Once upon a time – fifty years or so ago – I went to the movies for the first time. The cinema, a converted cork factory known as the Korky (aka The Ardgowan) was situated on Weir Street, Tradeston. Closed in 1963, it was demolished in 1965. Enchanted by this early experience, ever since I’ve conflated cinema with memory and reality and myth – and the bizarre idea it was somehow connected to me. The film I saw that day was the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933) deemed a flop during its first run at the height of the Great Depression.

How an American movie made in the 1930s arrived at a Glasgow picture hall three decades later is lost knowledge but the message of Duck Soup – not least its prescient take on European sabre-rattling – resonated with its Glasgow slum-dwelling audience, whose lives on a good day mirrored the anarchic slapstick played out on screen: loud, fast-lipped extras in an overcrowded monochrome set, politically tuned to the key of socialism but repressed (in script jargon) by external reversals borne of internal weaknesses. The rest is history one might say, if only history didn’t have the nasty habit of repeating itself. Riots? This city wrote the book on it – and a worthy subject for a future blog.
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Democracy is a lie reads the graffito. As the peoples of North African and Middle Eastern nations voice dissent against their autocratic leaders, I’m caught short by the message sprayed on a wall on a Gorbals side street round the corner from the Citizen’s Theatre. On a biting cold day I pick over the remains of the blowdown of one of the Norfolk Court high-rises and wonder, what would the peoples of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Libya think if they ever washed up in this city? [read more]

Taggart, STV’s perennial cop show, returned to our screens a few weeks ago. For those who’ve never seen it, Taggart endures as a popular example of the crime procedural, despite its spell-it-out dialogue and declamatory acting. To promote this latest outing the show’s legendary strapline – there’s been a murder – features in an ambitious trailer displaying jaundiced shots of Glasgow where police tape spans every corner and crevice; the entire city posing as crimescene. Even the local branch of Waterstone’s is cashing in. On the first floor, lately devoted to all things criminal, I find a shelf headed There’s been a murderrr (sic) doubtless created by the same designer responsible for the signage in their bioghapy (sic) section. A bookshop. I mean to say…
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Until recent times the Glasgow Fair Fortnight meant an enforced two-week break in mid-July, when most of the city’s workforce departed to points south and west, known colloquially as going doon the watter. Rothesay on the Isle of Bute was the resort of choice within our family, having rejected Dunoon after a miserable holiday spent in quarantine when my siblings and me went down with rubella and when on another occasion I almost drowned, fully clothed, in the town’s outdoor swimming pool. Oh, happy days…
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As Jason Bourne hits 95kph on the M10 from Sheremetyevo Airport to Central Moscow, I’m on the back seat of his VW Passat wondering if I’ll reach my destination in one piece. This is stunt driving like I’ve never known in a city that already feels familiar. Under heavy skies, wide highways are fringed with tower blocks, toothstumps in the mouth of the Moscow suburbs, all the more prominent on this vast, flat terrain. This is cityscape on a scale hard to fathom, in spite of the taxi driver’s efforts to compress time and space as he swerves and weaves across lanes onto the M9, the main drag into town. Any faster and I’ll either be dead or by some process of divine will and magic, find myself back on the M8 and home in time for dinner.
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After a long cold winter, I return to my shedquarters. On the desk sits a forlorn catalogue – Witness to Mortality, published in 1997 to coincide with an exhibition by Joseph McKenzie, a photographer famed for his iconic Gorbals Children. On the cover is a bleak landscape titled The New Lifestyle 2 (Red Road Flats Newly Opened). Shot in 1968, the black and white image shows a long, empty road, slick with rain, where a solitary vehicle drives towards the vanishing point. Centre frame, a black telegraph pole divides the image, beneath which a woman in a winter coat faces the camera. On the right, startling and mysterious in the fog are two tower blocks. For me, this one picture sums up Glasgow, a heartrending sign of things to come, but somehow not the future.
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Anyone entering by the front door may have noticed that The Devil’s Plantation recently won the BAFTA New Talent Award in the Interactive category, an unexpected but very welcome prize. But unlike the previous awards given that evening and prior to the announcement, this category prompted a long speech referring to new media and young talent. In a mix of elation and rare confidence I mounted the stage where during my fleeting moment of glory I delivered thank-yous and a reminder that ‘young’ ought not to be equated with ‘new’, all the while thinking but not stating my conviction that talent is talent regardless of age, gender, race or creed. I got a warm response – I think – not that I recall much, being whisked off for the obligatory photograph that in the way of these events I will probably never get to see.

The ceremony was staged at the Mitchell Theatre, formerly known as St. Andrew’s Halls, originally designed in 1873 by James Sellars, an acolyte of Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, and built between 1873-1878 in the Greek Revivalist style. The exterior, with statuary by John Mossman, resembles a Hollywood silent-era extravaganza and thankfully is almost intact. Much has been said of the Grand Hall, with its capacity of 4000 and near-perfect acoustics.

Tragically in late October 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile crisis, the Grand Hall staged a boxing tournament after which, according to Frank Wordsall, the building went down in flames, yet another fire in a long list of fires resulting in the loss of Glasgow’s most precious buildings. During refurbishment, St. Andrew’s Halls – the grand room in particular – was greatly reduced in scale. The main arena, renamed The Mitchell Theatre, now has a capacity of 418. Back then, with mutually-assured destruction occupying our minds, the fire only made it to page 2 of The Evening Times.

Apart from memories, all that remains of the Grand Hall is a photograph, a reminder of how small our ambitions and achievements are today. With this in mind, I note that the 2010 BAFTA New Talent Awards has not received any coverage. A sign of the Times?

Tonight it was announced that my love-labour, The Devil’s Plantation is nominated in the Interactive Category for the 2010 BAFTA New Talent Awards. Needless to say I’m delighted. But I’m also very pleased for my only competitor, a wonderful woman, Helen Jackson, from Binary Fiction whose website The Lost Book, I actually stumbled on last year. And a very good site it is too. I reckon she’ll win, and I mean it sincerely because her work is so lovely and accessible whereas mine may be perceived as a bit too leftfield/arty/whatever.

It’s odd for me to be in this place, not least because ten years ago, I pretty much swept the board at the 2000 BAFTA New Talent Awards with my first feature film, One Life Stand. Truth is, I’m just pleased that my peers, especially in the new media field, deemed my efforts worthy enough to be counted. The result will be announced on the 19th March but either way I’ll celebrate whoever wins because any recognition for the work we do – too often un/low paid – is still worth doing because you can’t do it unless you love it, which makes us all privileged.