Scotland Loves High Road STV, Wednesday ***
GEORGE Square in Glasgow has played host to many a protest down the ages – for peace, socialism, independence, you name it.
But few demonstrations have been as bizarre as the 1993 rally in support of Take the High Road, Scotland’s longest running soap opera.
With ITV threatening to axe the show, several hundred fans turned out – some had travelled from England – to defend their inalienable right to see a thrice weekly Scottish drama stuffed with adultery, murder, and soup competitions.
What’s more, the fans won their fight. The soap that first aired in February 1980 stayed in business for another decade under the shortened name of High Road.
It is now enjoying a revival on STV Player, where viewing figures are nudging the million mark.
The George Square showdown features in Scotland Loves High Road, a half hour documentary airing tomorrow to mark the show’s 40th birthday.
Presented by Emma Cameron, it is everything you ever wanted to know, and more, about the soap that gave the world both Mrs Mack and Alan Cumming.
Standing by the loch in “the quiet and beautiful village of Luss” (quiet, has she been lately?) which doubled as the fictional Glendarroch, Cameron raced through the early years, tracing High Road’s origins to an earlier soap, Garnock Way.
Set in a mining village between Glasgow and Edinburgh, Garnock Way was deemed too gritty for early evening viewing and ended after three years. The supporting clip duly confirmed its sarky miserabilism. “Oh, yer home, eh?” says father to son. “Naw, it’s ma ghost,” son sneers.
STV wanted something cheerier, so they opted for a drama that would take all the cliches about Scotland and squeeze them dry.
Take the High Road would be the lid of a shortbread tin come to life. If that makes it sound like a bad acid trip or a flu dream, sometimes, as we saw from the clips, it was.
Alan Cumming, beaming in from his home in America, recalled his mid 1980s days as Jim Hunter, evil forestry worker. Besides nicking money, Hunter stole the heart of a local woman, Carol, and she fell pregnant.
Luring her to the woods, Hunter (Cumming looking like a young Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon), chopped down a tree to fall on her “of course”.
Like some Caledonian Rasputin she still wasn’t dead, so he strangled her. Half way through the killing, Carol regained perfect composure, and her voice, to tell Hunter she wasn’t pregnant after all. Now that’s soap opera value for money.
The future star of The Good Wife and X-Men also recalled a night in a Byres Road pub when a fellow customer asked if he was “that guy who killed the wee lassie”. Cummings said he was. “The place cleared,” he laughed.
Among the other High Road actors taking a hike through memory glen was John Stahl, who played Tom "Inverdarroch" Kerr from 1987-2003. As the Game of Thrones star said, High Road touched on serious topics such as mental illness.
But it was the froth, Mrs Mack being a busybody, the endless number of affairs, the daft fights, that came to define the show.
At the height of its popularity in 1985 the show had 5.5 million viewers – including the Queen, who once visited the set – and was shown across the UK, Ireland, Canada, the US, New Zealand and Australia. As Cameron said, the makers may have been playing to the stereotype, but they were right.
The section on the early years was fun, with memories of a charabanc leaving the west end of Glasgow (where cast and crew lived, natch) every day for the 45-minute run to Luss. One of the villagers recalled how the vegetables on display outside the fictional local shop would be handed out free after filming had finished for the day. Oh, STV ambassadors, you really spoiled those locals.
More could have been made of the show’s legacy. It was not just Cumming, James Cosmo and a few others who got their breaks in High Road. A generation of directors, camera operators, sound technicians, writers, the whole kit and caboodle of a regular programme, learned their craft in Luss, and would have had a tale or ten to tell.
By far the highlight of the programme were the bloopers at the end. I would have been quite happy if this had been the whole show. After all, nothing says High Road like flatulent horses and corpsing Scots actors.
A 20 year run, 1500 plus episodes, and a new life on the STV Player is not a bad shift for one wee soap to put in. Wonder if River City, coming up for its 20th birthday, will be celebrated the same way.
Scotland Loves High Road, STV, Wednesday, 8pm
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