Take the High Road ‘86

Scottish Television very kindly kept on employing me and asked me to join their soap opera Take The High Road to play evil woodcutter Jim Hunter.

It was a really good way to learn very fast about acting for the camera and also for dealing with dialogue and story lines that weren't always plausible!

The show was shot at the Gateway studios in Edinburgh, and each recording day we had to do the scenes as live, meaning that if we made a mistake we had to go back to the beginning. Also we had to finish by a certain time because the equipment or the signal was used for the nightly news (I didn't understand it at the time either). Anyway, this meant that there was always a tension to get it right and do it fast. 

One day we were against the clock and I was in a scene in Mr and Mrs Blair's living room. There was some glare from the pictures hanging on the walls and so to avoid it someone placed tangerines from the fruit bowl under the pictures so they would angle up a bit.  Then the scene started and Mr Blair came in rather angry, slammed the door, and loads of tangerines shot out from behind the pictures.  It was insane. 

They decided to live with a bit of glare!

Shadow of the Stone

Also made by Scottish Television for the ITV network, Shadow of the Stone is a six-part series about a girl and her alter ego from a century ago who had been burned at the stake as a witch. I played her boyfriend Tom, her boyfriend in both time zones.

Shirley Henderson made her professional debut in this series, directed by Leonard White. I remember that every time I was mentioned in the script it said I was 'lurking'. I also remember meeting for the part with Leonard and assuring him that I could sail. Actually the only sailing I had done was with the Boy Scouts at Monikie Reservoir years before, but luckily on the day I had to sail in the show it was the calmest and most windless day ever, so much so that it was actually really difficult for me to capsize my little dinghy!

Taggart

Taggart, was my first big TV role. I played Jamie, a boy who works in a chemist's shop who is wrongfully suspected of murder. Taggart was the name of the Glasgow detective played by Mark McManus, and the show is still running in the UK.

I was so excited when I got this part. It was the first time I had done any real acting on TV, and it was the beginning of quite a run of shows I did for Scottish television.  I remember finding it really hard to play a young Scottish boy because I'd just come out of drama school and had never played any character in my own voice.

The thing about being the chief suspect in a Taggart in those days was that everyone knew you couldn't really be the murderer because you were being focussed on too much and given too much screen time. Eventually in the last part of the third episode the chief suspect would be exonerated and there would be a mad dash to catch the real killer, who of course had been featured in the previous episodes but you were lead to believe he (or she in my case) was a red herring.

Taggart saw my first TV nude scene. I remember being in the studios at Cowcaddens in Glasgow (which were being razed to the ground in front of my very eyes when I stayed in an apartment building opposite them when we performed The Bacchae there in 2007) and when the time came for me to disrobe, the producer, Robert Love, made an announcement from the gallery saying that as I was about to show my pudendum there would be a closed set. I didn't even know I had a pudendum. (Robert is a very natty man, and we once joked that he and Victor and Barry had a time-share cravat scheme!)