When she is spotted on the waterfront at Tobermory, actress Julie Wilson Nimmo is feted like Hollywood royalty.
She did warn her husband this might happen.
Tagging along in her wake, Greg Hemphill smiles magnanimously as his other half laps up all the attention. ‘I was in Still Game, you know,’ he says, to no one in particular.
Yes, but his wife was the star of the wildly successful children’s TV show Balamory, filmed in this very town.
She played nursery teacher Miss Hoolie for four years and helped trigger a tsunami of toddler tourism on the Isle of Mull.
Greg Hemphill and wife Julie Wilson-Nimmo, wild swimming on Loch Lomond
Now, almost two decades after the final episode was shot, she is back in her old stamping ground and a crowd is gathering. But what is Miss Hoolie doing?
She appears to be stripping down to her smalls. Come to that, so is Victor from Still Game.
‘Just getting the guns out,’ says the 54-year-old mischievously as he peels off his tracksuit top. His wife, 51, remarks that her 30-year-old self would think she was nuts.
With that, the two off them are off into the chilly Hebridean surf for a swim.
Both are stung by jellyfish, but they laugh that off.
This is what they do whenever they are near cold, Scottish water – and when they are at home in Glasgow they submerge themselves in a huge wooden barrel of the stuff in their back garden.
Something has happened to the showbiz couple, who this year celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary, and it seems simultaneously completely mad and wholly sane.
They have discovered cold water therapy and, by all appearances, cannot get enough of it.
This week, their first TV show together, a six-episode tour of Scotland’s prime wild swimming locations, was launched on BBC Scotland and found them kicking things off with an ice bath in Glasgow before a dip in White Loch in Renfrewshire.
A three-week campervan road trip later, journey’s end comes in episode six on a deserted beach on Iona where the scene is so idyllic and the inhibitions so absent that they run into the waves starkers, taking even their film crew by surprise.
‘It was so funny,’ says Ms Wilson Nimmo. ‘They all turned the other way when we came out of the water. Nobody saw our bits. We wouldn’t damage them like that.’
Not that the elder of their two sons, Benny, 23, was quite so amused. On the day his parents speak to the Mail they report he is ‘completely shocked’ by the finale, which he had just watched that morning.
‘He said, “Why did you do that?” says his mum, laughing. ‘He’s kind of not speaking to us now.’
And yet, in a sense, the ending to Jules and Greg’s Wild Swim could hardly be more appropriate.
It is, after all, a show all about stripping away the restraints, mental and physical, which stop us doing the things which are good for us.
Many will shudder with horror at the thought of entering Scottish waters in anything less robust than a survival suit and, a few years ago, the stars of this show may have been among them.
The TV couple can’t get enough of the open air and cold water
Even on holidays to Mallorca, they say, she used to take 25 minutes to tiptoe into the water.
Today, glowing with health, they take their cozzies wherever they go and say it makes absolute sense to jump in every day. Simply, they feel healthier for it.
‘I think that healing thread goes right through all the shows and it’s really beautiful,’ says Ms Wilson Nimmo, one of the stars of the BBC comedy series Scot Squad. ‘People have found something in the water that has made them feel better.’ Certainly she did. And, as the pair visit wild swimming groups all around Scotland it is striking that many of their members are women at a particular stage in life.
The show was never meant to be about menopausal women. Indeed, Ms Wilson Nimmo says there were scenes where she consciously avoided mentioning her own symptoms, including hot flushes and anxiety.
Yet the theme resurfaces repeatedly. Something in the water provides a balm.
‘For me I would back that up 100 per cent,’ she says. ‘I was on HRT and it was not doing what I needed it to at the time. It worked for a while and then didn’t.
‘Then everything I started researching and reading was all about cold water therapy and, oh my God, it helped me. I don’t have a day now where I’m not either in the tub or in a body of water.’ While her cold water swimming journey began during lockdown in Loch Lomond, her husband was slower to take the plunge. He admits that is how he has been for much of his life. Now, like a jolt to the system, the water has made him more decisive.
Hemphill says: ‘I’m very good at talking myself out of things and this process has taught me to flip that on its head.
‘When I think back to university, I wanted to be an actor from a very young age… and I used to go along to Glasgow University theatre department and I didn’t go into it. I used to look through the window and go, “Oh, they’re too loud” or “I’m not like them, I’m too shy”, and I didn’t go in there until the second year in a four-year course.
Julie Wilson Nimmo as Miss Hoolie in BBC’s Balamory
‘You look back on that and go, “Wow, that’s ridiculous,” you know, and these last few years I’ve kind of learned that you’ve got to do it now, whatever you want to do. Do it now and don’t second guess yourself, don’t talk yourself out of things.’
Two years ago the pair set out on a wild swimming trip to Loch Ness and, driving back to Glasgow, ‘buzzing’ from their adventure, an idea began to form for a TV series.
It would be a wild swimming travelogue in which husband and wife would explore the curious trend worming its way into more and more people’s lives, including their own.
They would meet members of the wild swimming groups springing up all over the land, hear their stories and swim with them.
It would also be a chance to work together – something the pair had barely done in almost three decades of showbiz.
‘We had always wanted to do something together but the opportunity had never really arisen,’ says Hemphill. ‘It’s so strange for the two of you to be living in a small place like Scotland where the industry is fairly small and everybody knows each other to have not worked together.’
A pilot – broadcast last year – was commissioned and, on the strength of its success, the current six-part series followed.
It was envisaged as a distinctly unshowbizzy affair: a middle-aged couple – albeit familiar faces from telly – rocking up at beaches, loch sides and riverbanks, stripping down to their swimwear and getting into the water along with the locals who do it every day.
There would be no film-set screens to change behind, no crew members on crowd control, no hair and make-up and no thought given to flattering camera angles.
Similarly, there is nothing airbrushed – the pair insist – about the insights the show brings to their marriage which, for all the bickering, is the picture of health.
Did they worry about letting viewers into their relationship?
‘Not from my point of view,’ says Hemphill. ‘It’s kind of like you want people to see what I’ve seen behind closed doors for the last 25 years and also, because of the nature of the show, because we weren’t really being hired to have our hair combed and be presenters, it was just like hippies wandering about.
‘We knew we could be ourselves and that was like the remit of the show. It wasn’t about presenting some polished version of yourselves and Jules and I were really excited about that.’
It is particularly interesting to observe Hemphill in his real-life relationship given that the nation is so used to seeing him in his fictional one with Still Game best friend Jack Jarvis, played by Ford Kiernan.
‘I guess so. You’re right, that’s how people see you,’ he says. ‘Jules has such a natural curiosity and a great empathy and, I always joke, a wee bit of nosiness as well. People love to talk to her and she loves to talk to people, so I always call her the secret weapon of the show because I think she’s great at that emotional intelligence. I have seen it for years.’
Nor did Ms Wilson Nimmo worry about letting the world into her marriage. ‘I want people to see Greg how I see Greg,’ she says.
So we see her eyes roll when he reels off ‘fascinating’ facts about the rainfall in Nairn as they pass through the town in their campervan; we learn his snoring can keep her awake and even that Viagra plays a part in their marriage.
There is tension when she nearly crashes the van and a poignant admission that she has been ‘feeling rubbish’ about herself because her confidence has been down since the onset of the menopause.
Yet their bond is as natural as it is formidable. They plainly adore each other.
It is she, the more naturally outgoing of the two, who teases the back stories out of their fellow swimmers on their travels, sometimes gleaning the facts as she swims alongside them.
Some are working their way through grief, others physical or mental health issues, the menopause, addiction, or coming out as gay.
All find a form of healing in the water. It is, the couple come to realise, a therapy which was used regularly even in Scotland’s cold coastal climes well into the 20th century before foreign travel contrived to cast the nation’s waters as a no go area.
Ms Wilson Nimmo says her father recalls his mother was sent to the Fife coast to convalesce when she was poorly. Her husband says his mother swam regularly at Port Bannatyne on the Isle of Bute.
Yet, for their and their children’s generations, swimming was something you did on holiday, mainly in the Mediterranean.
‘We’re definitely hardwired as we get older that we are not to go in the water in Scotland,’ says Hemphill.
But the tide started to turn on that notion during the pandemic when holidays abroad were not an option for most.
Suddenly Scotland’s waters presented themselves as an untapped resource.
Ford Kiernan, left, as Jack and Greg Hemphill as Victor in Still Game
‘This is like our love letter to Scotland,’ says Ms Wilson Nimmo. ‘I actually feel guilty about all the times we’ve been to these places and not been in the bodies of water. Maybe it took Covid to see what was on our bloody doorsteps.’
While the series was shot in August, the couple insist their dips are a year-round affair. Speaking from Elie in Fife, they say they’ll be in the water by early afternoon.
Does it get any easier dealing with the searing chill of the North Sea against their skin? Not really, they admit.
‘It’s not like you become an expert at it,’ says Hemphill. ‘There’s not a single time we have gone in the water when we have wanted to go in beforehand. You always don’t want to go in every single time but, because you’re doing it with other people, or Jules and I are doing it together, you sort of gee each other on.’
And yet, once they are in – and when they are coming out – they swear the feeling is wonderful.
At home in Glasgow, the wooden water barrel Hemphill gifted his wife for her 50th birthday is now in almost daily usage.
‘I’ve just done a big Christmas show and I was in it every day because my body was so sore from dancing,’ says Ms Wilson Nimmo. She says her husband sometimes eats his dinner in there.
Friends now text them asking if they can pop over for a dip.
What, one can only wonder, would Jack and Victor have made of it all? ‘I think, if I’m being absolutely honest, Jack and Victor were too far gone,’ says Hemphill, who remembers the pair glumly rolling up their trousers for a paddle in fictional Finport.
He and his real-life partner, it seems, plan to grow old with rather more panache.
- Jules and Greg’s Wild Swim is broadcast on Wednesdays at 10pm on BBC Scotland. All episodes are available on iPlayer.