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

Here is the field. A one-off series. Hero is a young guy who cleans up abandoned flats full of rubbish and tackles rats and mice. Even takes bodies to the morgues. First episode full of this gloomy everydayness.

Then resolve to episode two. The same young man is sitting in a coffee shop in Edinburgh. He speaks to an evasive journalist. He talks about his life, singing a song about poo to Nicola Sturgeon, sending a Tunnock’s tea cake into space, working with the NBA, working with an English Premier League club, making A View From the Terrace and preparing a Euro show with Martin Compston. and Gordon Smart.

It’s all reckless, wonderfully absurd. But where. For Ian Greenhill, Life of Grime has become a kind of Mad Men of Leith.

‘The work at the municipality was horrible, the worst work you can imagine. That’s why I don’t really complain if a customer doesn’t like the color of a font. I think: “No big problem”. It also gives me a bit of perspective. I might have to go back to that if this all fails,” he says.

This is Studio Something, a content agency founded 10 years ago by Greenhill and Jordan Laird. They met at the Leith Agency after Greenhill had taken off the protective gear, avoided the chaotic flats and completed an internship. He is now concerned with ideas.

A large part of this now takes place in the sporting field. But ideas can travel and Greenhill, at 35, has always been happy to wander towards new horizons.

The work with major brands such as Tennent’s, Coca Cola and Skyscanner has been supplemented with innovative work on topics that need inspiration.

‘The tea cake was part of a contract with the Glasgow Science Centre. We wanted to promote science, technology, engineering and math. What better way than putting a bottle of Irn Bru in a bulletproof lid and dropping it from a tap? 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 was all informed and entertained. This is the Greenhill mantra.

A friend of rock band Frightened Rabbit and collaborator on some of their video work, he is deeply involved in projects to promote mental health. Scott Hutchinson, the band’s lead singer, died by suicide in 2018. Greenhill’s professional work in mental health is driven by deeply personal forces.

“I obviously knew Scott,” he says. ‘I am also aware of the challenges of mental health care. I consider myself a writer and 90 percent of the time there are doubts. You live in your head a lot of the time and that can be exhausting. It can be all-consuming.”

However, he is generally fueled by pleasure. The serious issue of bowel cancer was tackled by deciding to write and perform the Poo Song in the presence of Sturgeon, the then Prime Minister, and her ministers.

The growing, influential work of television has always been inspired by an idea of: ‘Why not? Let’s try.’ Studio Something is based 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, now in its seventh season.

“My first job on a television show was as an executive producer,” says Greenhill (below). ‘I knew nothing about making a television program and suddenly I was a producer of a television program.’ This is said with quiet wonder rather than with idle boasting. He is the living embodiment of the spirit of trying.

What he describes may seem comically amateurish, but it has been articulated by the biggest brands in the world. The NBA, the basketball giant, has come to the Scots to produce a series about the sport. “It’s called the ABC of the NBA,” Greenhill says.

“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 attempts to explain the sport and increase its popularity in Europe.’

The English Premier League has broken through in the form of Brentford. “We want to tell the club’s story through fans and to fans,” he says. ‘One of the episodes is about a supporter who is still alive because he had a heart attack, next to a steward who managed to resuscitate him. We reunited them.”

Work has also been done for Football Focus and the BBC has consulted them on how to improve fan engagement. “That’s crazy,” he says. ‘The largest broadcaster in the world asking for our input? We feel like we can tell them things.”

A view from the terrace was a gamechanger. It takes a unique look at Scottish football and has firmly established itself. “It’s Marmite,” says Greenhill. “Some love it, some hate it, but I would always rather be involved in something that divided opinion than something boring.”

The football work is now expanding for the European Championship. Late Night at the Euros with Martin Compston and Gordon Smart starts today on the BBC. The first guest is Lyndon Dykes. Others include Compston’s Line of Duty co-star Vicky McClure. Again, it’s about fun, but the content is just beneath it. A sketch about traveling to the European Championship also tells a lot about the dedication of the fan, the importance of football for the individual.

“I saw that during Covid,” Greenhill says. ‘My father is a Hearts season ticket holder and the lockdown has taken the fulcrum off his life for a while.’

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

‘We work hard to make things that people like. It sounds like nonsense, but that’s what I believe in,” he says.

“The biggest lesson I learned is that all the mistakes I made were based on ego. This makes me think back to my favorite record, Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. Brian Wilson had the ideas, but he got the best people to execute them. So maybe we come up with the ideas, but we do the best we can to make them a reality.”

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

He regularly mentions the company’s success with the phrase: ‘If you want to win every competition, invent your own sport.’ For example, he has devised a line-up that matches an advertising agency with a television production company.

The Edinburgh coffee shop episode comes to an end. Greenhill stretches and prepares to get back to work 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 did this happen?” he asks. ‘Maybe because we are tenacious and resilient. Maybe because I don’t feel like picking up dead bodies anymore.’ Snee. Cue titles.