FROM GRIME TO GLORY! Mail Sport meets the man who left a grisly council job to create the BBC's A View from the Terrace ... and now hopes to clean up with a nightly show from the Euros

• e-mail

Here's the pitch. A one-off series. Hero is a young guy who clears out abandoned flats full of rubbish, deals with the rats and mice. Even takes bodies to the mortuaries. First episode full of this bleak mundanity.

Then dissolve to episode two. The same young man sits in an Edinburgh coffee house. He is speaking to a doddering journalist. He talks of his life singing a song about poo to Nicola Sturgeon, sending a Tunnock’s tea cake into space, working with the NBA, collaborating with an English Premier League club, making A View From the Terrace, and preparing a Euros show with Martin Compston and Gordon Smart.

It is all recklessly, marvellously absurd. But true. For Ian Greenhill, Life of Grime has become a sort of Mad Men of Leith.

‘The job with the council was gruesome, the worst work you can ever imagine, so it is why I don’t really complain if a client doesn’t like the colour of a font. I think: “Not a big problem”. It gives me a bit of perspective, too. I may have to go back to that if this all falls through,’ he says.

This is Studio Something, a content agency, launched by Greenhill and Jordan Laird 10 years ago. They met at the Leith Agency after Greenhill had removed the protective clothing, shunned the chaotic flats and taken an internship. He is now in the business of ideas.

Much of this now takes place in the sporting area. But ideas can travel and Greenhill, at 35, has always been happy to walk towards a new horizon.

Ian Greenhill has high hopes for his new TV show broadcast during Euros

Gordon Smart and Martin Compston will be hosts of the BBC programme

Scotland star Lyndon Dykes will be among those making a guest appearance on show

The work with big brands such as Tennent’s, Coca Cola and Skyscanner has been complemented by innovative labour on subjects that need to be fired with inspiration.

‘The teacake was part of a contract with Glasgow Science Centre. We wanted to promote science, technology, engineering and mathematics. What better way than to put a bottle of Irn Bru in a bulletproof cover and drop it from a crane? Or send a Tunnock’s tea cake into space.’

The said confectionery was placed in a hot air balloon and launched from Houston. In Renfrewshire, of course. It came down in the Galloway forest. It all informed and entertained. This is the Greenhill mantra.

As a friend of rock band Frightened Rabbit and a collaborator on some of their video work, he is heavily involved in projects promoting mental health. Scott Hutchinson, the band’s vocalist, died by suicide in 2018. Greenhill’s professional work in mental health is driven by highly personal forces.

‘I obviously knew Scott,’ he says. ‘I am also aware of the challenges of mental health. I consider myself a writer and 90 per cent of the time there are doubts. You are living in your head for much of the time and that can be draining. It can be all-consuming.’

He is, though, generally fuelled by fun. The serious subject of bowel cancer was addressed by deciding to write the Poo Song and perform it in front of Sturgeon, then First Minister, and her ministers.

The growing, influential television work has always been inspired by a notion of: ‘Why not? Let’s give it a try.’ Studio Something sits in a 14th century Leith manse and Greenhill and a tradesman had barely finished building an editing suite before the BBC came along to commission A View From the Terrace, which is now running into its seventh season.

‘My first job on a television programme was to be an executive producer,’ says Greenhill (below). ‘I knew nothing about making a television show and was suddenly the producer of a television show.’ This is said in quiet wonder rather than vainglorious boasting. He is the living embodiment of the spirit of having a go.

What he describes may seem comically amateurish but it has been franked by the biggest brands in the world. The NBA, the basketball behemoth, has come to the Scot to produce a series on the sport. ‘It’s called the ABC of the NBA,’ says Greenhill.

Vicky McClure from Line of Duty is also due to appear on the Euros show

‘We got the job because a guy who worked with us was impressed with what we were trying to do and recommended us to the NBA. The series seeks to explain the sport and increase its popularity in Europe.’

The English Premier League has been breached in the shape of Brentford. ‘We want to tell the story of the club through fans and to fans,’ he says. ‘One of the episodes is about a supporter who is still alive because he took a heart attack next to a steward who knew how to resuscitate him. We reunited them.’

There has also been work for Football Focus and the BBC has consulted them on how to improve fan engagement. ‘That is crazy,’ he says. ‘The biggest broadcaster in the world asking for our input? We feel we can tell them stuff.’

Pals Compston and Smart will be having regular chats with the Tartan Army

Scotland fans are set to make appearances on the BBC show after converging on Germany

Greenhill has previously brought A View From The Terrace to the BBC

A View From the Terrace was a gamechanger. It takes a singular look at Scottish football and has solidly entrenched itself. ‘It’s Marmite,’ says Greenhill. ‘Some love it, some hate it but I would always rather be involved in something that divided opinion rather in something that was bland.’

The football work is now expanding for the Euros. Late Night at the Euros with Martin Compston and Gordon Smart starts today on the BBC. The first guest will be Lyndon Dykes. Others include Vicky McClure, Compston’s Line of Duty co-star. Again, it is about fun but the substance lies just underneath. A skit about travelling to the Euros also tells much about the dedication of the fan, the importance of football to the individual.

‘I saw that during Covid,’ says Greenhill. ‘My dad is a Hearts season ticket holder and the lockdown took away the fulcrum of his life for a while.’

Football is fun, but serious. This could be used as the mantra for Greenhill’s professional endeavours.

‘We work hard to make stuff people like. It sounds like bull*** but it’s what I believe in,’ he says.

‘The biggest lesson I have learned is that all the mistakes I have made were based on ego. So I think back to my favourite record, Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. Brian Wilson had the ideas but he got the best people to carry them out. So we might come up with the ideas but get the best in to bring them to reality.’

The future is unformed, unwritten. ‘Who knows?’ says Greenhill. ‘We have some interesting projects, we have a few commissions that I can’t talk about yet.’

He regularly addresses the company’s success with the line: ‘If you want to win every match, invent your own sport.’ He has thus come up with a line-up that matches an advertising agency with a television production company.

The episode in the Edinburgh coffee shop is coming to an end. Greenhill stretches, and prepares to head back to the job before heading to Munich, the Euros and the noise of the Tartan Army and the words of  Dykes, Compston, Smart and so many others.

‘How has this happened?’ he asks. ‘Maybe because we are dogged, resilient. Maybe because I don’t want to go back to picking up dead bodies.’ Cut. Cue titles.