But we’re still good at doing drama. Shetland, Guilt and Granite Harbour are three recent examples, showcasing the best of Scottish writing, acting, design and production.
However, as BBC executives have constantly told me, the BBC Scotland headquarters at Pacific Quay in Glasgow once rang every Monday morning to the mid-morning travel trolley parade.
That’s when English executives – fresh off the first flight from London – planted themselves in Scotland for a few days to determine much of BBC Scotland’s output. Zoom calls might since have cut the travel bill, but the system remains the same.
And while there have been some sparkling Scottish drama successes, the budgets on which they’re produced can be dwarfed by one single English costume drama, such as the Tudors or Wolf Hall, breathtakingly brilliant though that drama was.
The message is clear: when it comes to Scottish drama, keep the costs down: not too much travelling; keep the cast numbers down; use tried and tested locations. It helps if you keep most of the action in the one area.
Stars of The Split (Image: Owen Humphreys/PA)
Split decision
The Lord alone knows how much money the BBC spent on a piece of self-indulgent psycho trash called The Split: Barcelona.
I’d struggled to get through two of the three series of this when it was simply called The Split, mainly as a self-flagellating task in seeing what happens when a cohort of affluent, middle-class television executives with too much money to spend commission something about affluent, middle-class London divorce lawyers with too much money.
Somehow, they’d managed to stretch it out over nine years before happily letting it die long after it’s natural life had expired. But no: someone obviously found a pile of cash that had to be spent before the end of the year and thus we got two episodes where – for no apparent reason – they transported the entire cast to Barcelona, or at least a millionaire resort just outside the city.
There was virtually no dialogue to speak of. They just emoted all over each other in every conceivable way about every conceivable situation.
It was a factory of feels. They were all doing violence to each other without the blood. It was how the English practice diplomacy.
One of them was listening to her dead boyfriend’s heart in another person while her sister and brother-in-law kept telling each other how much they love each other while conducting the longest divorce in television history.
Their other sister – an alcoholic kleptomaniac – has a new wean and thinks she’ll be a s***e mum.A vicar quite fancies the grieving sister and seeks to leverage the moment with a wee emote of his own.
The poor sod who fancies the soon-to-be-divorced sister gets told: “I want life, not a fantasy.” He doesn’t get a word in as his dreams hang by a gossamer thread of emotion.
Bloody awful
The maw – a vampire figure who’d have terrified the Prince of Darkness himself – gets a new man too.
Rather insensitively they have their reception in a graveyard just days after her daughter’s been weeping over the tomb of her suddenly deceased – and now disembowelled – boyfriend.
Then they all decide to go to Barcelona. What Catalonia did to deserve this shower is not made clear. We’re told it’s because a niece is marrying her Spanish boyfriend, so why isn’t the wedding in London?
And then you realise that being a drama about very rich London lawyers it really is a vampire flick updated for the present day and Generation Z where they all just emote people to death.
There’s a bit of 2025 yoga stuff where they throw pebbles into the sea to symbolise casting off all “the baggage”.
At the wedding they don’t even get properly howling with it.
They all take turns to make unconsciously comic speeches like a convention of Humanist celebrants. “Despite the swirling awfulness of the world, we’re born optimists. We’re born blindly hopeful, searching for the good. Faith is believing in something that you don’t entirely know because the waves of pessimism are always lapping at the ankles of righteousness,” – or something like that.
Another relationships lawyer says it was his hurt that was stopping him “moving on” because in half-a***d, kitchen-sink emotional dramas like this, everyone is trying to “move on” to some never defined better place.
(Tell you what, though, that fine actor Nicola Walker is good at doing the Al Pacino “acting with the eyes” thing.)
Then they sit on a rock overlooking the sea that looks like the road from Girvan to Stranraer. There’s a lot of walking about in slow motion and that other absurd device of 21st-century English melodrama: the slow-motion dance.
Brenda Blethyn bows out as Vera (Image: Owen Humphreys/PA)
Viva Vera
OF course, we’re all good at being critics and maybe I‘m missing something. Perhaps The Herald’s peerless television critic Alison Rowat can put me right.
I’m reminded of this observation by the late, great English comic actor Kenneth Williams on critics:
“They’re like eunuchs in a harem. They’re there every night, they see it done every night, but they can’t do it themselves.”
If you want to see English drama done right then I’d recommend the final two episodes of Vera after 14 series. I can give no higher accolade to this show and its curmudgeonly star than that it’s the best British police drama there’s ever been since The Sweeney.