"Airdrie Auteur"

In writing this brief memoir of Hugh, I'm struck by how much there is one could say about the man and his influence not only in television but also his contribution to cinema. If I must limit myself here to discussing Hugh's early television work let us not forget his later seminal additions to the grammar of cinema. To take one example, the influence of his "Bare Naked Girls Bank Heist" is clear in the work of Tarantino and Oliver Stone. Of course, neither of these directors would dare emulate Hugh's stylistic innovations. Recall that the action in "BNGBH", as it became known, centres on the robbing of The First City Bank Of Detroit. Who but Hugh would have dared transpose the action from Detroit to Belshill? And no one but Hugh would have filmed a supposed assault on the local branch of the Airdie Savings Bank without first asking permission.

I first met Hugh in the October of 1966. I had come up to Glasgow fresh from Cambridge, to train as a production assistant with David Dunlop at BBC Scotland. In those days, BBC Scotland was not the radical, innovative organisation we know today. In the mid-sixties, the revolution sweeping through the industry, especially in the field of drama, was largely ignored within the douce portals of Queen Margaret Drive.

In truth, local drama output made little attempt to confront the issues of the age. Thus, while the BBC in London commissioned the ground-breaking "Cathy Come Home" which led to the setting up of the charity Shelter, BBC Scotland offered, for local consumption only, "It's a disgrace!" a hard-hitting look at the problems of queues forming at the Auchtermuchty post office on pension day. Transmission led to the formation of a pressure group aiming to abolish post offices.

Thank goodness then for David Dunlop. As a young producer in BBC drama, David was keen to encourage innovative work, and in pushing through to transmission Hugh's largely autobiographical "Naw, no wi' a dug in it" David shocked local critical opinion. "Naw" was a gritty treatment of a family surviving in the Lanarkshire town of "Larkwell" by a judicious mix of burglary, car theft and seemingly gratuitous violence. While local opinion including, unfortunately, David's superiors within the BBC, was horrified at this seeming celebration of Lanarkshire thuggery, metropolitan critics loved the play, and BBC2 in London immediately approached Hugh to write the scripts for the next segments of what would become known as the "Larkwell" trilogy.

On the very day that David Dunlop attended an uncomfortable meeting with those superiors, Hugh rushed into our offices at Queen Margaret Drive, pausing only to collect his writer's fee for "Naw", (idiosyncratic Hugh always insisted on "cash in hand"), borrow another fifty pounds from myself and then he was gone, to catch the London train. Hugh and I had become very close over the preceding months and I regretted that the manner and speed of his departure did not allow me time to share my own little piece of news, but the artist must pursue his muse, in Hugh’s case, the Central to Euston train.

On his return to clear his desk, David expressed regret that Hugh had, through oversight, neglected to tell him about the move to London and wondered if they would work together in the future. Sadly, they would not. David was at least fortunate to secure work in New Zealand, developing drama for the country's nascent television service. And while David never fulfilled his early promise, "Mutton", his 26 part series documenting the history of Auckland farm folk, did enjoy local critical acclaim.

My position with the BBC was equally untenable and although I had enjoyed my brief sojourn working in the media, it was time to move on. Perhaps, like David and Hugh, I should have left Glasgow, but for pressing personal reasons I preferred to remain, quietly building a life for myself. At least my Cambridge degree and membership of the One True Church stood me in good stead as I took up a teaching post at the "Our Lady of Joined Up Writing" College in Clydebank.

Hugh's brief time working for BBC2 was eventful. As writer of the trilogy, Hugh demanded total artistic and, unusual to this day, financial control of the productions. With an eye for economy that would characterise all his work, Hugh elected to have the second segment of the Larkwell trilogy filmed in London. Thus "Who are you lookin' at?", his affectionate homage to Lanarkshire pub life, was filmed entirely in Camden. After surveying equity scale rates, Hugh elected to produce another stunning innovation. The cast of "Who" was made up entirely of the second year diploma year at RADA. That these young actors, desperate for TV exposure, all came from the Home Counties did not worry Hugh. He simply instituted a system of idiot boards, rendering phoenetically the rich patois of Lanarkshire for his young cast to read. The effect was stunning. Looking back at an old tape of the drama, it astonishes how the flat, dead monotones prefigure by years the style adopted in much popular drama today as does indeed the continuing use of the pub as central motif.

After "Who" was shown on BBC2, Hugh found himself feted by the metropolitan critics. Thus in April 1968, on Late Night Line Up, he was asked if the events portrayed in "Who" were to be taken as an exercise in actualite or to be seen as a fictive discourse around the iconography of masculinity. Hugh's reply was characteristically forthright: "Well, the bits I couldn't remember, I just made up".

I've written elsewhere on the curious character of media life in London at the time (see Chapter three of my "Auteur") and there is no space here to detail Hugh's happy relationship with the "Scottish Boys" media network or his membership of the Ham 'n' High Loyal Defenders Club. We need only note that this would prove a useful connection for Hugh after the controversy surrounding the still unscreened final segment of the Larkwell Trilogy threatened his career.

"Bang the big bloody drum" was to have been Hugh's final, elegiac settling of accounts with "Larkwell". I still possess a yellowing copy of the shooting script which details one day in the life of a colourful Lanarkshire flute band. The tone throughout is gentle, even a touch dull. The flavour of the whole piece is exemplified in this exchange between two of the band members enjoying the annual "Walk":

Walker I: "Well Peter it's certainly a nice day to be enjoying this parade while celebrating our Protestant heritage in a totally non-aggressive and non-threatening manner."

Walker 2:" I would certainly agree with you there James, there's nothing here that members of the Catholic community could take exception to. More tea?"

Nothing there to suggest that the shooting of "Bang" would lead to the BBC firing the entire production crew, that Hugh would be banned sine die from Broadcasting House or indeed that a Greek Cypriot Church just off Chalk Farm Road would suffer extensive fire damage.

At the time, police action was probably justified.

Hugh had perhaps gone a step too far in simply bussing a real flute band down to Camden from Lanarkshire to re-enact their annual Orange walk. And Hugh would have conceded that paying the band's expenses in cases of a fortified wine beverage was, in retrospect, a mistake. Especially, as Hugh later told the public enquiry, "The bastards had arsed the lot before we started. "In logistical terms, Hugh's failure to obtain police permission for the march sequence did contribute to the general sense of chaos surrounding the surviving fragments of footage of "Bang" that I have in my possession.

The running fights with the police, the collective decision by the band to burn down the building they took to be a "pineapple", these scenes in themselves all cry out cinema verite. But one moment crowns all of this and transforms Hugh from mere writer to auteur: I refer of course to the flying headbutt incident.

Thankfully, the few feet of film left fully record the moment. We see the BBC appointed director, St John Sinden, move into the shot, attempting to wrest what appears to be a petrol can from the hands of "Big Neillie", Hugh's brother and band leader. As the two wrestle for possession of the can, Hugh headbutts St John, allowing Neillie to continue on his way to the nearby Orthodox Church. As St John is attended by an ambulance man, Hugh advances on the camera enquiring "You didnae film that did ye?" The last few frames of footage record Hugh covering the lens with one hand as he throws a punch with the other. Astonishing. In this one scene Hugh breaks down the divide between artifice and actuality. The power of the scene has not diminished over the years, for when I screened this fragment at a recent media studies conference, the audience could do no more than sit in stunned silence, such is still its power.

Hugh's career after "Bang" was saved by the "Scottish Boys". Although he would never again work for the BBC, the Boys secured him work within the independent sector. Thus over a four year period up to his first foray into cinema, Hugh wrote and directed numerous crime and adventure serials for Sol Steinway's "Goliath Productions". All of these essays in genre were characterised by what we would now term extensive intertextual borrowings and a spare, almost skeletal, production style.

Indeed, so extensive were the borrowings that Steinway designed the productions to be shown only in Israel, thus avoiding, or perhaps evading, claims of copyright infringements. In truth, I would argue that contemporary charges of plagiarism were unfounded. It's clear now that Hugh's work within the genre prefigured by years the innovations more usually associated with crime series of the 80s and 90s. Consider as an example, "B Bikes"(1970), Hugh's take on the popular police dramas of the day. It concerned a crack team of Hasidic policemen enforcing kosher dietary rules in Tel Aviv. Ready, at any time, apart from midnight on Fridays, to furiously pedal their RSW 16s around, prosecuting restaurant owners found wilfully mixing milk and meat products.

Rather than film the production in Tel Aviv itself, Hugh shot the series in Camberwell, making extensive use of stock footage of Tel Aviv supplied by the Israeli tourist board, casting English actors and re-dubbing the dialogue into Hebrew in post-production. To get round potentially expensive problems in synching the Hebrew dialogue with the original English soundtrack, Hugh pulled what turned out to be a stylistic masterstroke. He simply made sure that as a character delivered a line, their back should always be to the camera. Never before had actors "ignored" the camera in such a literal way. If today we enjoy the indistinct dialogue of say, "NYPD Blue" or indeed, anything with Jimmy Nail in it, and accept the challenge of attempting to follow the plot, then we have Hugh to thank.

Hugh's association with Steinway ended in 1974 after working on ten productions. Steinway, an American, decided that the time was right to move out of television production in favour of other entertainment. It may well be that his subsequent project, opening an Ashkenazi casino in Atlantic City, did offend the local Italian American business community in some way, but this must remain an open question since Steinway vanished from public life completely in 1976.

With touching Neapolitan grace, the Italian community paid tribute to Steinway's memory and influence. Thus a roadbridge in Atlantic City, built by a construction company owned by Vinnie "Cement" Gramsci in 1977, bears a simple plaque: "To Sol Steinway wherever you are: we couldn't have built this without your support."

To use the vernacular, Hugh landed on his feet despite Sol's departure. In returning to America, Sol was anxious to avoid repatriating too much taxable income, so he therefore wrote off Goliath's production facilities and offered them en bloc to Hugh for a nominal sum. Nominal indeed, as things turned out, for Hugh elected to pay Sol via instalments, starting in 1976.