Vital Sparks Watching Ourselves: 60 Years of TV in Scotland

We first got television in Scotland in 1952. 1952!

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

Prime Minister Winston Churchill scrapped identity cards.

The first ever passenger jet flew across the Atlantic.

And Al Martino topped the first-ever UK singles chart

with Here In My Heart. # Heeeeere in my heeeeaaaart.... #

Tonight, we're celebrating the arts.

We've a long tradition of "doing a turn" here in Scotland -

it's what the original ceilidhs were all about -

and over the years we've produced more than our fair share

of world-class artists, musicians and writers.

Forget investment bankers, this is a real fiddle!

FIDDLE MUSIC PLAYS

Arts programmes give us a close-up view of the creative process

and a chance to peek inside the minds of our great artists.

They also give programme makers the chance to be, well...

Arty.

Arty.

Arty.

This was made in 1966, as the BBC was walking a line

between tradition and modernity.

And the Corries were walking wherever they damn well pleased.

THEY SING: "The Braes O' Killiecrankie"

Come on, guys. I know you wrote Flower Of Scotland,

but surely that doesn't give you the right to break the Highway Code.

What is this? Some kind of crazy three-wishes routine?

Yep, looks like it.

SHE SINGS

Early art shows like this gave directors a chance to have some fun.

The man calling the shots here was producer/director W Gordon Smith.

Blimey. I wonder how they sneaked this one past Mary Whitehouse.

Smith was a respected playwright and author and he appears to have

had a knack for getting people to do the strangest things.

I started off in a body stocking

but Gordon said that...

He said, "No, no." He leaned over

and said, "No, I can see the straps of that, it's spoiling the shot,

"get out of it," so I had to wriggle out of it.

And you do feel a bit vulnerable

in icy-cold water with no clothes on.

SHE SINGS

MANIACAL LAUGHTER

This is Muriel Spark, author of The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie,

interviewed by W Gordon Smith in her Rome apartment.

I can't imagine her doing this on Parkinson!

She's clearly much more relaxed here than she'd ever be in a studio.

As long as you don't mess with her stationery.

I haven't got a lot of eccentricities,

but I am eccentric about my pens.

I always use these black Biro pens.

I get a new set for every book,

and if by accident somebody picks up one of these pens

to write a telephone number or write something and then puts it down again

I notice that and throw that pen out of the window -

I don't want to touch it for my book any more.

Nobody's allowed to touch the pens - I lock them up.

One of the best-known faces

from the early days of TV was Mary Marquis.

Before going on to become the Scottish Angela Rippon

on Reporting Scotland, Mary built a reputation as an unflappable

and intelligent interviewer on her own show, First Person Singular.

I kinda like her.

Gordon Jackson, I know that the very first film you ever made

was The Foreman Went To France, and that was exactly 30 years ago.

I was an apprentice in an aircraft factory in the drawing office

and I got this part in the film and it was about a boy

who was in the army who had been an apprentice.

I remember years later, after I'd given up drawing offices

and everything and was concentrating on acting, Meg Buchanan,

dear late Meg Buchanan, a wonderful actress,

she said to me, "Are you still keeping up your engineering?"

This was 20 years later. And I said, "No, I'm an actor full time now,"

and she said "Oh, pity, pity."

He was a most delightful man

and he thought a great deal about acting and actors.

And it wasn't all facile stuff, he really thought about it.

And he was totally without pretension or side or anything -

he was just genuinely a charming man.

Naomi Mitchison is a very remarkable woman.

She's a farmer in Carradale in Argyll, and in her 76 years

she has also produced more than 70 books.

The mother of a large and brilliant family,

and the adoptive mother of the 30,000 members of an African tribe.

You've certainly had one of the fullest lives

that any man or woman could hope to have,

but has there ever there been a turning or a situation

which you didn't take or didn't react to and wish you had?

Och, well, at times I think of people

I might have slept with and I didn't. THEY LAUGH

It was so much like Naomi to be completely forthright

and just come out and say it.

There must be a number of people

who feel that as they approach their old age,

and she was just expressing it for a lot of people, I think.

Interview shows are still as popular as ever,

but over the years programme makers have been keen to try

more imaginative and playful ways of portraying their subjects.

In my eye I have no apple.

Every object enters in there with hands in pockets.

I welcome them all just as they are -

everyone equal, none a stranger.

It's hard to imagine, say, one of our politicians

allowing themselves to be filmed

in such microscopic and unflinching a fashion as Norman MacCaig,

although I'd be surprised if one or two of them wouldn't like to

take a leaf out of Alasdair Gray's book and interview themselves.

Mr Gray.

I have heard people call you a piss artist,

one who by hard drinking

converts the profits of his artistry into piss.

That's partly true.

But my use and abuse of alcohol

has not yet stopped me working hard and well.

That may be an alcoholic delusion.

Posterity will judge!

In 1988, the BBC let John Byrne go one better than Alasdair Gray

by giving him free rein to tell his own life story.

Left to his own devices, Byrne came up with a mindboggling collage

of visual styles and shifting realities.

Hey, it was the '80s, everything was up for grabs.

As portraits go, this was more Cubist than Old Master.

He had created these characters in his plays and in his paintings

and so on, and he had created

those characters as a kind of...

not extension of himself,

but as a way of exploring different sides of himself.

And so in this documentary he was going to get them to tell him,

to help him discover himself.

Sort of reverse the process.

So what he does is goes through the film

and encounters the characters he has created.

And there is this incredible dialogue going on.

My name's McCann, Phil McCann. I'm a fictional character

inhabiting a world of artifice and illusion -

it's over there, ya dummy -

besides which, I don't even look like this guy.

What guy?

The guy that dreamed us lot up.

Not even in 1957 did I look like this jerk.

I regard it as that rare thing - a programme about the arts,

or an artist, that is actually a work of art in itself.

I think it's just...mind-blowing.

Stop moving your lips.

# I thought of you and thought of you

# Until the morning light... #

Almost ready.

It's funny how as you get older

you hanker after the things you enjoyed as a child.

One of the great things about being an artist, of course,

is it gives you a licence to make mischief,

no matter what age you are.

George Wyllie, one of Scotland's great contemporary artists,

didn't really hit his stride until he was in his 60s.

Wyllie had a playful approach to his work, but his message was serious.

Where I live, I can observe and try to comment

on what we are allowing to happen

to one of the most beautiful estuaries in the world,

the River Clyde.

One of Wyllie's most famous sculptures is The Paper Boat,

and, as these pictures show, it was a real crowd pleaser.

Wyllie wanted his work to appeal to as many people as possible,

and he made the Paper Boat to draw attention

to the decline of shipbuilding on the Clyde.

George was a multi-talented artist.

For instance, he wrote this fantastic early attack on monetarism

and the banks, called A Day Down A Goldmine.

In this film, The Why?sman, we managed to get Bill Paterson

and we re-staged parts of it in very strange places

like the workshop where he made these things.

Murray Grigor worked in close collaboration with Wyllie to produce

a programme that brilliantly combines art and television.

This is the golden attitude of mind

that this trip is designed to encourage.

I'm giving you the earliest possible warning that this mine

is rich only in visual falsehoods.

George for me is a psychotic surrealist,

very west of Scotland, I think,

because a lot of artists, a lot of comedians

and a lot of traditions come from this idea of a kind of surrealism.

Chic Murray had it in spades, Billy Connolly certainly had it.

It's a great tradition of Clyde humour

which goes way back to the early days of music hall, even.

Never mind Connolly and Murray - this is the kind of madcap carry-on

that Dali and Bunuel would have been proud of.

I just can't understand why he's not taken more seriously -

he deals with a wide spectrum of things.

Anyway, I think psychotic surrealism really pins him down.

This living room belongs to the poet Hugh MacDiarmid.

It's being filmed by the artist/filmmaker Margaret Tait.

Tait described this style of close-up filming as mantelpiecing,

and she believed that experimental films such as this

were the modern answer to the oil paintings of the past.

I'm just using the camera in a way as a sort as extension of myself.

I'm not really a cameraman, or camerawoman.

I couldn't do camerawork for anybody else.

I can only do my own camerawork, really.

Margaret made films utterly for herself, in a way.

She wasn't interested in scenery, which was going out

and taking beautiful shots of sunrises and...

you know, heather on the moors and so on.

She was interested in landscape, which for her could be anything -

a real interior landscape or it could be

the light falling on a flower in her garden.

So of course we went out and filmed her

running around the beautiful landscape of Orkney

in her little van, totally ignoring it,

with a camera on the seat beside her!

WOMAN SINGS

Although she was filming in the real world,

Tait wasn't making documentaries.

Like many great artists, she found poetry in the everyday.

Art isn't made in a vacuum.

When it's at its best, it tells us something about the world around us,

and it isn't always a pretty place.

The artist Peter Howson made his name

painting dark and violent images of Glasgow's hardmen.

Then in 1993, he went to Bosnia

and discovered they weren't that hard after all.

Art doesn't get any more challenging than this.

Nothing can prepare you for Bosnia.

There's nothing like it.

What people see on the television is basically just a snippet.

What you don't see is the continuing nightmare.

I've got to be ultrasensitive, I suppose, to what's going on here,

and notice everything and keep it inside my head for a few weeks

until I can do the work.

And, um...if I let it out through... the way other people do it,

by, like, humour or bravado,

then I wouldn't be able to produce the paintings.

The sketches Howson made in Bosnia don't make for easy viewing.

They're the work of a creative mind at the end of its tether.

I think they might have got his job description wrong.

They should have called him an anti-war artist.

In 1994, Billy Connolly presented The Bigger Picture,

a six-part series about the history of art in Scotland.

One of the things that made this series so engaging

was the way it brought the art of the past to life

by telling the stories surrounding it.

These are the Falls of Clyde.

It's not the picture you usually get when you think of the Clyde,

but Glasgow's a few miles downstream.

We're at the source of the river here.

In the late 18th century,

when the Industrial Revolution was just starting to bite in Glasgow,

this place became Scotland's first big tourist destination.

People arrived here in droves to gaze upon the wonders of nature.

And, of course, the painters weren't far behind them.

'It came right out of the blue, The Bigger Picture.

'Douglas Rae got in touch with me. He was the guy who produced it.'

And I think it was, as far as I can see,

his basic idea to take the history of Scottish art

and give it to somebody like me

instead of someone in a velvet jacket.

You know, people are so used to that velvet jacket, limp-wristed,

armful of brochures, "Come this way,"

and flitting over things you would like them to linger on, you know.

And leave it in the hands of me,

who was just as naive as the audience most of the time.

Believe it not, this windswept and interesting,

svelte and interesting character standing before you

used to look like this.

And it was voluntary!

And when I wore these

I had little idea that one day they would end up in a museum.

But had I the choice, this is the museum I would have chosen.

This is the People's Palace.

In the middle of Glasgow Green, in the heart of Glasgow,

on the banks of the beautiful River Clyde.

When we were children, we were brought here on a Sunday

to gaze upon Glasgow's illustrious history.

But in recent times there's been another great reason to come here.

The city of Glasgow commissioned one of the Glasgow Boys,

Ken Currie, to produce a series of murals

depicting Glasgow's socialist history.

Glasgow's always been one of the most left-wing cities in Britain.

As a matter of fact, in the 1920s,

the government sent the troops up here

just in case the Communists won the political battle.

The Riot Act was read on the steps of the City Chambers,

and the red flag was raised.

The revolution and the West

came a great deal closer than you might imagine.

Ken Currie and Peter Howson were part of a group of artists

known as the New Glasgow Boys, who kick-started the cultural renaissance

that led to Glasgow becoming the 1990 European City of Culture.

This studio belongs to another of the Glasgow Boys, Steven Campbell.

I'm not sure about the feng shui in here.

But at the time this film was made, Campbell was living and working

in New York, where he was the toast of the art world.

He was incredibly focused on his work,

and had more or less locked himself away in his studio.

But he allowed the cameras in

for a rare glimpse into his creative process.

Yeah, yeah, I usually just rough it in like this.

And I have an idea of where the pose is going, where it's moving.

Usually I start with the highlights.

The eyes, just the sockets and the bones and things.

Usually I use bones the exact same as mine, which is kind of high,

high bones over the eyes and big bones on the cheeks.

If he turns out quite well

then he'll make his own little story, more or less.

It's rare for an artist to be this open about their work on camera,

but all is not as it seems.

Don't go looking for this painting in a gallery. You'll never find it.

The thing was, he did paint this picture

and it looked pretty good to us, and finished,

and then it appeared in the gallery

and it was a completely different picture.

This, believe it not, as the painting we've just seen

Campbell working on. Who says the camera never lies?

When I was painting in the studio when the cameras were there,

it was like a piece of showing off or something.

You learn a lot of tricks, and it's quite easy to do the tricks

but because people are there

you don't have the same privacy to get nervous.

I became dissatisfied with the figures

so I put the painting away and I did another one

and when I took the painting back again it looked dreadful.

I painted all that out

and turned the head of one and the arm and head of another

into part of an archway, which is in the painting,

and I painted out all the wall and stuff.

There is a little bit...

In the first attempt at the painting,

there's a little green bit in the middle, which is there,

just above the eye, I think, of one of the guys, a tiny green bit.

I think it's about this size. Which hasn't been touched.

It's such a private process, the creative process,

so to be able to take the camera in and just get a glimpse

of how that works is extraordinary.

But of course not all artists... Probably the majority

would not want to expose themselves in that way, because even to them,

I guess, a lot of the time what they are doing is a bit of a mystery.

Getting visual artists to open up about their work

can sometimes be like getting blood from a stone.

They like their work to do the talking.

Well, what have you got to say for yourself?

My thoughts exactly.

However, there's one branch of the arts in which self-promotion

has never been much of a problem.

I'm talking, of course, about the movies.

-Do you have anything you want to make, a story?

-Yeah.

-Something that's driving you crazy?

-Yeah.

-Write the script, that's number one.

-We've got the script.

This is the screenplay Shallow Grave.

It's a film about love, trust, and friendship.

It's also about sex, violence, evil, greed, anger, betrayal,

duplicity, death, dismemberment and disposal.

Last year my brother Andrew and I took our script

Shallow Grave to the Edinburgh Film Festival

hoping to attract moneymen and stars.

12 months later, low-budget finance was in place

from Channel 4 and the City of Glasgow.

But, in true Hollywood fashion, I was jettisoned from the project

just a few weeks prior to shooting.

Instead of suing the hell out of him, I decided to exact my revenge

by filming him as he produced

his first feature film, to catch him in the act of digging his own grave.

Just imagine it! Bumped off your labour of love

to be replaced by some two-bit TV director.

Who just turns out to be Danny Boyle.

Kevin MacDonald used his close relationship with his brother

to shoot some remarkably candid stuff.

It's almost like he's making a home movie on a movie set.

What are you worried might happen to the fight scene?

I'm worried that we might not have planned it out sufficiently

to be able to do it in the time we've got.

And it made end up being, you know, too arty.

DOOR OPENS

I want it to be completely real.

It's got to be really, really horrible.

It's not an art movie.

It certainly is not an art movie.

Even though some of it might look suspiciously like one.

So you need to enjoy the fact that you're killing them,

and it's at that moment, as you get there,

you're on the knife

then we cut back to Ewan's face, then we cut back to you,

and she rushes in and goes "whack".

Shallow Grave went on to become a massive hit both here

and in the States, and don't worry about poor wee Kevin.

He's gone on to win an Oscar for his documentary One Day In September.

Moviemakers aren't the only ones

with dreams of making it big in the States. Ever since the Beatles,

musicians have been obsessed with cracking the American market.

In 1990, Scotland's most reclusive band, the Blue Nile,

emerged from hiding to embark on their first-ever tour.

Nine years after they formed.

The words "light" and "bushel" spring to mind.

# The rivers in the distance

# Must be leading somewhere

-# Heatwave

-Heatwave

-# Heatwave

-Heatwave

# Why is it rolling down? #

At the time the song was written,

the band were living in a damp Glasgow tenement with no hot water.

Yet, as this film shows, the songs they created

were just as at home on the streets of New York.

-# Heatwave

-Heatwave

# Are we rich or poor

# Does it matter... #

Flags And Fences, the Blue Nile documentary,

I think was one of those programmes that goes beyond being

a mere documentary about a band and their first tour -

it becomes almost a piece of televisual art,

if that doesn't sound too pretentious.

American music fans took to the Blue Nile like mustard to a hot dog.

But how would they react to a big daud of broon sauce?

Very well, as it turns out.

In spring 1993 The Proclaimers' song I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)

climbed to number 3 in the US Charts

after featuring in the Johnny Depp film Benny and Joon.

When the Reid brothers went over to the US on a follow-up tour,

it wasn't exactly Beatlemania, but they did create quite a stir,

even if no-one had a clue what they were talking about.

What the hell is haver?

# I'm gonna be the man who's haverin' to you... #

It's havering.

Can we get a spelling on that?

-H-A...

-H-E...

-A.

-H-E-E?

Can we get a translation on the letters, please?

Everybody in Cleveland wants to know -

what does it mean when you haver?

It just means to talk rubbish.

Talk rubbish?

There's always been that Scottish love affair

with all things American, and here it was reciprocated.

America loved and continues to love the Proclaimers.

Their music has been featured on countless soundtracks,

they still sell a lot of records over there.

There's just something about them.

It's a huge country, as people know.

A lot of bands just don't do it

because you don't spend enough time there. It was funny going back in '93

because then it was a situation where we were getting national prominence

because of the single, and basically you didn't have to do anything.

We just sort of turned up and people were there.

The Proclaimers were used to their songs being hijacked by sports fans,

but, America being America,

even A-list celebrities were keen to get in on the act.

The twin on the left is Mike Myers.

-# Michael Jordan

-Michael Jordan

-# Michael Jordan

-Michael Jordan

# Michael hey, Michael ho Michael Jordan... #

Of course, it's not all been one-way traffic.

At the same time as we've been striking out into the world

the world has been coming to us.

I feel very much like the domesticated dog

who yearns for the prairie,

and every so often takes a sniff of that wilder air

to refresh himself and

to give him the strength and courage to renew himself.

One of the best things about traditional music

is the way it connects us with the past.

This is Yehudi Menuhin, the world's greatest classical violinist,

arriving in Blair Atholl for a bit of rough.

Sorry, "to reconnect with the violin's folk roots".

Here at Blair Castle he would learn something of the authentic style

of the folk fiddlers of Scotland,

and his first lesson would be from an Aberdeenshire gardener,

perhaps the greatest living exponent in Scotland, Hector MacAndrew.

That's more like it. Put an emphasis on your B.

MacAndrew was extremely nervous about dealing with Menuhin,

but Menuhin immediately put him at ease,

and the wonderful exchanges between the two were marvellous.

Will we try it together?

I wasn't born a Scot, but I do my best.

Maybe one day.

But you can do the Beethoven concerto, whereas I can't.

You were born to do that.

He just couldn't get the...

IMITATES VIOLIN

..the one down, three up, couldn't manage it,

cos that's not the way that classical players play.

But he had a good go at it.

It's not too bad, you're coming quite near it, you know,

quite near it!

To end, we're going right back to basics.

In 1980, legendary folk musicians Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger

travelled to Blairgowrie

to document the songs and stories of its travelling people.

Scottish culture doesn't get any more authentic

or closer to its roots than this.

# When berry time comes round each year

# Blair's population swellin'

# There's every kind o' picker there

# And every kind o' dwellin'

# There's tents and huts and caravans

# There's bothies and there's bivvies

# And shelters made wi' tattie bags

-# And dugouts made wi' divvies... #

-39!

# ..Noo there's families pickin' for one purse

# And some wha pick alane

# And men who share and share alike

# Wi' wives that's no' their ain

# There's gladness and there's sadness tae

# There's happy hearts and sare

# There's comedy and tragedy

# Played on the fields o' Blair

# Noo there's some who earn... #

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