All rightee! So aye... aye well - homely phrases pepper his conversation, all delivered in an affable, man-of-the-punters mode. Whatever it has done, showbiz success has not gone to Fred MacAulay’s head... or his communication style. And in spite of the TV and radio shows, the celebrity status, he confesses he’s still the child he always was, waiting to grow up. Some of that growing up was care of / the University of Dundee where ‘Fred the Fresher’ arrived in 1974 with a couple of friends from Perth Academy. Four years later he graduated with what he refers to as ‘an odd hybrid of a degree’ in accountancy and jurisprudence - the only one of the three to get that far. Last November, with a scripting deadline for STV’s BAFTA awards on his mind but still elated by the success of his first TV doubleact with football hero Ally McCoist - ‘Over a million viewers which for Scotland equates to about 12 million UK wide !’ - Fred reminisced about his student days at the University of Dundee to Carol Pope. ‘Well I have to confess right up front it was a four year ordinary degree... That’s why it’s also such an odd degree because I think I failed my part two economics so I couldn’t take it in final year. I scraped through though... I look back and think well it may not have been a great degree, I don’t think my marks were ever very good, but at least I managed to stick it out.’ Like one or two who have gone before him and since, Fred credits student days with his first real initiation into the non-medicinal use of alcohol. ‘I can remember one of my very earliest experiences when we were in Belmont Hall [Room B214 if anyone’s interested]. The Queen Mother was coming up and we all got 50p or something because we couldn’t get our lunch. We went to the Phoenix Bar and ... I think that was the first time I ever got very drunk. I’ve tried it once or twice at home since. Unfortunately my uncle Richard Erskine who works in the Dental School came round to my room in Belmont that afternoon to take me back to my parents’ house for tea and found me paralytic!’ ‘Fridays and Saturdays were the high points ... I’m still in touch with some of the guys that I became friends with at university - Andy Munro who’s a solicitor in Glasgow now and Scott Landsburgh who’s now back in Dundee with the family business.’ And the low points? ‘Failing the degree the first time around... but when I look back I was just incredibly immature. That extra year was a good thing for me.’ Comedy was not the first survival route on ‘Fred the Graduate’s’ mind in 1978. After trying his hand, and patience, at chartered accountancy he decided his life lay elsewhere. He went up in the world and spent the following three years with the Cairngorm Chairlift Company in Aviemore. From there he joined Pitlochry Knitwear as company accountant - it was a moulding period, and one he talks of with genuine warmth. ‘When I joined it was a family owned company - had 25 shops and a turnover of £11 million. By the time I left - as company secretary - it was part of a plc with over 80 shops and a turnover of about 40 million... I used to get fantastic jumpers which I sorely miss. If I go and buy a woolly jumper now I know exactly how much it’s been marked up.’ A chance visit to the Comedy Store in London opened his mind to the possibility of a different life and initially it was from this woolly environment that Fred began to knit together his professional comedy routine - travelling south most weekends to pursue it on the London stand-up circuit. Now Fred the Family Man was moving towards a difficult decision : ‘The kids were wee and it was fairly stressful and the job was far and away too big for me on my own so I actually resigned - went to my boss and said I want to have a go at this. What he did was split the job in two, employed someone else and took me on so I could do as many hours as I wanted. That cushioned the blow financially and then after two years it seemed the right thing to concentrate solely on this career. All along the way it’s been joint decisions between my wife and I because I don’t want to leave my family high and dry. Touch wood it’s paid off.’ Twenty years since he scraped through his finals second time around and, coincidentally mastered the art of buying a round in DUSA, Fred is hosting his own BBC Radio Scotland show four days a week, has launched a first TV series, is hoping for a second and is recording a new panel show for BBC 1.Does he have any advice for today’s graduates : ‘My experience was that the degree was helpful for getting in the employment door but from there hard graft and determination and being prepared to work the odd six and a half day week is what counts... I’ve gone down the traditional roads ... good job, company car, all the security, wife, three kids, mortage. But if you have a dream - get out and do it. There’s no point in being 45 and saying 'I wish I’d tried it'.You’ve got to have courage... to give it a try. And you need courage, especially for stand-up it’s just so bizarre.’