Is "the thistle of Scottish political drama" flourishing?

Two shows on the telly, apparently unconnected. The first, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil was broadcast on BBC Alba the other night, while two episodes of the second, Borgen, were shown on BBC4. The Cheviot was written by John McGrath and performed across Scotland during the 1970s by the 7:84 theatre company. Unfortunately, the play hasn't been made available on iplayer to view again, for those who missed it. By contrast, Borgen is a Danish political drama from the folk behind The Killing, focussing on the struggles and machinations of Birgitte Nyborg, a political leader in Denmark's proportional electoral system just before and in the aftermath of a general election. 

So what is the connection? I've been thinking lately about Scottish political drama, whether on telly or on stage, and both Borgen and The Cheviot speak to that interest in their distinct ways.  "What is it that makes Scotland a place with such a fertile soil for the thistle of political theatre to flourish?" asks Oran Mor's David MacLellan in a blog for the National Theatre of Scotland. Serendipitously, MacLellan also starred in the 7:84 production of the Cheviot. The piece was written in anticipation of an event held in the parliament in the middle of December past, discussing Scottish theatre and politics. MacLellan's piece is brief, and I didn't attend the subsequent discussion, but is worth briefly examining for the highly characteristic (and in my view, profoundly flawed) account of Scottish social class it promotes. Its general features ought to be familiar to most of you.

MacLellan's takes it for granted that Scotland is a fertile site for political theatre, and offers an account of why he believes it to be so.  His basic thesis appears to be that political theatre would be inhibited by a dominant bourgeoisie, envisaged as individualistic, selfish, thirled to authority and clergy (blame the Episcopalians!). Social class in Scotland, suggests MacLellan, is like a stick of rock. If you chip off the thin, shiny gloss of the middle classes, you discover within a rich, telling seam of working class authenticity. And insofar as there is a discernible bourgeoisie in Scotland, it is self-involved, sparrow-sized, and inauthentic. He writes...

"Class differences between Scotland and England could hardly be more pronounced. Scotland is essentially a working class country where the terms yeoman or gentry have no resonance. Our middle class has historically always been very small and, if it multiplied to some extent during the 19th century, the strangulated vowels of Kelvinside and Morningside are testimony to its collective insecurity. Scratch the average middle class Scot outside Edinburgh’s New Town legal fraternity and you will find within a very few generations a product of the working class. Add to this largely proletarian stew the seasoning of Calvinism, where the individual may converse with God on equal terms without the mediation of Bishop or priest, and you have the beginnings of an audience receptive to ideas, who share a view that there is such a thing as society and who have a personal, ethical and political interest in its outcomes."

I was immediately reminded of Christopher Whyte's notion of the "textual invisibility" of the Scottish middle classes, as enthusiastic producers and consumers of fictions in which they are not represented, their significance denied, minimised, marginalised. We needn't look too far to find recent political examples of this curiosity at work. Quoth Whyte...

"One may posit a demand on the part of the Scottish middle class for fictional representations from which it is itself excluded; a demand, in other words, for textual invisibility. This would connect with the widespread perception of the Scottish middle classes as 'denationalised', as less Scottish in terms of speech and social practice than the lower classes. The task of embodying and transmitting Scottishness is, as it were, devolved to the unemployed, the socially underprivileged, in both actual and representational contexts."

One is immediately struck by how hackneyed and implausible MacLellan's account of the Scottish bourgeoisie is. The "legal fraternity in the New Town"? In terms of members of the Faculty of Advocates, and of the High Courts, we're talking about around 1,000 people at most. Only a handful of those could afford to stay in the stately Georgian homes in the New Town, or derive from families who've been in the law for generations. That's the "unscratchable"  bourgeoisie in a nation of over 5,000,000?  It's an absurdity.  Interestingly, such simple images are, I find, familiar stock-stuff.  In the Ken Stott adaptation of Ian Rankin's The Black Book, Inspector Rebus investigates, amongst others, a patrician Edinburgh MSP Daniel Raeburn.  I haven't read the book, but on the telly, Raeburn is played by David Robb, who specialises bourgeois characters running from the suave to the stern; barristers, army officers - and in his youth, the ill-fated Germanicus in I Claudius (1976). A privileged scion of the New Town, Raeburn cuts a respectable, stuffy figure, boasting an ambitious, cold-eyed and haughty gin-wife, and bears no discernible resemblance to any contemporary Scottish politician I can think of. He is a hackneyed  echo of some pre-1997 Tories perhaps, but difficult to envisage in Holyrood as is.

So what makes something like Borgen possible, but a Scottish equivalent difficult to envisage? Denmark, a country of five million people, with a unicameral national parliament, seating 179 MPs is not obviously more interesting than Scotland.  Perhaps it is a question of Holyrood lacking the political maturity required to envisage counterfactual alternative stories and a perceived lack of drama in the histories which have actually unfolded since 1998, discouraging pieces like the Blair-Brown inspired The Deal (2003) or the New Labour spin-inspired The Thick of It from Armando Ianucci. Put it another way. What sort of character could a dramatic, fictional First Minister be? What sources of narrative, of tension, corruption and struggle might one identify in the Scottish political landscape?

Could it be that one of our problems - encouraged by the theory being propounded by MacLellan and those who share his opinion - is that we don't talk about Scottish elites these days, their incestuous connections, throttled by the suffocating assumption that everyone is basically decent and well-intentioned? How can one develop a political theatre, when we're all pretending to be Jock Tamson's bairns, and our humanitarian banalities serve mostly to obscure from us the extent to which our egalitarianism is a fond, self-serving fantasy? How can one critically engage through drama with questions of who holds power in Scotland, if the producers of the dramatic refuse to see Scotland's bourgeoisie as anything but proletarians in none-too-convincing costumes, a small cast of peripheral characters with background parts, non-speaking roles and little influence? To put the argument at its most provocative, surely, contra MacLellan, the really interesting question is why contemporary Scotland doesn't have political drama (in both the institutional and, arguably the broader senses), and what we might do about it? 

"There's been a murder!"

Have you noticed that, in Taggart, the last scene almost invariably shows the apprehended villain being prodded into a police vehicle? Fin. We never see DCI Matt Burke testifying and being cross-examined before the throng of a fifteen-soul Scottish jury, nor the presiding Scottish judge sitting in the distinctive red-crossed criminal gowns of the High Court of Justiciary, nor the male advocates wearing white bow ties instead of the Geneva bands of the English barrister. The macer isn't summoned. We don't gasp as the jury cries "not proven", we don't miss the absence of opening speeches in Scots trials. We can never be wholly sure if the accused's confession is corroborated by admissible evidence, as required by Scots law; never hear if Detective Robbie Ross' louche police practices and illegal searches derail prosecutions; nor if the procurator fiscal decide that  a prosecution is in the public interest. Generally, all we know is that there's been a murder, the culprit has been apprehended and Scottish criminal processes will presumably and unerringly bring them to justice. Moral equilibrium is resorted. In part, this is the narrative tension of the piece. The denouement must be conclusive.

One of the curious side-effects of this (understandable and justifiable) narrative closure is that  Taggart leaves much unsaid about the distinctiveness of Scots courts. And Taggart isn't alone in this respect, but is certainly the most high-profile, long-standing example of a Scottish drama in which some figuration of Scotland's legal world might be attempted - but generally this opportunity is foregone. Similarly in Ken Stott's recent - and highly enjoyable - rendition of Ian Rankin's Rebus, identical police practice and storytelling values were to the fore. Previously, Scots law themed dramatisations have been broadcast, including Sutherland's Law in the 1970s in which Iain Cuthbertson played a small town procurator fiscal. STV recently put the first series of The Advocates onto their YouTube channel, which draws on all the familiar tropes of a foosty Faculty of Advocates, an incestuous Edinburgh power elite whose Jekyll and Hyde sensibility is revealed by the remorseless cynical lawyer-hero-investigator with a jaundiced view of it all.  English law has much more successfully found expression in popular culture, from Rumpole of the Bailey to the more recent Kavanagh QC and even the dreaded Judge John Deed. The American attorney dramas are endless. One may quibble and complain about the melodrama and implausibility of their scripts and  the unrealistic performances given by actors, but crucially they make space for the recognition of legal distinctiveness.

Generally, the spaces and eccentricities of Scots Law aren't often projected onto the popular consciousness through the medium of television. This, I think, is to be lamented. Equally, this dearth ought to be contextualised in the lack of televisual representations of Scottish life more generally. Its an old and familiar saw that our seperate legal system is one of the foundations of Scotland's continuing independent-mindedness. I've never found this terrifically convincing, at least insofar as it suggests that most Scots have a developed clue about what goes on in courts up and down the country - and draw succour in some substantive way from the continuing influence of the Corpus Iuris Civilis. If they do think that, most Scots I've spoken to must keep the inspiration mired in a gloopy soup of false consciousness.

The thought was set in motion by a couple of unconnected recent experiences. A North American fellow Peat Worrier recently directed my attention to a book by an American jurisprude called Richard Sherwin, entitled When Law Goes Pop: The Vanishing Line Between Law and Popular Culture. Sherwin's central point, according to my friend, is that the ubiquity - even the hegemony - of popular representations of legal processes on the telly is having a discernible impact on the real practice of criminal justice - and even more curiously - on the practice outside the United States. One anecdote reflects the point. Such is the impact of American popular culture’s representations of their criminal justice system, and so pervasive is its language, that having been arrested, a significant number of Canadians are now known routinely to bitterly complain about not having been read their Miranda rights.  Jurors are likely to entertain certain ideas about trials. In the absence of court recording, these are largely mediated by yarn-spinning, dramatic or comic television shows. I imagine our fellow citizens are often disappointed to find that legal representatives want an actor's delivery and don't deliver rollicking closing arguments like Boston Legal's Alan Shore.

On a connected but distinct point, I also wanted to mention the rather odd way in which some of the papers have been reporting the Sheridan trial. Or more precisely, how Scottish law and institutions have been depicted and discussed in sections of the metropolitan press.  For instance, this piece in the Guardian is full of odd circumlocutions, repeatedly referring to "counsel", failing - presumably purposely - to use the apt Scots term "advocate" even once. Precisely what is odd about the prose is somewhat difficult to put the finger on. No doubt a sub-editor is implicated, concerned not to befuddle their overwhelmingly English readership.  They also write about "Lord Bracadale, the judge at the high court in Glasgow". An eccentric in-house style may be partly to blame here, but reading the article, it was almost as if there were speech marks in the original. For me, it read like the despatch from an international journalist, full of simplification and vernacularisation. Still, this is at least marginally preferable to the Gurnian's initial tack of simply using the English term and referring to Maggie Scott QC as Sheridan's "barrister"...

There's been a murder, indeed.

Time for a Scottish political drama?

Jubilantly, this week had me expelling a particularly extensive project from my proverbial corner of the professional peat hags. My relief is palpable. And then, like an anvil lobbed from a tall building, the weight of inactivity hits you. After life’s fitful fever, he sleeps well.

What to do now, I agonised? Despairing of the bare walls of my garret providing any inspiration, I stalked into the Glaswegian streets, at last, after much travailing, resting my tired feet in a hostelry in that city’s western district. And then, as my Deuchars ebbed to a half-draught, the divine Muse Calliope slapped my phizog with her laurel leaf of inspiration.

We’re dominated by American political films, the hero-priest of presidency cults, and homicidal alien forces whose primary mission seems to be flattening the White House. Of course, the British got there first, giving Washington and its presidential bungalow a good singeing during the War of 1812. Its tempting to analyse the persisting re-enactment of this fiery tableau – substituting googly-eyed extraterrestrials for the redcoats – as the fell spectre of a vengeful George III exhaled from the bilious fog of the collective American unconscious, come back to punish the errant nose-thumbing of the States’ founding sons. And after all – isn’t the widely mooted American glee and self-subordination to the swank of “British” accents not a form of defensive sublimation attempting to erase this sweating folk memory and the vestigial terror of the misbehaving child with an overcoming and overstated scoosh and gush of unmerited admiration?

But my primary point concerned political dramas. Obviously, dominating the firmament is the West Wing. For myself, a continuing favourite is the House of Cards trilogy. As an aficionado of the wondrous malice of Jacobean tragedy, Andrew Davies managed to massage the themes and the atmosphere into a more modern setting tremendously well. How some keen-sighted producer found in Michael Dobbs’ novel the germ of the television programme, I have no idea. I’ve rarely encountered prose more lumpen – and female characters more obviously and ludicrously scripted from a sweaty-palmed, sausage-fingered male perspective. Nor can Dobbs be credited with Francis Urqhart’s much quoted saw, or the splendidly creepy henchman that is Colin Jeavons’ Tim Stamper, another brace of owings to the estimable Davies. For those who have not yet encountered it, I urgently encourage you to seek it out.

At the time, though I’ve not revisited it, I enjoyed the Deal (2003). Partly, this comes from the simple novelty of seeing a system and a culture with which you are relatively familiar dramatised. I’m sure other Scots experience a similar frisson at the limited number of popular dramatisations in a Scottish setting, Ian Rankin's Rebus, Taggart et al. In last night’s episode of the former, I noticed that one of the characters was an MSP – I presume a Tory – and along with the nudgings of the Muse, it got me to wondering – what might a fictionalised Scottish parliamentary drama be like? Would it work, could it? I’ve read Boiling a Frog by Christopher Brookmyre, which trades in the imaginative space of a devolved Scotland and the Parliament, but wasn’t wholly convinced by it.

Perhaps a phantasmal version of the Foulkes to Secretary-General spangly fairy story I suggested earlier in the week?

Shambling Gurn: the George Foulkes Story (2012) is uplifting tale of a talentless soak who accidentally shuffles, like a confused extra, into the eye of the camera… From the voice of one crying for devolution from the Westminster wilderness to a triumphal entry to his parliament in 2007, Foulkes’ story is Scotland’s story, his face the leathery map of his land, thirsty for freedom. The lines slowly folding his august, statsman’s brow telling of his people’s travails and torments on their cobbled path to devolution...

My bladder is already pinching with excitement and anticipation! Moreover, watching Rebus yesterday, I think we have a strong presumptive candidate to play Georgie, in fellow Lothians look-alike, Ken Stott...