Hearts in the Highlands Watching Ourselves: 60 Years of TV in Scotland

We first got television in Scotland in 1952. 1952!

That's year the Queen became, well, Queen,

Prime Minister Winston Churchill scrapped identity cards,

the first-ever passenger jet flew across the Atlantic,

the Americans set off the first H-bomb

and Vladimir Putin, Roseanne Barr and Joe Strummer were all born.

To different mothers, obviously.

# Step we gaily on we go

# Heel for a heel and toe for a toe

# Arm in arm and row and row

# All for Mhairi's wedding

# Plenty herring, plenty meal

# Plenty people to fill her creel

# Plenty bonny bairns as weel

# That's our toast for Mhairi... #

Sorry.

There's something about this Scottish landscape

that always brings a tune out in me.

It's a landscape of extreme behaviour and extreme rugged beauty.

Since the dawn of televisual time,

programme makers have been drawn here

to conduct crazy social experiments,

to test the limits of human endurance.

And to film the crazy, beautiful, mysterious, blue-skinned natives.

And, thanks to telly, us Scots have been able to enjoy all of this

from the very comfort of our own armchairs.

In the 1960s, a BBC film crew travelled to the

remote and beautiful Scottish island of Harris

and followed the only remaining child in his village,

Donnie MacSween.

Watch how they present the idyllic rural culture

under threat from some strange new forces.

'Top Of The Pops is a programme I watch.

'The disc-jockey is the man introducing them.

'Sometimes it's Alan Freeman or Peter Murray,

'Jimmy Savile or David Jacobs'.

This touching portrait of an innocent island child of the '60s

asks many questions about the future for the Islanders.

And even the influence television itself

was having on rural depopulation.

The question was, would Donnie's heart stay in the islands?

'When I grow up, I think I would like to be an artist

'because I'm very fond of drawing pictures in school.

'It is mostly scenery I like to paint.

'If I was going to be an artist, I would have to go to Tarbert School.

'And if I'd pass all my exams I'd go to Inverness Academy'.

Once I had finished filming and that had been transmitted,

I continued in school, then went to Inverness then to the city,

to the bright lights that I was seeing on television

all these years ago. I was in Glasgow.

And having sort of bathed in city practices and drank too much,

more than was good for me, I found an emptiness in myself.

I thought that all these things, the material things,

if you like, of the world, would satisfy and they didn't.

Having come back up to these parts now,

to the Scottish Highlands and the islands,

I'm kind of reconnected, if you like, with my childhood.

I've almost come full circle.

I embraced the religion that I grew up with.

I never was a city boy.

I was an island boy, and that's still in me.

I'm much more at home where I am now.

In 1968, Grampian TV travelled to Australia,

another island full of Scots,

to find out what was happening with a new generation

who'd given up the cold comforts of old traditions

for a fresh start in the sun.

Australia had just introduced the Bring A Briton scheme.

And tens of thousands of hopeful migrants headed Down Under,

every year leaving family and loved ones behind.

However, very soon they discovered

that it was literally a world upside down.

Every morning, migrants from the United Kingdom

are arriving at Sydney airport,

and most of them arrive in a bewildered state.

Tom got a job up in Sydney, so we moved up here.

When I saw the hostel here,

I was really shocked, to put it mildly,

because it was like a prison camp.

The huts were dilapidated, really. They were really terrible.

After only three months in Australia,

it seemed the Scots in Will You No Come Back Again?

wanted only one thing. To come back again.

They were no doubt pining for the Highland rain

and luxuries of the Scottish cludgie.

My first impressions of it were really terrible.

So many people that live in the hostel are just not very clean.

Their appearance more than anybody.

The British migrants seem to be better.

It's just as well we can't time travel.

Will You No Come Back? showed how disgruntled Scots can get

when they're cut off from their roots,

struggling to make a new life in an alien land.

On the flipside, in this next documentary from 1980,

you'll see some aliens who are only too happy

to have a wee trace of tartan in their veins. Aye!

This is Jim Lawrence reminding you that Scottish clans

from throughout the United States will come to Norfolk April 2nd-11th

to dance their flings, blow their bagpipes and sport their kilts

in celebration of the first International Scottish Festival.

In the midst of all this celebration,

the big question is what does being a Scot mean to you?

Scotland means Highlanders in general.

And I know it's not necessarily that way,

but that's what it means to me, the old-time Highlanders...

A lot of fighting type stuff.

Who do these guys think they are, eh?

They're not real Scots like us, the big, stupid dafties.

Could I ask you to put in words what your Highland heritage means to you?

That's who I am.

It's... I'm...

I have a North Carolina accent but I'm a Scot.

The American Scots in this documentary

had their hearts in the right place,

but their idea of a Scottish celebration

was lacking in Highland passion.

An American celebration without hamburgers and hotdogs

is as inconceivable as a ceilidh without a wee dram.

Even if here it has to be a dram of ice cold Coca-Cola.

These people are clearly from the MacDonald clan.

Then again, who's to say the Americans have got it wrong?

And who's to say that one idea of Scottishness

is better or worse than any other?

Take for example the Scotland of the '70s.

Now this is what I call true Scottish beauty.

# I never know you looked so good

# I never knew anyone could

# I must have been crazy

# To ever have gone away... #

...Miss Dundee. Elaine, Miss Arbroath, Yvonne,

Miss Kilmarnock. Jackie, Miss Glasgow South. Elizabeth Joy,

Miss Paisley. Christine, Miss Johnston.

And Jackie, Miss Aberdeen.

# It's a miracle, a miracle

# A true blue spectacle... #

It was a miracle indeed!

But sadly, the BBC decided for some reason

that this should be the very last televised Miss Scotland competition.

So can we glean anything

about the true nature of Scottish beauty from the finalists?

Well, as soon as I get my grant I'd like to start on my PhD,

which is all about the domestication of the cat.

I've actually got a cat cemetery in Egypt

which I'm going to start digging, hopefully quite soon.

# A miracle, it is a miracle... #

I wonder what happened to Dorothy Walker.

Being a well-known face and in the public eye,

people often used to ring up when they wanted a quote about something.

Where are you going on holiday? What's your favourite food?

What do you think about independence for Scotland, that sort of thing.

The things I was asked to do

ranged from opening a furniture store in Glasgow,

to taking a penguin out to dinner in the West End of Edinburgh.

And also, of course, I met my husband when I was on television,

he saw me on TV, and that wouldn't have happened

so that was the major benefit of Miss Scotland 1979.

Second, it's Miss Montrose, Dorothy Walker.

After a modelling career that won her 20 other titles,

Dorothy gave up the temptations of world travel and stardom

to return to her home town of Montrose

and restore a ruined Scottish castle to its former glory.

It's now her home.

If there'd been a Mr Scotland competition

and it was judged on personality alone,

then our next chap would have been a dead cert winner.

Instead, he had to console himself

with the TV Personality Of The Year award for 1976.

Tom Weir's generous character and huge curiosity

roamed all over Scotland in search of a very different kind of beauty.

Well, I thought the brilliant sunshine was too good to last.

The sun would have roasted you yesterday

and today I've moved into winter into Glenn Affric.

I must say that it's really a marvellous scene. A fairyland.

All the birch trees here, almost like Christmas trees.

Great bluffs with icicles hanging.

Below me, the river with great lumps of ice.

A few pine trees, this is just the very edge of the big forest.

The primeval forest of Scotland.

Tom Weir's epic trek was not for the faint hearted.

He was a world-class mountaineer who scaled the Himalayas.

But it was his infectious enthusiasm for the Scottish countryside

that made this such a memorable series.

Bizarrely, Weir's Way wasn't just for the Barbour jacket

and wellies brigade.

When STV repeated the show in the midnight to 3am slot

in the late 1990s and early 2000s,

it unexpectedly won over 30% of the TV audience

and gained a cult following among late-night revellers and students.

Wicked!

What brought such different audiences to Weir's Way

is probably the spontaneous, lyrical way

that Weir reacted to what he saw around himself.

OK.

And the strange but true tales that Tom recounts for us,

keeping the old Scottish tradition of storytelling alive.

This is a wishing tree. Look at all the coins that are in it.

They used to come to a holy well, which is now filled in, I believe.

They would wish a wish and go away contented.

But very much earlier than that, when Thomas Pennant paid a visit

somewhere around the beginning of the 19th century,

what he found was that the island was still being visited

to cure mental illness, and the cure was pretty drastic.

They went to the holy well, took a sip of the waters,

they left a present and then they were dipped in the loch three times.

They did that every day until they were cured.

It's reckoned some of them WERE cured.

The Scottish landscape isn't always about discovering hidden gems.

Sometimes it's about mud and muscle.

Climbing for hours and hours in gale force winds,

risking life and limb to get to the top.

Before the Munro Show,

hill climbing had been the occupation of old, bearded men,

but Muriel Gray brought a pinch of punk to the peaks.

This is it, the tiny little summit of Sgurr nan Gillean,

a quite magnificent mountain at 3167 feet.

A translation of that incidentally means "hill of the young men".

Fat chance with this film crew.

CREW GROANS

Oh, yes. But the thing about it is,

even though we've come up tourist route, in inverted commas,

it's still very exposed and there's some tricky scrambling there

so you should take enormous care.

I wouldn't recommend it if you don't have a head for heights.

But look at the superb views

quite unmatched by anything I've been on recently.

Across there is In Pin, remember we did that last series.

Right along the Coolan Rigde, down to Sligachan, where we started.

The Red Cones behind me and Bla Bheinn.

Spectacular!

I can't tell you how sick I am of people thinking that we just flew in.

We actually climbed every mountain for real, sometimes twice,

because we had to wait for a good weather day for the weather to match.

Everybody in the crew had to carry something huge up the hill

tripod, Betacam, all the heavy batteries.

Then, here's the really awful bit,

is we had to come back on another day with the helicopter

to get the helicopter shots.

So they dropped me on the bits where I'd done the pieces to camera

when we'd climbed the mountain.

And you would always get some smart arse climber going,

"Aha, that's how you do it then!"

No! It's not! We've climbed it twice already!

It's supposed to be an easy scramble.

Can you imagine how awful this would be if it was wet and slimy?!

I'm frightened. The worst thing is you break your fingernails!

Oh!

Oh, come away from the edge, Muriel!

It was a potentially lethal couple of series.

Yes, I nearly killed the entire crew one time on the top of a mountain,

because I wanted to wait until the sunset,

because it was an amazing sunset.

I thought, great, great. Just wait, there it goes.

Fantastic, we've got the sun going down.

Oh, we're at the top of a mountain and it's dark.

We only had head torches!

That was embarrassing.

We just managed to get down off that and save our dignity

and not call out mountain rescue.

Even though we were being silly, none of us involved in that program

could hide our absolute passion for what we were doing.

How much we loved Scotland, how much we loved the mountains.

I think that came through, so what's wrong with that?

Ah, the great outdoors. Coupled with the threat

of severe bodily harm, coupled with a live broadcast

is a recipe for having the audience on the edge of their seat!

-Excuse me.

-Sorry, love.

Nearly 50 years ago, a group of Britain's leading mountaineers

and a TV crew of 100 people put their lives on the line

in one of the most extraordinary television events in history.

The Old Man of Hoy.

450 feet of crumbling sandstone rock,

rising out of the North Atlantic off the islands of Orkney.

Tonight, six men are going to try to climb this pinnacle,

the most awesome pinnacle in the British Isles.

This is reality TV before it was even invented!

The BBC had to use the army to transport 16 tons of equipment

450 miles by boat and tank landing craft.

But this was peanuts compared to what lay ahead.

The Old Man of Hoy is a sea stack 450 feet tall.

It had only been climbed once before.

And now they were doing it for the camera, live.

Let's see what we can... Where Chris Bonington is.

He should be somewhere at the bottom of the final crack.

Right, Chris.

I can see you now bridging across. How are you getting on?

I'm buried deep in this chimney.

It's pretty awkward going because the rock is all damp

and the kind of thin slime of wet sand,

it's just like ball bearings.

The holes are fairly good so far but it's getting narrower.

I think it's going to get pretty hard.

There's always a sense of anxiety

immediately before you go onto one of these live climbs.

I've now done three of them.

Firstly, you don't want to fall off.

But then you don't want to fall off anyway.

So I was actually rather... Kind of enjoyed talking as I climbed.

I'm kind of ringing eloquent as I climb up the thing.

I'm an enthusiastic kind of person.

-Erm...

-What are you doing there with that thing?

I'm just getting a runner on.

This is a bong bong that was left by the last party.

I get really involved in trying to describe for an audience

what the climb was like.

Sometimes I get absolutely carried away with it.

This was just one such occasion.

I was there talking about what wonderful climbing it was, etc.

I'd stopped actually concentrating on the climbing.

-Your right foot doesn't look as if it's on much.

-It's...

My left foot actually is the worst one, the right one isn't too bad.

And I suddenly found myself in a completely wrong position.

I was kind of all off-balance, I couldn't get the next hole

and I really thought I was going to fall off.

I've now got to reach right up here... To try to get one foot up.

Can we go to Joe Brown, I'll shut Chris Bonington up.

An audience of 15 million

tuned in over the weekend to watch the ascent.

That was nearly a third of the population at the time.

Nail biting stuff!

The presenter, Chris Brasher,

always seemed to pick the worst possible moments

to talk to the climbers.

IN A POSH ACCENT: I say up there. Yes, you. What? How are you doing?

You've got an overhang above your head, what do you do now?

Somebody who wasn't quite so good would get into real trouble.

He's coming out.

My wretched crash hat is too big to fit into the chimney.

We weren't as good as the climbers of today

but I think we were perhaps more full of character.

And I think all of that made it something very special.

They've got a long way to go, but they've got all tomorrow.

Tonight, they'll sleep on the Old Man,

on any nook or crevice that they can find,

and we'll be back to see where they are

at 10.45pm.

You know, some folks see Scotland

as one big, massive adventure playground.

But it's not just the cliffs

and Munros that attract the thrill seekers.

There's also the uninhabited islands, too.

At least Robinson Crusoe had the good sense

to maroon himself on a tropical island.

For this survivor, there's not so much as a coconut!

Ewan, you're supposed to hold onto the rope.

Oh!

In this series of reports, tele-journalist James Hogg

was put to the test when stranded on a Scottish island for two weeks.

But before he was left to fend for himself,

he was given a chummy crash course in survival skills

from a man in the military.

Check out these guys going native.

There it is. Home sweet home.

Turf on top for water protection.

Bracken for a bed. Reflect the fire, delightful fire, keep you dry.

What happens if there's a thunderstorm in the night, Gerry?

-Marvellous, it won't leak.

-Won't it?

I never discovered why I was chosen for this particular role.

But the editor of Nationwide, as it was,

took me out to an all-expenses-paid BBC lunch in a very nice restaurant.

Told me I was marvellous, I was doing great work,

he much admired the quality of my abilities.

And poured wine down me and finished with brandy and then he said,

"Would you go on an uninhabited Scottish island for a couple of weeks

"on your own, and do a little bit of filming.

"And we'll pop over and film you from time to time

"and put it out there next evening?

"It'll be a kind of cliff-hanger. Will he survive?"

I said, "Oh, yes, I'll do that. I was feeling very mellow by this point."

No problem. So I did it.

To his credit, James did succeed

in living off the natural resources of the island,

eating rabbits and fish and even seaweed.

So, if you want to learn how to survive in the hostile wilderness,

pay attention.

You're about to hear four words that might just save your life.

Ah! The buns are burnt!

It is said that anything that walks, crawls, swims and flies can be eaten.

Oh, mangle, dangle, strangle and something else, wasn't it?

All that's required is a little bit of knowledge,

a lot of luck and a little bit of equipment.

You've got to strangle after you've... Tangled.

Because it's not necessarily dead.

I didn't lay the snare the first day, I didn't have time.

I laid the snares the second.

Then to my utter amazement, I found I'd got one.

I'd clobbered it on the back of the neck.

After two weeks of killing to survive,

it was the solitude that finally mangled James' mind.

The other thing I keep doing is keep forgetting what day it is.

What I'd like... I can't remember what you asked me there.

My brain is going as well as my body, you see.

Funnily enough, people think,

oh, you must have been sitting around all day.

I was not sitting around all day. It's a full-time business surviving.

Everything took far longer than you think.

And you don't have a lot of time for philosophising.

I very much doubt if the caveman did much philosophising

because he was too busy!

Well, if you thought that was tough,

you should have seen what the BBC were planning

for their end of millennium special.

Castaway was going to be reality TV

on a scale that had never been seen before.

It even beat Big Brother to the punch.

The question on everybody's minds was,

how long will this group of strangers

be able to survive in the middle of nowhere,

without any creature comforts, with only each other for company?

Well, that was the question for the first couple of episodes anyway.

36 intrepid castaways were flown to the Isle of Taransay

to build a community from scratch.

They were only permitted to each take 100 kilograms

of possessions with them.

Which left them all grappling with the question

of what items were essential for survival.

-And... You put it on. Just shake it.

-Beautiful.

Loads of toothpaste.

Perfume.

My feet don't smell too bad.

A little bit of lace and a little bit of red.

And this to go with that.

That is the real emergency kit here.

I'd like to take a moment to applaud that woman's notion of essentials.

Very soon, however,

the castaways had bigger things to grapple with than frilly underwear.

Storm clouds were brewing.

We've lost a large proportion of the felt off one of the pods.

The pods are leaking.

People are very cramped, people are tired and irritable.

I think things were put against us for a particular reason,

to see how people would struggle

and how other people would cope and get on with it.

Some people went one side of the fence, some went the other.

Who's going to crack up first? Of the people I've seen here,

I would say maybe to keep an eye on Mike.

I think it's a grey seal, from what I know about them.

The poor wee thing looks as though it had a bit of a rough existence,

so I employed Colin's help this morning

to come down and skin the wee beastie.

I was squeamish about cutting it open

but you get used to it.

It's a new one for his book and a new one for mine.

Around about July or August, I took two weeks out

which I referred to as my summer holiday,

and I went to live on the other side of the island.

I'm on holiday!

Most of the community, the ones I got on with, came over to visit me.

It was a good place.

Mike's desire to become Robinson Crusoe

went down a bomb with the others in the new community.

All the time I've been thinking, we are all here for each other,

so what's the point?

Why doesn't he go and find an island on his own and bye-bye Mike?

I think we would have worked in a far more cohesive way

once we got rid of the antagonistic people.

Yeah. The problem for the castaways

was identifying which antagonistic people to get rid of

in the name of peace.

We'll see. We'll BEEP see.

It's all getting a bit nasty.

If there wasn't women and children in this room,

I'd throw this plate at you.

Another man's bottom. Having sex with another man is dirty.

It says that in the Bible.

What's going on?

I'm BEEP sick of these BEEP earthlings that got here.

And we're sick of you, you fat, snoring BEEP!

-Ray!

-Ray!

-No!

Sit down! Sit down! Stop it, now!

In March, Ray dramatically left the island

and sold his story to a newspaper.

It was almost working. I think it was cruel that it was only a year.

Insurance man Mike went on to become an international explorer.

While Castaway set the template

for a whole generation of reality TV shows

filmed in dangerous, inaccessible and exotic places.

Usually with a lot more sun!

So, there you are.

The documentary makers who braved the rough terrains,

the hostile natives of Scotland and the terrible weather.

These guys are modern adventurers,

bringing the thrill of this great land into our homes.

And maybe, just maybe, it's persuaded one or two of you

to get up, get out the front door

and get the blood pumping aboot yourself.

And I've saved the best for last.

A Dram For All Seasons

is a rose-tinted look at the Scottish whiskey industry in 1976.

There's a cracking wee bit where the guy explains

that whiskey can actually cure death for real.

All you need is whiskey, a glass...

And a hat.

Oh, and by the way, please don't try this at home.

Watch and wonder at '70s health advice

just the spirit for keeping your heart in the Highlands.

Or the way to an early grave!

Pour one large glass of blended whiskey into a pint tumbler

and stir with a silver spoon.

Then add the same size of glass full of boiling water.

Then some brown sugar.

Then another glass of blended whiskey and another glass of hot water.

And then fill to the top of the pint glass with slightly warmed,

not boiled, malt whiskey.

Place your hat at the foot of the bed and climb in between the sheets.

If a body could just find out the exact, proper proportions

and quantity that ought to be drunk every day and keep to that,

I verily trowel that he might live for ever withoot dying,

and that doctors and churchyards would go out of fashion.

Drink till you can see two hats.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd