I have been sitting on a small thrill for a couple of days. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the figurative adjective “Marmite,” the one we all use now, to a single citation in 1994. So I went and looked at what that citation actually is. The very first time anyone put “Marmite” in print to mean “divides people,” they were not talking about a politician, or a pop star, or even the spread. They were talking about Rab C Nesbitt.
Here it is, from the Sandwell Evening Mail of 19 September 1994, a short television review tucked in the listings:
“Love him or loathe him the ‘Marmite man’ of comedy is back. Gregor Fisher’s show is still very much an acquired taste, even though it’s now returning incredibly for a fourth series.”
That is the earliest use of Marmite as an adjective the OED has on record. You can still pull the page up on the British Newspaper Archive, on page 17 of that day’s paper. A Black Country evening paper, reviewing the return of a BBC2 sitcom about a Govan drunk in a string vest. Marvellous.
Marmite and an acquired taste, in the same breath
Look at what the reviewer did without thinking about it. “Love him or loathe him,” then “Marmite man,” then “an acquired taste,” all in two sentences. The whole love-it-or-hate-it idea, fully formed, two years before the 1996 advert everyone credits with inventing it.
And it was Rab. Robert C Nesbitt, the unemployed Govan philosopher in the filthy headband and the string vest, created and written by Ian Pattison and played by Gregor Fisher. Series four, BBC2, nine o’clock. “Returning incredibly for a fourth series,” the reviewer notes, a little amazed the country had stomached three.
So Gregor Fisher is the original Marmite man
This is the bit I cannot get over. By the OED’s own dating, the first Marmite man in the English language is Gregor Fisher, by way of Rab C Nesbitt. Not a brand campaign. Not a focus group. A telly reviewer in 1994, reaching for the most British shorthand he could find for “you will either adore this or switch it straight off.”
It fits him twice over. Rab C Nesbitt was always going to split a room. You either found the Govan patter and the gloom hilarious or you found it hard work, and the reviewer says as much: “for those who do like it, there’s nothing better.” But Fisher himself is also genuinely a bit Marmite, in the way the best character actors often are. You know the face without quite placing it. He is the bald man in the old Hamlet cigar advert whose comb-over gives up in the photo booth. He is the whole engine of Rab. People have strong feelings, both directions, and always have.
Nobody seems to have put it together
This is the part that made me want to write it down. The OED lists the 1994 Sandwell Evening Mail citation, and people happily quote the date, but I have not seen anyone go and check what the citation IS. It is Rab C Nesbitt. Gregor Fisher has been called a Marmite man plenty of times since, by plenty of people. As far as I can tell, he was the first, and nobody has bothered to join the two ends up.
So there it is. Before the jar became an adjective for the rest of us, it was already describing a string-vested Glaswegian on BBC2. Love him or loathe him, the Marmite man of comedy was back, and the dictionary has quietly been agreeing with that Black Country sub-editor ever since.
If you want the wider story of how Marmite ended up in the dictionary as a word, I wrote that up separately in a bit Marmite. But the headline, for me, is the smaller one: the first Marmite man wore a string vest.
