Jonathan Murray

Introduction: Scotch on the Box: Television Drama in Scotland, 1952–1990

Despite its position as possibly the most ubiquitous of all post-Second World War popular cultural media forms, and the wealth of existing scholarship on multiple aspects of British TV drama, television occupies a surprisingly marginal position within the study of modern Scottish culture. Despite being a markedly younger (and, in terms of cumulative production volume, a markedly smaller) indigenous representational tradition, Scottish cinema has attracted several monograph and anthology publications since the appearance of the pioneering Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television in 1982. Scottish television drama, however, still awaits the publication of any book solely dedicated to it as a subject. This special issue of Visual Culture in Britain therefore aims to highlight Scottish television drama’s considerable cultural and scholarly importance and encourage enhanced levels of academic research in this area. Tellingly enough, given television’s traditionally sidelined status within Scottish cultural studies, this special issue derives its inspiration from the AHRC-funded project, ‘The History of Forgotten Television Drama in the UK’, based at Royal Holloway, University of London. That project ran from September 2013 until June 2017 and placed a specific emphasis upon the critical and historical investigation of television drama from the British nations and regions. As a part of the project, a conference entitled ‘Television Drama: The Forgotten, the Lost and the Neglected’ took place at the University of London in April 2015 and included a panel devoted to Scottish television drama. All the papers from that panel are included in this special issue, along with other work undertaken as part of the ‘Forgotten TV Drama’ research project. John Cook’s essay plays a vital scene-setting function for this special issue. Cook casts light on the historical origins of television drama production in Scotland by exploring the careers of key figures such as James MacTaggart (1928–74) and Pharic Maclaren (1923–80). Through a comprehensive account of those men’s local and BBC network activities, Cook shows both how and why enhanced historical understanding of one televisual tradition also results in better comprehension of others. Specifically, Cook’s analysis pinpoints the dense, mutually informing connections between the history of television drama produced from and/or about Scotland and the evolving (and frequently contentious) debates about drama’s place within the BBC’s UK-wide public service remit between the mid 1960s and early 1990s. Cook’s detailed historical account also possesses ample contemporary relevance. His work reminds readers that the idea of devolved and distinctive television production

Containing the Spectre of the Past: The Evolution of the James Bond Franchise during the Daniel Craig Era

The notable commercial and critical success of the four James Bond films made with actor Daniel Craig playing the lead role – Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, GB/Cze/USA/Ger/Bah, 2006), Quantum of Solace (Marc Forster, GB/USA, 2008), Skyfall (Sam Mendes, GB/USA, 2012) and Spectre (Sam Mendes, GB/USA, 2015) – has, over the past decade, provoked a sustained increase in the amount of academic commentary and debate around the Bond character, his fictional universe and multimedia incarnations. Working from the premise that Spectre knowingly advertises itself as a possible conclusion to the Craig era, this article attempts to identify and discuss a range of key thematic trends in Bond filmmaking (and Bond criticism) in the years since Casino Royale. Such themes include: enhanced attention to the fictional spy’s body as a producer of textual and popular cultural meaning; Bond’s complex relationship with evolving ideas of British national identity and state structures; and the questionable extent to which the Craig Bond films constitute a meaningful revision of the 007 film franchise’s traditional aesthetic and thematic defining characteristics.

Alliteration, America and Authorship: The Television Drama of John Byrne

Creative polymath John Byrne enjoys a secure and substantial international reputation within the graphic and theatrical arts, and as a seminal figure within late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century Scottish culture. Yet Byrne’s sustained engagement with screenwriting and screen directing practices between the late 1980s and late 1990s constitutes a critically under-examined aspect of his career to date. Moreover, such neglect is also symptomatic of a wider lack of attention paid to television within the study of modern Scottish culture. This article casts light on an important aspect of, and period within, Byrne’s creativity to date. In doing so, it also seeks to offer an illustrative demonstration of television drama’s relevance to the questions of changing identity politics – national, subnational and supranational – that have dominated Scottish cultural studies in recent decades. The article achieves those aims through extended textual analysis of Byrne’s two best-known screen works, the television serials Tutti Frutti (1987) and Your Cheatin’ Heart (1990). It identifies and discusses a range of common thematic preoccupations (the influence of American culturewithin post-Second World War Scotland; changing patterns of Scottish gender identities) and authorialapproaches (intense linguistic experimentation; use of popular cultural intertexts to impart narrativestructure and substance) shared by the two works. In this way, the article establishes both some of the idiosyncratic defining terms of Byrne’s televisual practice and some of the reasons why these have rendered him such an important figure within Scottish culture since the late 1970s.

Give a dog a bone: representations of Scotland in the popular genre cinema of Neil Marshall

The best-known and most influential cinematic image of Scotland is that which constructs the country as the civilised modern world’s northern boundary and ideological antithesis. This historically venerable representational tradition incorporates Brigadoon (d. Vincente Minnelli, USA, 1954), Brave (d. Mark Andrews/Brenda Chapman/Steve Purcell, USA, 2012) and much else in between. The following essay examines what is perhaps the most explicit and extended twenty-first century manifestation to date of Scotland’s classic celluloid stereotype: the oeuvre of British popular genre filmmaker Neil Marshall. Analysis of this director’s Scottish trilogy – Dog Soldiers (GB/Lux/USA, 2002), Doomsday (GB/USA/SA/Ger, 2008), and Centurion (GB/Fr, 2010) – suggests not simply the historical persistence of a particular cultural representation of a particular national culture and identity, but also the varied, and often non-nationally specific, thematic uses to which Scottish cinematic stereotypes can be and are put. That conclusion suggests a number of possible future directions for Scottish cinema criticism more generally. First, the need for a more inclusive critical engagement with popular genre cinema, a hitherto under-examined area with the study of Scotland’s relationship with the moving image. Second, the extent to which critics might usefully approach Scottish-set and -themed cinema in a more multifaceted manner than has frequently been the case in historical terms. Neil Marshall’s oeuvre exemplifies the complex interplay of nationally and non-nationally specific images and ideas that exist within many popular filmic representations of Scotland.