ONCE upon a time it was all Bill Forsyth comedies around here.

Back in the early 1980s, when I first came to Scotland, John Gordon Sinclair was swapping numbers in a Cumbernauld park with Clare Grogan, Burt Lancaster was looking at the stars on a Highland beach in Local Hero and Bill Paterson was chasing ice cream vans around Glasgow in Comfort And Joy. In my first term at university, Gregory’s Girl was even on the curriculum (Stirling Uni, 1982, film and media studies).

The lecturer, I remember, asked if this feelgood film was a recognisable vision of the country, a country, at the time, hobbled by Thatcher’s economic strategy. Well yes, I thought. It seemed very recognisable to me -- clever, funny, sarky, even sexy (in a peely-wally way). Forsyth’s Scotland chimed with the country -- and the people -- I found myself surrounded by.

You could see that same country in the music of the time too -- most notably in the good-humoured arrogance of Postcard Records (“the sound of young Scotland” as it used to say on the label) and in some of the new post-Kelman writers who appeared towards the end of the decade (Gordon Legge’s 1989 debut The Shoe springs to mind, still the best representation of what it was like to be young and alive in small-town Scotland at that time).

You could also find it on the small screen. Robbie Coltrane may have amused all my Celtic-supporting mates playing Mason Boyne in A Kick Up The Eighties, but I liked him more playing footsie with Emma Thompson in John Byrne’s Tutti Frutti. Scotland back then may have been increasingly impoverished and effectively disenfranchised but it bristled with an oppositional optimism, an ebullient self-belief played out in its pop culture.

But that was then. A different country perhaps, as a quick glance at the nominations for tonight’s Bafta Scotland Awards might suggest. If Forsyth’s Scotland was a place where humour and heartache rubbed up against each other, where straitened circumstances didn’t undermine cultural self-confidence, what is the Scotland to be found in The Field Of Blood, a contemporary crime drama set in the same timeframe as Gregory’s Girl? It’s a place of casual misogyny, heavy drinking and serious smoking. Think, too, of Peter Mullan’s film Neds, with its vision of 1970s gangland culture in Glasgow; the voyeuristic documentary The Scheme, which followed drink and drug-blurred lives on a Kilmarnock council estate; or even the return of Govan’s favourite string-vested “scum”, Rab C Nesbitt. What is their Scotland? It’s an urban Scotland, it’s usually a Glaswegian Scotland and it’s a grey, dreary, defeated, often dangerous Scotland. Yes, there’s still humour there but it’s a humour riddled with despair. It’s a vision of a country that is alcoholic rather than merry, that is ground down rather than fighting back. It’s as if someone had turned out the lights and plunged all of us viewers into the dark.

This is not an argument about quality. Peter Mullan’s film Neds has been rather overrated in my book -- its surrealism is a little laboured and it has none of the hooligan energy of Trainspotting. But then it’s in no real danger of glamorising violence the way some said Trainspotting glamorised drugs. There is also a real craft to it.

Even the return of Rab C Nesbitt hasn’t been quite as tired as many feared. Denise Mina, author of Field Of Blood, meanwhile, is a significant Scottish writer whose books deserve adaptations. Annie Griffin, writer/director and creator of Channel 4’s The Book Group, even suggests that the BBC drama is the Scottish equivalent of The Killing. Nor is this an attempt to pretend that the problems such programmes address don’t exist. Rab C Nesbitt is at least as valid now as when Ian Pattison created him at the end of the 1980s. There has been no radical dismantling of the Thatcherite social engineering to which Rab was originally a response -- as, some might argue, the hugely successful BBC One docusoap The Scheme proves. In truth, we are all too aware of Scotland’s problems with alcohol, drugs, sectarianism, neglect, abuse and deprivation. When Rab C Nesbitt said in a recent episode, “Listen, boy, being 50 and vertical is going against nature round here”, there was truth in it. All these things are Scottish realities. The question is: are we wallowing in it?

Last year, film director Eleanor Yule gave a seminar at the Glasgow Centre for Population Health on the rise of what she called “Scottish miserabilism”. Yule argued that Gregory’s Girl was the last vestige of “post-war modernist optimism” and that since then we’ve had a tsunami of urban blight on our screens. It was a theme picked up by Scottish commentator Gerry Hassan when he argued that Neds was just the latest example of the miserabilist tradition in the wake of Ratcatcher and Red Road, “films which portray an urban wasteland of lost hopes, confused souls and brutalised lives”.

Of course there’s nothing unique about this, as film historian Mark Cousins points out. “What you describe,” he tells me, “is not only a Scottish thing. Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Russia and other countries often beat themselves up because they make gloomy art. Ingmar Bergman, Lars von Trier, Wallander, Tarkovsky and so on are bleaker than much of what Scotland makes.”

Griffin, who is currently working on Channel 4’s student sitcom Fresh Meat alongside Greg (Gary: Tank Commander) McHugh, is not convinced by the “miserabilism” idea. Having sat on the Scottish Bafta drama jury, she says: “I wouldn’t call anything I saw for TV drama miserabilist.” She cites BBC drama Single Father (starring David Tennant) and detective drama Case Histories as recent examples that don’t conform to the miserabilist model. Yet she is familiar with the argument that “it’s harder to get stuff commissioned from BBC Scotland that isn’t set in a tower block”.

Eleanor Yule thinks Scottish miserabilism has become a genre. Yule has directed Peter Mullan and believes he is far more flexible than he is given credit for. “He’ll say that he’ll go in with five ideas and the only one they’ll put money behind is the miserabilist one.”

 

T he real issue, Yule and Griffin agree, is fear. Broadcasting organisations are not keen on taking risks. After the success of Griffin’s sitcom The Book Group, her most recent Scottish project, New Town -- set among Edinburgh’s bourgeoisie and critically well received -- was cancelled after a pilot episode (which ended with a cliffhanger). She wasn’t given a reason. But it’s a good example of current conservatism on TV. Yule’s Aberdonian comedy pilot Desperate Fishwives received great feedback but hasn’t been commissioned. There’s a reticence, both women argue, to be brave and offer something new. “It’s a very timid time at BBC Scotland,” says Griffin. The result, suggests Yule, is inevitable. “As the industry gets tighter and tighter it’s cheaper to make films that are domestically based and full of melodramatic situations.”

She cites the return of Rab C Nesbitt as an example. “Rather than having the imagination to commission new work, it’s bringing stuff back that was successful in the past. There’s a lack of balls in commissioning. Taking chances on new and original work is what we should be doing.”

Indeed. But the danger is that broadcasting timidity leads to cultural repetition. And repetition leads to a cultural reductiveness. That’s when we get stuck in Hassan’s urban wasteland. So we end up with a vision of Glasgow that’s partial and distorted in the same way as Monarch Of The Glen’s vision of rural Scotland is partial and distorted. It’s as if we’ve moved from the kaleyard to the backyard, and it’s full of tyres and barbed wire.

I would argue, though, that there is a bigger issue here. My problem with much of what passes for Scottish broadcasting concerns the way the working class is portrayed on screen. Ever since Brookside jumped the shark back in the 1990s and started introducing homicidal cults and bodies under the patio, soap operas have increasingly supersized their plots, twisting them into ever-more unrealistic and unrepresentative forms. Soaps, like so much of British culture over the past 20 years, have undergone a kind of tabloidisation. As a result, much of television has been left languishing in an uneasy, queasy voyeurism.

It’s there in EastEnders with its endless parade of East End gangsters and attempted murders and it’s there in something like Shameless, which has morphed from an original vision of life on the margins in Britain into a dubious Carry On Thieving.

That vision of working-class life is not confined to drama and comedy. The Scheme fits the mould. We can argue about whether The Scheme is “poverty porn”, as Pat Kane suggested in these pages last year. It is possible, I suppose, to argue that it’s a vision of life at the bottom of the ladder. But the question is, are we seeing the full 360 degrees? Are there people with problems in Onthank? Clearly -- as in virtually every town in Scotland. But are they the only people who live there? Of course not. We live in a world that is juiced on narratives of bad-boy (and girl) behaviour. These are not the only stories council estates can tell us, but they’re the ones that keep being retold. If our vision of the working class is only the one offered in Neds or The Scheme then it’s not a true vision. Worse than that, it is fodder for what Hassan calls “a pathologising of the poor, a demonising of the working class”. This is what they’re like so we can safely ignore them and their problems. They’re not worth helping. And so, as Yule has pointed out, in representations of Glasgow the same characters keep reappearing -- the feckless, alcoholic, probably abusive, usually violent hard-man figure.

What’s missing in all of this? The gay Glaswegian. The academic Glaswegian. The teetotal Glaswegian, the gainfully employed Glaswegian. The Glaswegian who goes to the pub, has a pint with his mates, talks about the football, then goes home and doesn’t beat up his wife. As Hassan has asked: “Where are the stories of the good men of the west of Scotland?” And where are the girls? One of the strengths of Field Of Blood is that it has a young woman at its heart, a rarity in Glaswegian drama. “There’s not enough stuff with central female characters in most Scottish drama and comedy at the moment,” agrees Griffin. Where, too, asks Yule, are the Highlands, or the Borders or the middle class?

 

And where in all this is the idea that anyone can change themselves, their circumstances and their surroundings? There’s a curious disconnect between the increasing self-confidence of Scots on a political level and the hermetic, defeatist programmes we watch. An interesting comparison can be made between Scotland and Wales in this regard. Thanks to the likes of Russell T Davies (who revived Dr Who) and Ruth Jones (co-creator of Gavin And Stacey), their native Wales has been at the heart of BBC drama and comedy over the past decade. As a result, Wales is being presented to the rest of the country in positive new ways that challenge and undermine the clichés of the past. Scotland is in danger of selling the same old stories and the same old images.

This is a broad-brush argument, and it’s possible that things are already changing. One of the interesting responses to last year’s so-so lesbian drama Lip Service was the way it was embraced by some Glaswegians who loved the fact that it represented their city as hip and, in parts, glossy. It reflected their own lives in a way that Rab C Nesbitt can’t. You might say something similar about Single Father or Case Histories. Then there are comedies such as The Limmy Show and Burnistoun which, while still dark-hearted, are beginning to break away from council estate defeatism, indulging, instead, in a kind of Scottish surrealism. Perhaps comedy is more flexible in its responses to pressing social problems than drama. Perhaps laughter itself is an act of defiance, a gesture of resistance.

The aforementioned Gary: Tank Commander, meanwhile, presents a vision of Scotland and Scots that is endearingly ordinary and surprisingly gentle; almost Forsythian. In that sense it’s part of another, older Scottish trope: the one the rest of the world knows Scotland for. “Realism and miserablism are not good shorthand ways of thinking about Scottish film and TV,” says Cousins. “Gregory’s Girl and Local Hero defined Scottish cinema more than anything else and, before that, the markers were I Know Where I’m Going!, Whisky Galore, and the jaunty animations of Norman McLaren. Add to that the fact that one of the most glamorous and heightened movie stars of the 20th century was a milkman from Fountainbridge and you get a Scottish film culture whose main melody is full of gentle surrealism, irony and a degree of escapism.”

Once upon a time it was all Bill Forsyth movies round here. Who’s to say it won’t be again?