Television
Her first major television appearance was in 1986 as a star on the BBC sketch show Naked Video. Made by BBC Scotland, it was shown throughout the UK on BBC2. In between seasons of Naked Video, Smith also starred in Scottish sitcom City Lights, which ran for four years on the BBC.
Smith is best known for her role as Mary Nesbitt in the BBC sitcom Rab C. Nesbitt, a series based on characters in a Naked Video sketch. Launched in 1990 and set in Glasgow, the show was a cult hit, and ran for nine years on BBC2. The show was revived for a one-off Christmas special in 2008 and a new series was filmed the following year.
Since 1999, Smith has appeared in the BBC dramas Two Thousand Acres of Sky and 55 Degrees North, performed alongside Helena Bonham Carter in the British film Women Talking Dirty, and toured Scotland with her stand-up comedy show.
In January 2011, she appeared in an edition of Celebrity Mastermind with singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell as her specialist subject. She finished second in the programme.
Other TV appearances include a guest spot in Jennifer Saunder's The Life and Times of Vivian Vyle and a 2010 documentary on Scottish actor Gerard Kelly.
Read more about this topic: Elaine C. Smith
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“We cannot spare our children the influence of harmful values by turning off the television any more than we can keep them home forever or revamp the world before they get there. Merely keeping them in the dark is no protection and, in fact, can make them vulnerable and immature.”
—Polly Berrien Berends (20th century)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.”
—Shirley Chisholm (b. 1924)