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:
“So why do people keep on watching? The answer, by now, should be perfectly obvious: we love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist. In fact, deep in their hearts, this is what the spuds crave most: a rich, new, participatory life.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)