MISSING the string vest and sweaty headband, the humble and, almost shy, Gregor Fisher was a far cry from the Glaswegian yob Rab C Nesbitt we are used to seeing him portray.

The BAFTA award-winning TV icon visited the Borders Book Festival on Sunday to discuss his book, A Boy from Nowhere – a moving memoir of his childhood and the struggle he faced to try and find out where he came from.

Gregor was 14 and living in Glasgow when he asked where he was christened and was told he was adopted. But it wasn’t quite that simple: he must be one of the few people in the country to have been adopted twice – the first time when his mother died of a heart condition, the second when his first adoptive mother died in a fire.

He was then brought up by a third adoptive family, headed by a distant and unpleasant 1950s patriarch.

In 2014, the actor-comedian approached Times columnist Melanie Reid to help him tell his story and the pair of them travelled through the mining villages of central Scotland, trying to piece together the vague fragments Gregor knew of his birth.

From the squalor of industrial Coatbridge after the First World WarWW1 to his own 1950s Glasgow childhood, via a love letter found in the wallet of a dead man and meeting his sister outside lost luggage at Glasgow Central, Gregor shared his family story with warmth and blunt Scottish humour.

When speaking in front of the packed marquee at Harmony House, you could’ve heard a pin drop as the audience was mesmerised by the gentility and almost shyness of his character, as they remembered him as the brazen, slurring Rab. 

Border Telegraph:

It’s obvious that the process of writing the book and discovering the truths of his upbringing has been as painful as it has been rewarding. 

Among a few of the harrowing facts he spoke of was that his one adoptive mother didn’t call him her son in her will but: “the boy who lived with me.” 

And when he said he talked about trying to understand why his father abandoned him, he said it was because he would’ve had no choice in those days: “He was a politician, a government officer... respectable. While she was an unmarried clerkess in a factory. A Nobody to her lover’s Somebody.” 

Those kind of experiences leave scars, he said.

But as expected, and as a testament to Gregor, the evening was full of warmth and laughter, despite the harshness and sadness of the subject matter. 

There were times when he said: “Aye you’re all sittin’ there thinkin’ Naw yer makin’ that up! But a’ umny!” 

And there were outbursts of laughter from what probably started out as a roomful of Rab C fans, which quickly turned into Gregor Fisher fans... as demonstrated by the huge queues in the book shop after the show.