SCOTS comedian and Love Island star Iain Stirling has said Irvine Welsh is one of his biggest heroes.
The Edinburgh-born comic hailed the Trainspotting author as one of his three big inspirations alongside fellow Scots Billy Connolly and Scott Hutchison.
The 37-year-old has been the voice of the famous ITV2 reality show since 2015 after rising to fame in his work on the CBBC Channel, having previously started stand-up comedy during his final year studying law at the University of Edinburgh.
Despite being a regular on British TV screens for over 15 years now, Stirling says stand-up is still his love, and credits the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for kick-starting his career.
The Scots funny man also spoke of how Irvine Welsh’s novels, and the vocabulary used in them, helped him realise that art could be done “however you wanted to”.
Speaking in this month’s Scottish Field magazine, Stirling said: “I have the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to thank for my career in comedy.
“I think all kids should have access to the arts. I went to school with no drama department and where theatre was seen as a posh, middle-class thing that I wouldn’t understand.
“But I went and saw stand-up at the Fringe and I got the bug from there.
“I still love stand-up, the immediacy of it and that all you need is a room with people in it.
“It feels like it is my trade. With telly you can be flavour of the month, but with stand-up if you do a good job you’ll be asked back. It’s got that tradesman vibe.”
Welsh, 66, and Billy “The Big Yin” Connolly served as Stirling’s primary inspirations, alongside the late Scott Hutchison, former frontman of Scots indie band Frightened Rabbit.
Hutchison, from Selkirk, Scottish Borders, took his own life in 2018, and left a legacy that Stirling says he tries to honour with his own stand-up.
He said: “I have three heroes. Billy Connolly, just because he’s the Big Yin.
“Irvine Welsh, because I read Acid House and it had sex and drugs in it and it blew my mind.
“I was a young lad and I thought, ‘OMG, I didn’t even know this was allowed to be in books!’.
“And it was literally written how I talk. It made me realise you could do art however you wanted to.
“And Scott Hutchison, the lead singer from the band Frightened Rabbit. He sang about really dark and sad things in a really interesting and non-apologetic way.
“It’s something I try to do with my stand-up.
“It’s not a coincidence that all of my heroes are Scottish. We are all so culturally similar.”
Stirling also added that David Tennant could play him in a movie of his life, quipping that people reckoned they sound “exactly the same”.
He joked: “David Tennant would play me in the movie of my life, because people keep telling me that we sound exactly the same.
“For the first few series of Love Island people would write on Twitter things like, ‘Bloody hell has David Tennant got a tax bill due or something? What’s he doing on this?'”
