He had two notable appearances in one-man plays performed on BBC Scotland in the early 1970s: "Cocky", where he played Henry Cockburn, Lord Cockburn, which ended with his speech to the jury defending Helen McDougal, Burke's wife, in the Burke and Hare case, and "Jock", where he played an archetypal Scottish soldier guarding a military museum. In 1974 he played Ted, a simple-minded but kind-hearted man in a two-part story in "Rooms (TV Series)", two-part dramas concerning the various drifters who rent rooms in a lodging house. He played 'Old Fred' in a 1974 episode of "Thriller". In 1975 he played a Scottish painter in the BBC's adaptation of the "Lord Peter Wimsey" story "The Five Red Herrings". In 1979, at the artist's request, he opened the Edinburgh Festival Exhibition of the Glasgow artist Stewart Bowman Johnson held at the Netherbow Gallery.