Peter McDougall
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Peter McDougall, (born Greenock, Scotland, 1947) is a television playwright whose major success was in the 1970s.
McDougall claims to have had very little schooling and barely even read books, and began working in the shipyards of Glasgow when he was fourteen. Here he worked alongside future comedian and actor Billy Connolly. Depressed by the harsh conditions and unfulfilled by the menial work, he left Scotland and moved to London where he worked as a house-painter.
It was while painting Colin Welland's house that McDougall impressed the actor and writer when relating tales of being the drum major in the Orange parade as a teenager. He was advised to try writing a television play about this and the result was Just Another Saturday, which McDougall wrote in secret and hid even from his wife. Once completed, the script was sent to the BBC Play for Today team, who were enormously impressed but rejected the play because of the sensitive subject matter. McDougall was however asked to try again, and wrote a more intimate piece Just your Luck based on his sister's wedding, and again exploring sectarian divide in its story of a Protestant girl who finds herself pregnant by a Catholic boy.
The play caused a furore in Scotland, many people appalled by its portrayal of the people's earthiness and prejudice. However, there was much positive praise too, one viewer even going so far as to say it was "the most exciting debut since Look Back in Anger."
At this point the director John MacKenzie began enquiring after the script of Just Another Saturday and managed to get the play into production, only to then find the piece banned after the head of the Glasgow police said that the script would cause "bloodshed on the streets in the making and in the showing". After a year MacKenzie managed to persuade Head of Television Alasdair Milne to press ahead with the play, although some scenes were eventually filmed in Edinburgh to minimise controversy.
The finished film, the script of which was barely changed from the first draft, proved to be a televisual masterpiece. It won massive acclaim, was repeated several times, and won its author the Prix Italia.
McDougall was now hot property and followed his success up with a short kitchen comedy for BBC2, A Wily Couple and another Play for Today, The Elephants' Graveyard. The latter began life as a rather similar piece to Just Another Saturday but under MacKenzie's guidance became a wonderful, lyrical fable of the hopes and dashed ambitions of the modern Scottish male.
Several other television projects ensued, including an aborted sitcom, until McDougall and MacKenzie collaborated again on their final Play for Today Just A Boy's Game. Starring blues singer Frankie Miller this was the story of Greenock razor gangs and specifically of one man's life of alcohol and violence over a twenty-four hour period. His most violent and yet strangely most endearing piece, Just A Boy's Game in some of its most haunting sequences seems to play like a Clydeside Martin Scorsese piece, Frankie Miller expertly capturing the slow, unflustered menace of the true hard-man. The film was also notable for brilliant supporting performances from a then unknown Gregor Fisher, the flamboyant Ken Hutchison, comedian Hector Nicol and Jean Taylor Smith.
McKenzie and McDougall's last collaboration was on the STV film A Sense of Freedom, based on the autobiography of Glaswegian gangster Jimmy Boyle, detailing his crimes and subsequent reform. It won enormous viewing figures but did not speak with quite the individual voice of McDougall's previous work, and despite hard work from David Hayman in the lead role, is something of a curiosity. A DVD, heavily edited and dubbed, was released in 2003.
In the Eighties MacKenzie moved into movies full time after the success of The Long Good Friday and McDougall has never found another director as suited to his material. Shoot For The Sun, a BBC drama about Edinburgh's heroin problem, and the disastrous Down Where The Buffalo Go starring Harvey Keitel, a BBC Scotland production, were dreary and undisciplined, and 1993's Down Among The Big Boy's was equally lacklustre.
In 2004 McDougall wrote three short dramas for the stage starring Robbie Coltraine, which were presented at the Oran Mor in Glasgow as part of the lunchtime theatre event A Play, A Pie and A Pint. He was at this point working on remakes of The Maggie and Whisky Galore but spoke out furiously when his proposed casting of Robbie Coltraine and Robert Carlyle was passed on in favour of English actors.
Fiction frequently outweighs fact in articles about McDougall. He has on many occasions claimed to journalists that he wrote The Long Good Friday, has written over twenty-five movies and won five BAFTAs, none of which is true. Despite his fiery personality and his tendency as a writer towards repetition and indulgence, he is unjustly neglected as one of Scotland's great playwrights, simply because his work has almost entirely been for television.
Recently however many Scottish writers, actors and directors including Robert Carlyle, Andrew MacDonald, Simon Farquhar and Gilles McKinnon have acknowledged the huge debt they have to McDougall for being the first one to portray Scottish low-life with the right look and the right accent, his dramas beaming into over ten million living rooms at a time when television drama commanded huge audiences, amongst them those who would grow up to follow in McDougall's footsteps. Despite the respect he has amongst a younger generation, he has been mostly critical of recent forays into similar territory by others, publicly denouncing films such as Trainspotting and Sweet Sixteen.
