Ally McLeod's coaching squad for the Argentine debacle, ex-player-manager on his second liver transplant, and drunken fitba' bore.

A few festivals ago, Paul Sneddon made his debut on this stage as the cursing, boorish Doolally with bottles of spirits bulging from his ruined blazer. He was, like all great comic caricatures, hilariously familiar, and skewered TV pundits in full, inarticulate flight. The slurred (semi-fictional) recount of the Argentina fiasco should have been his masterpiece, but Doolally struggled despite lurid tales of team debauchery and dalliances with Miss Scotland. The Doolally persona may be starting beginning to creak as much as the stories of his youth. His routine, previously hilarious, is watered-down whisky compared to the earlier hard-hitting act. A nil-nil draw after injury time.

Venue 5, 7.40pm (one hour) to 25 August (01331-558 7272)

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