I'm Frankie Boyle. There comes a time in every comedian's career
when he decides to do travelogues. In fact, among comedians,
the phrase "Gone to do travelogues" is slang for when someone dies.
I've started to tour round some smaller theatres in Scotland
to get my show ready for a big run in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
I've decided that I really need to reconnect with the place.
It's my first tour of Scotland since 2012,
and back then, I was mainly doing it
to avoid the One Show sofa at the London Olympics.
Bringing my own views and sometimes my own facts,
I'm going to explore and learn about
important Scottish historical figures
and the many and varied ways in which English people killed them.
I'll be reunited with the toymaker who built me
and find out what now counts as foreplay in East Kilbride.
I'll come to regret my extensive genital piercings,
attempt to contact the spirits
of some of Scotland's greatest serial killers,
and travel back in time to Scotland in the 1970s.
And you'll even get to watch my senseless death
through the eyes of a military drone.
Before a tour begins, I usually warm up
and road test my material at a comedy club in Glasgow.
I think the most I laughed last year...
I actually fell onto my knees laughing at this, right.
I went to a personal trainer in Glasgow.
That's not the joke. LAUGHTER
I went to a personal trainer who had a moustache.
Now, when I tell English audiences that,
they never quite hook in immediately,
but we know, us Scottish people,
that any Scottish guy with a moustache is fucking psychotic.
Remember Graeme Souness back in the day?
DEEP, SLOW VOICE: They all speak as if they're trying to hold back
some kind of dreadful memory.
LAUGHTER
And this guy, he actually said this to me, right.
He went, "Mr Boyle, I see from your food diary
"that yesterday, for dinner, you ate a bag of chocolate money."
LAUGHTER
I didn't realise you could get sacked by a personal trainer.
MOBILE PHONE RINGS
That would have been better if you'd put your fucking phone off.
Yeah, that's great. Turn it up. The glockenspiel. Why not?
LAUGHTER
This is just the right time to draw attention to yourself. Who's that?
Was it him? See, when you were born...
LAUGHTER
..the doctor said to your mother, "Do you want gas?"
And she said, "Surely it would be quicker
"to just drown it in a bucket." LAUGHTER
You can never quite be sure when you tour
because you can assemble all the ingredients
but it's like making a souffle or something.
It's still got to work
and it's got to work in the rooms that you're playing,
so to take anything out of wee clubs and go, "This all works now,"
and go, "Well, this is something that 2,000 people will laugh at
"in a big theatre on a Friday night,"
is like two different things.
But I think there's always been a colonial side to charity in Britain.
Look at it at the minute in Yemen, right?
Britain is the number two provider of bombs and weapons
to Saudi Arabia that they use to bomb Yemen
to engineer a famine in Yemen.
And at the same time, we're the number one provider
of aid to Yemen. And why not?
Life gives you Yemen, you give Yemen aid.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
That one's staying in.
LAUGHTER
Stand-up comics travel loads,
but usually only see the country accidentally
in a reflection on their phone screen
or at speed as they're being chased out of town.
But this time, I'm going to get to know more about the land
I'm passing through, how it has shaped Scotland
and how it shapes us.
I like watching the countryside roll by.
I remember one time, I was doing a gig in Rothesay,
so I got the train down.
There was an old guy sitting beside me the whole way
and it's just lashing rain.
And he just looks at the fields the whole way down there,
and then just before we got there, he turned round to me
and he went, "Fuck being a sheep."
This journey is taking me east from Aberdeen,
across the north-east coast and then onto the west coast,
through some of Scotland's most dramatic landscapes.
Most of it's amazing.
The only towns you really have to worry about
are places that call themselves the gateway to somewhere,
do you know what I mean? Gateway to Midlothian, or something.
Just basically saying, "There's nothing here, keep going."
The rural north-east of Scotland is sparsely populated,
so it's perfect for people who crave a quieter, isolated life,
and who may or may not be on the run from the law.
Perfect, too, for people who want to stave off a nervous breakdown
by staring at conifers.
I'm thinking of buying a hut up here myself,
so that when the wheels of my mind finally come off,
I can run up and down these beautiful glens
wearing a crown of pine cones
and screaming my jokes at confused otters.
I'm en route to meet with a man who's chosen to live
in splendid isolation among the shallow graves
of the dense forests of Rhynie in Aberdeenshire.
I don't know how the production have set up a meeting with a hermit.
I assume they've just shaved a time and date
into a badger's back and released it into the woods.
It'll be interesting to meet someone who's officially antisocial,
cos I consider myself to be pretty...
a pretty gifted amateur at being antisocial.
But what if I meet him
and, like, compared to me he's like Graham Norton or something?
Jake Williams' place is a fixer-upper, for sure,
and it comes with enough firewood
to see anyone through the impending apocalypse.
Nice to meet you, man. Good, come in.
It's a great part of the world here, man. It's beautiful. It's great.
How long have you been up here?
Long enough that I don't tell people how long I've been here.
That's my sign of permanence, when you've got a treehouse in a tree
that you planted yourself when you came. Oh, right, cool.
As an occasional break in Jake's seclusion,
he's been marketing one of the most bizarre holiday lets in Britain.
It's a caravan up a tree! Is it totally safe, Jake?
Cos it sort of looks a bit like... Don't worry. It's perfectly safe!
It kind of reminds me
of a really low-level Scottish Dignitas, do you know what I mean?
THEY LAUGH
What sort of people come up? It's young couples.
A lot of them are on these mad tours,
where they were at Loch Ness yesterday
and they're just stopping the night here
and they're away to Edinburgh Castle tomorrow and stuff.
How do book it? Do people book online? It's Airbnb.
Can I go up and have a look? Might as well, now you're here.
Luckily, I'm not afraid of heights, although it turns out
I do have a mild phobia of falling through the rotten floorboards
of a caravan up a tree and plummeting to the ground below.
This is where I'd like to come
if I was in witness protection or something. Aye.
I don't think anyone's going to find me here.
Well, that's a niche market to get into.
FRANKIE LAUGHS Yeah, witness protection Airbnb.
It's a wild wee spot. What about when it's windy?
Well, there's been a few storms and, touch wood, it's still here.
Imagine if you owned this caravan originally.
Aye. And you went on your holidays in it with your kids,
just imagining one day it's going to be up a tree.
Do you ever feel you're kind of tied to one spot now?
Do you miss travelling? No, I don't think so.
I always find travelling really hard and then I love the memories.
You know that whole thing of trying to live in the moment.
I'm never convinced by that.
Live in the moment like a heroin addict or a dog.
THEY LAUGH
I'm always thinking we should live in the moment,
but I'm always thinking what will I have for my tea tonight?
I tried to get into that as well
and then I thought I love thinking about the past and the future. Aye.
The moment's often a little dull. Not this moment, though!
This is, if anything, filled with fear...
..that we're going to plummet to the ground.
Have you ever seen Top Gear? It's a car programme. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
This is kind of like the aftermath of one of their stunts,
do you know what I mean?
No, it would be burnt.
I felt he was a lovely guy.
He was obviously a slightly eccentric guy, but not a hermit.
The caravan up the tree felt genuinely quite precarious.
I was thinking, if his main customers are couples,
that place has seen some of the most careful sex.
It must be proper prison strokes up there.
Scotland's not just for those who want to be alone.
There's also room for those who want to be alone together.
50 miles west of Jake's house in Rhynie
is Scotland's best-known commune.
The founders of the commune arrived here back in 1962,
which makes Findhorn the same age as Jon Bon Jovi.
Findhorn has grown from an idea in the '60s
into a thriving commune of around 300 people.
It has an eco-village, its own currency
and, sadly, its own theatre.
Mari Hollander has lived in the commune for over 40 years
and is taking me to the place
where the founders of Findhorn toiled for years
to turn salty sand dunes into a land of plenty.
Another fucking caravan.
So, even though this is a sandhill - and when you see
some of the land elsewhere, you'll see it's really pure sand dunes -
they worked it with muck and seaweed and anything they could find,
which made a big hit in about the late '60s,
when everything was interesting. Right. Yay, '60s!
So, people started to come and visit.
What had they done to make so many species of plants and flowers
and beginning of trees and fruit trees grow
in such a short time on such an inhospitable piece of soil?
That's interesting to me as well, you know,
the idea that you would have started in a tradition
from the late '60s and '70s, I assume, yourself,
of... There was a counterculture, as it was called then,
and there was, like,
the anti-Vietnam War movement and all that stuff.
There was a lot of hope attached to that stuff. Mm.
How do you feel... How do you feel about now?
I feel like it's more of a discipline to stay hopeful,
I have to say. Right.
I'm determined to, to still see that it's ignorance and fear
and that can be healed, that can be overcome, that can be met.
It's a less buoyant atmosphere, clearly, in the world today.
Because of, like, climate change and all that stuff?
Yeah, all the crises that are unfolding,
all the dimensions of planetary health
that are at the limits of viability,
be it the seas or the climate or the land.
We have to turn it around.
Findhorn is not in Just Eat's delivery radius,
so self-sufficiency is key.
I joined head gardener Luke Whitney to try to be of some use,
but also for respite from a biblical downpour.
It's like Blade Runner out there. We can barely hear ourselves.
So, you work up here all the time? I've been here about 12 years now.
And what kind of stuff do you grow up here?
From lettuce through to tomatoes, cucumbers,
chard, kale, cabbage in the winter.
We estimate, this time of year, around 80% of all the produce
coming from here will be from this garden.
So, what are you doing here?
Trying to sow a couple of trays of lettuce.
So, just putting them into the modules here
and it's a very methodical, very meditative type of job.
I don't even know if I have the fine motor skills to do that.
Can I do that one at the top? I'd like to test your motor skills.
I'm tempted to just lick my finger. You can do if you want. Yeah?
Nothing wrong with that, yeah.
Because I was an alcoholic for so long,
I think if I tried to do them by picking up,
it would be like one of those fairground machines. The DTs.
THEY LAUGH
Some people just spend hours doing this, you know.
And does it mean you spend a lot of time alone?
No, you've come on a very quiet day.
Usually, we have huge groups of people here.
That struck me as a wee bit of a contradiction,
is, like, there's, to some extent,
people moving away from society to here, and yet,
when you're here, you have to be much more community-minded.
I don't think everyone who's here is naturally an extrovert
and that's also something I struggle with, personally, myself at times.
Yeah, I've often struggled with sociability.
I don't trust extroverts on some level, do you know what I mean?
What are you so happy about? Kind of with you on that one, yeah.
I've been enjoying meeting other antisocials,
so I'm pleased it's 12.30
and everyone gets to swim to the lunch hall.
There's more organic veg here
than I could ever leave on the side of my plate in a lifetime.
So, we're going to bless the food.
Welcome to Saturday lunch.
And we have rice, potatoes, lasagne,
various vegetables, hot and cold,
some beautiful salads and a green bean and potato soup.
So, let's just take a moment to appreciate
all the people who've been involved in making this meal -
the farmers, the growers, our gardeners,
and then the people who bring it to our door
so that we can make it for you.
And may this food nourish us on all levels.
Blessings on the meal.
Thank you for cooking it. ALL: Thank you.
Yes, double carbs, here I come! What you need on a day like today.
I've carb-loaded enough to run a marathon
- or sleep in a people carrier -
but I want to show my gratitude before I leave.
Leaving a wee donation in the bowl there.
I did an exchange, got some of the local poppy there, the local sheets.
Not a challenge to a good forger, I wouldn't think.
I think a good forger up here could have
all the sprouts they could handle. That was good.
The journey south from Findhorn to Oban takes me through Glencoe,
some of Scotland's most beautiful landscape.
I feel a lot in common with the land here.
Like me, it has a rugged and dramatic beauty,
and we've both caused several ramblers to go missing.
Over 300 years ago, these valleys became infamous
when 30 members of the MacDonald Clan were massacred here,
and it still has an air of the uncanny.
Glencoe, one of the most beautiful places in Scotland.
People come here from all over the world to admire its grandeur,
clamber about aimlessly and defecate behind clumps of gorse.
Of course, it's always associated
with the Massacre of Glencoe in 1692,
an example of what could happen
when you wanted to pacify the Highlands before heroin.
It's fairly typical of Scotland's relationship with history,
though we still think of it as a story of clan warfare,
when it actually happened by order of William of Orange
on the advice of the Lowland Scots who served him,
and the task was entrusted to a regiment in the British Army.
The DJ and sex monster Sir Jimmy Savile owned a house at Glencoe
until his "death" in 2011.
Here, the elderly pervert would sit long into the Highland evenings,
quietly sipping Scotch and molesting fell walkers.
Here, he entertained such luminaries as his friend Margaret Thatcher
and the demon Adramelech, the ancient Assyrian commander of hell.
Why did Savile want to live on the site of a massacre?
Well, we can safely assume that the DJ was a time vampire.
Cross-legged in his pentagram,
his nostrils would flare as his foetid soul, hungry for pain,
sniffed back through the centuries,
latching onto the death screams of the Clan MacDonald.
Savile would teleport back into the mayhem.
In his demonic form, he would happily roam the killing field,
gorging on the panic.
He would grant dying wishes to Highlanders,
who would then find their soul inexplicably hurled
into the body of a Boy Scout on a roller-coaster.
His activities have had an enduring legacy.
The Gaelic word for "demon" is pronounced...
THICK ACCENT: ..tracksuit-wearing paedophile.
HE LAUGHS
Scotland often sees itself as a liberal,
cultural and sexual paradise.
But when it comes to who owns the land,
Scotland is one of the most backward-looking countries
in the world.
This is the village of Inveraray,
which sits on land owned by the Duke of Argyll,
one of the largest landowners in Scotland.
In the 18th century,
the then Duke of Argyll decided to demolish
and rebuilt it here, on the shores of Loch Fyne,
so didn't spoil the view from his magnificent new castle.
To consider why Scotland's land ownership remains
in the hands of so few people, I've met up with Andy Wightman,
who's been campaigning for land reform in Scotland for decades.
The thing about Britain, Scotland as well,
is we never had a revolution,
whereas in Continental Europe, you had the French Revolution,
and that, basically,
chopped the heads off the king and the aristocrats.
It gave the church its parishes, turned them into municipalities,
civil administrative units, and that swept right across Europe.
And it changed the law on inheritance,
so children had the legal right to inherit land.
That swept across Continental Europe,
but it never happened in Britain, so even today,
children in Scotland do not have the legal right to inherit property.
And that's been a critical ingredient
in the perpetuation of land and power.
We only abolished primogeniture -
you know, the eldest male son shall inherit - in 1968.
So, the eldest would inherit the estate
and they would keep it together, and then the other children had nothing.
And that was a factor in colonialism because the second son would go,
"I'd better go and invade India then."
That's right, yeah, or run somebody else's estate.
And the daughters would get married off to other landed classes, yeah.
We could revolutionise the ownership
and occupation of land in Scotland if we wanted to.
So, we don't have the will then. Cos I remember,
when Donald Trump built his golf course
on a Site of Special Scientific Interest,
that was a really depressing moment, I think, for people who thought,
"Things can be different in the future in Scotland."
He's not even President then. He's just some guy.
God's twisted some haemorrhoids into a balloon animal
and we've gone, "OK, let's give him whatever he wants."
He was convinced of his right to do what he liked.
He didn't even know, at the time,
that he would have to get planning consent and stuff.
He saw that as an inconvenience.
And the condition was, "OK, you can destroy this beautiful dune system
"because we think that the benefits, in terms of jobs and stuff,
"balances that out."
The tragedy is he was never forced to put a bond down
or any guarantee that these jobs would come.
So, he destroyed the dune, built the golf course,
and he still hasn't provided the jobs,
so actually, we've done it all for nothing.
The fact is that anyone from anywhere in the world can buy
anything they like in Scotland, no questions asked.
The wealthy buy up chunks of the Highlands for tax reasons.
The ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum,
owns 70,000 acres.
But he's not buying any more -
not since he found out how women get treated here.
Fewer than 500 people own half the land in Scotland.
Indeed, the real reason
the royals holiday in Balmoral is so they can use Scottish staff
to teach their children about mortality,
in the same way that you or I would let them have hamster.
IN ENGLISH ACCENT: I'm afraid old Jock's dead, son, but he was 35.
In Scottish years, that's two World Cup qualifications.
Aristocrats get their power from vast estates,
but north of Inveraray,
there's a radically different way of generating power.
I'm heading along the River Awe to get inside Ben Cruachan.
We're not dogging. Ben Cruachan is a mountain -
a mountain that I'm about to take a hard left into,
like Buddy Holly's pilot,
because about a mile inside is a very unusual power station.
This dam was part of a massive building project across Scotland
to create hydroelectric power,
but it's what's underneath the dam that's most remarkable.
Four huge turbines produce massive amounts of electricity
that's supplied all across Britain when it's needed most.
I love the decor.
It's all that kind of Scottish 1970s school and chapel kind of thing.
You know, like you'd see Stations of the Cross
in a modern church when you were a kid.
And that's the legend there of Ben Cruachan,
which is an old Celtic legend, that there was a witch,
and her job was to put a slab over a spring every night,
over a wee fountain.
And she forgot to do it one night and she fell asleep
and it flooded the whole place, and that's where Loch Awe comes from
and that's where the River Awe comes from.
It really just reminds me of church as a boy.
I used to do the readings at Mass when I was a wee boy,
so I had to dress up really smart every Sunday.
Except for midnight Mass at Christmas,
when I had to dress up as a shepherd.
HE LAUGHS
Hundreds of men hollowed out this mountain more than 50 years ago.
Some lost their lives in the harsh working conditions.
Ian MacLean is one of the men who became known as the Tunnel Tigers.
What was health and safety like in those days?
Some days, you couldn't see maybe about 20 feet in front of you.
Smoke, diesel off the dump trucks, and if they were blasting,
there was gelignite. It was quite uncomfortable, you know.
It's a dangerous life, isn't it? It's quite dangerous, aye.
I remember, one time, there was four guys came.
They were coalminers,
and by the 11 o'clock tea break, they'd left
and said they wouldn't work in the conditions we were working in.
We were too young. We didn't know any better.
It's a very impressive place. Opened by the Queen.
Mad life, being the Queen.
You've got to get up one morning and go and open a mountain.
This is, like, 50 years ago though, isn't it?
So, probably, like, we're two or three years away
from a mountain being hollowed out on Grand Designs.
AS KEVIN MCCLOUD: Philip and Tamsin are hollowing out a mountain,
but as Christmas approaches,
the slate hasn't arrived and the twins are on their way.
HE LAUGHS
Those people are always in crisis, aren't they?
There's always twins on their way.
Performing stand-up in Oban isn't as heroic
as blasting away at the inside of a mountain,
but it can be equally daunting.
I used to do gigs in Oban when I started out in comedy
and they'd just kind of put on a night somewhere.
I remember there was one in a Mexican restaurant in Oban.
Er... And one time, I went up
and they were really drunk, the crowd.
And the first act on died,
as anybody can in a Mexican restaurant in Oban.
And then the second act was a kind of comedy poet.
She came on and she went,
"The first thing I have to say is I'm not actually a comedian."
And someone went, "Not a-fucking-nother one."
HE LAUGHS
I hope they've cheered up since then.
Oban's always been best known as a thriving fishing town
and you'll still get crabs here.
But I've got a day before my gig in Oban's Corran Halls.
That's them over to the left of my van.
So, I thought I'd show you my favourite ferry trip in Scotland,
because you get thrown out of Travelogue Club
if you don't have a boat moment.
This is the ferry journey from Oban over to Mull
and I've done it loads and loads of times.
And what I love about it is the light changes every time.
It's a different journey every time. Look at that.
You can see how, even in the breaks in the cloud, it changes it.
And it's starting to rain. But, like, I used to think,
"Scotland's beautiful but it rains." And then gradually, you realise
Scotland's beautiful BECAUSE it rains.
So, it feels amazing just to be here.
It's interesting to try and talk about
something like the Scottish landscape
cos I used to watch Billy Connolly, you know, when I was younger,
and I loved the way he talked about it
cos he had such enthusiasm,
and he's, like, really atypical for a Scottish man, really.
But then, I think a lot of people came after that
who were saying things like...
They'd try and look terribly sort of wind-tossed
and go, "Scotland, the land of contrasts.
"Well, some of it is and some of it isn't.
"That's what makes it such a land of contrasts."
I suppose part of what I feel is I look at places across there
and I kind of fantasise about them. I go, "Imagine living over there."
And it's a good fantasy, but then you sort of realise
that there's no shops and you'd be dead in a week.
What we'll actually probably end up doing
is just showing you some of the scenery
and playing a beautiful wee Scottish song over it,
which I'll introduce by turning dramatically away from camera,
like this.
MUSIC: Da Flugga by Jenna Reid and Bethany Reid
I'm now going to recreate the moment from Titanic
by going below decks and fucking someone in a really old car.
The trip to Mull takes less than an hour.
The crossing itself is enough for me,
so I haven't planned anything exciting to do on Mull.
I'm already worrying about my gig.
You always worry about your show a bit, you know.
It's funny when you're out in rural places
and there's all this beautiful scenery,
and you're just kind of lost in there, you know.
I remember one time, I was doing a gig in Lochinver,
which is way, way up the far north,
and I was walking around the harbour waiting to go on, doing my lines.
And I realised that, as I was worrying about this show,
I was actually making eye contact with a seal, you know.
HE LAUGHS
Comedy is a bit like that. It makes you look at the world, you know,
but it also takes you away from the world a wee bit.
I've done gigs where I've been waiting to go on
and I've been with a cow.
I've been with a cow and its calf one time.
One time, I did a gig near Edinburgh
and there was a field outside where we did the show
that had horses in it.
And in the next field is, like, you know, the jumps that horses do
when they're showjumping but they've just left the polls on the ground.
So I was really bored, and I ran round,
jumping over the wee jumps, like I was a horse, for a laugh.
And when I looked round,
I saw the three horses had come down to the fence
and they were looking over, like that, going like this... Like that.
Which I like to imagine is horse laughter, do you know what I mean?
I hope it is.
Interspecies laughter. That's the toughest kind to get.
HE LAUGHS I'll take it.
Ladies and gentlemen, let's make some Oban noise
and bring onto the stage the one, the only Mr Frankie Boyle!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
It's good to be here. Oban. Oban, man.
CHEERING
I like Oban cos Oban's a community and that means something.
It means that everyone in this room knows at least three people
they can phone after midnight
that'll help them ditch a body in the sea.
LAUGHTER
Just in case you're a tourist and you don't know,
Oban is where drugs come into Scotland.
And they don't all make it back out again.
LAUGHTER
Last time I was here, I got murdered by midges.
I got absolutely devastated by midges.
And I finally realised
it was cos they're used to feeding on the locals
and have become addicted to heroin.
LAUGHTER
HE LAUGHS
I know, like, cocaine is actually the drug here, cocaine.
And I know why you'd need the confidence of cocaine
when you're selling seafood to tourists at these prices.
LAUGHTER
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
£17 for a fish supper.
I'll do a line before I take the bill over.
LAUGHTER
I first started coming up to Oban maybe about 20 years ago.
I remember, the first night, I went to a pub
and a guy was absolutely mortal and he left.
And I went, "Is he going to be OK? He's not driving, is he?"
And someone went, "No, no, no. He's got a boat."
LAUGHTER
I was, like, "A boat?! Is that safe?"
And no kidding, the guy went, "He's only rowing."
He's only fucking rowing?!
It shows you just how different life is here, man.
Hi, my name's Andy. I'm your Uber.
LAUGHTER
On my next journey, I'll be on the east coast,
as I brave Edinburgh during the festival...
..head north to spend a day in a Scottish prison...
Wow, it's a beautiful day to go to jail.
It's lovely, yeah, it's lovely.
..and do a gig in Aberdeen.
APPLAUSE
I'm Frankie Boyle. There comes a time in every comedian's career when
he decides to do travelogues, like a racehorse being put out to pasture
to eat sugar lumps and have sex with donkeys.
So I'm off on a tour of Scotland.
I've decided that I really need to reconnect with the place,
playing a bunch of smaller theatres around the country
in preparation for a big run in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
I haven't toured Scotland since 2012,
and back then, I spent most of my time
in hotel rooms and dressing rooms,
struggling to get porn on a 2G reception.
But this time, I'm going to explore Scotland,
find the real nation beyond the cliches and tourist traps,
meeting some of its most unique people,
and considering some of its most important historical characters.
You'll see me stare into the middle distance in a hotel,
seated, and from the stage.
I'll be meeting people with beards, statues without beards,
and fighting a man because I want to win his beard.
As I tour Scotland, I'll finally find a way
of talking to my therapist about my father,
and take part in a vegetable-based seance.
And wherever possible, I'll be throwing money
at unnecessary drone shots, just like this one.
I think my favourite royal story at the minute,
have you seen this story?
They've got a plan to evacuate the Queen in the event of a Brexit riot.
Who in the middle of a riot is thinking, "Let's do the Queen"?
I mean, you're trying to steal some loo rolls and some Minstrels
out of a burning Asda,
and you stop yourself and go, "No, you know what I need to be doing?
"I need to be sprinting across open moorland towards Balmoral..."
..to where the Queen is lying in wait for you, by the way.
The Queen has been preparing for this like fucking Skyfall.
Prince Philip bursts out in his Jeep like fucking Mad Max.
The Queen starts to assume her dragon form.
The Queen has a dragon form.
That's why Pall Mall is so long and wide.
It's a kind of runway...
..for the...
For the Queen's demonic dragon body
to get airborne over a riot.
That's why we have flypasts at royal occasions.
We're just reminding the Queen,
"Hey, we have the firepower to subdue you".
Watch the Queen on the balcony.
She always looks up at the Red Arrows like that. "Rrarr!"
LAUGHTER
When I'm on the road, I'll be thinking a wee bit about language,
which is a big preoccupation for stand-up comedians.
I'm going to encounter Scots language, English language,
sign language, and of course, some bad language.
Swearing is different in Scotland.
Here, the word "fucking" is just a warning that a noun is on its way.
On this journey, like so many promising showbusiness careers,
I'm starting in the capital, but ending up doing a gig in Aberdeen.
I know Edinburgh well
from many years performing as a stand-up at the Fringe.
There's really two Edinburghs.
Economically, there is huge inequality here.
Much as it's like two cities economically,
there are also two Festivals as well.
The Festival is very different for local people.
I remember when I was starting out in comedy,
I can't remember what it was for,
but I was doing vox pops around Edinburgh, talking to locals.
Pretty much the first guy I talked to,
I went, "Are you excited about the Festival?"
He was like, "Yeah, yeah". "What do you like about it?"
He said, "Tourists dropping money".
During the Edinburgh Festival,
the city swells in population by almost 200,000 cunts.
MUSIC: Keep Yourself Warm, by Frightened Rabbit
Anywhere on the Royal Mile, you can throw a rock and hit a juggler,
or I suppose you could use a hammer.
The Edinburgh Fringe is a place full of hope,
which is probably why I'm not really welcome any more.
But I came to see one show that ponders a difficult transformation
of a young man from addict to performer
to prize-winning author and social commentator.
Darren McGarvey has become well known
as a voice for the unheard or ignored, and in much of his show,
he rails against class stereotypes
while attempting to rationalise his sudden change in circumstances.
Now, travelling first class would not represent any sort of conflict
for many ABC1s in here.
Indeed, they will have become accustomed to that quality of life,
any contraction in which will make them feel very aggrieved,
almost like they're experiencing some form of oppression.
But when you are raised in a community
where it's ingrained in you from an early age
that people who travel first class are in fact wankers,
then you can imagine the inner conflict felt by me.
After the show, I caught up with Darren,
as we climbed up to the inner sanctum
of a multistorey illuminati sex temple
to talk about how he feels language has empowered him
and how it's been formative for both of us.
Darren, loved the show, man. Thank you. It was really good.
It's really self-critical, and it's really reflective.
I wonder how huge an effect language can have on people sometimes.
I remember when Lara Croft, Tomb Raider first came out,
me and my pal were sitting in this flat down in London
and someone was showing us this game,
and it's like she hangs off these big blocks, and I was going,
"So it's basically a game about dreeping, right?"
They were like, "What are you talking about?"
And I was going, "You know how you dreep off a wall?"
They were like, "No".
And I was like, "Well, you climb up the wall
"and if you couldn't get back down by jumping, it's too high,
"you have to hang yourself off and drop.
"You don't have a word for that?" They were like, "No".
I said, "What did you do when you were up a wall when you were a kid?"
They were like, "We got stuck! We'd have to shout for our mums."
Maybe because you don't have the word.
That's a great point, and I think that that also applies
to social problems and politics,
where if we're all using different terminology
to describe the reality around us,
then we lose the ability through language
to start to conceptualise
what a solution to a problem might look like
or what the problem is in the first place.
The good thing about language is that everyone has access to it,
or most people have access to it.
It's just when you start making pronouncements
about what is the right language and what's the wrong language,
that's when it becomes exclusionary.
From the classroom to the courtroom, lower-class people are conditioned
that there is a voice of reason and there is a voice of authority,
and that voice, whether it's Jeremy Kyle
or whether it's a newsreader, is always middle-class.
It's very hard to shake that, isn't it?
One of the first days I was at uni, I went to uni in England
and I remember telling people what a scramble was in Glasgow,
you know, at weddings. Did you have that? Money.
Yeah. The father of the bride
would come out with a load of change,
maybe 50ps if it was a good wedding,
and would just fire it into the gutter.
And the kids would fight each other for it.
And this to them sounded like... Barbaric.
..the opening scene of a musical or something, and it's terrific.
And you sort of learnt to go, "Maybe file that memory away".
Edinburgh at Festival time
is overrun with performers and tourists.
During August, you could club a man unconscious here,
and so long as your face was painted,
people would assume it was theatre.
It's also Scotland's most literary city,
with three branches of WHSmith,
and home to many of its greatest writers and thinkers.
Some are commemorated with statues,
but one of them has his own monument.
No single writer has done more to define the very idea of Scotland.
Sir Walter Scott was born in 1771 in Edinburgh's Old Town,
although it was newer then.
He contracted polio and developed a limp in childhood.
Only in Scotland would they build a monument with so many stairs
to a guy with a limp.
Edinburgh's Waverley Station
is still the only train station in the world
that's named after a novel, which is a pity,
as who wouldn't want to get a bus replacement service
from American Psycho?
Scott initially wrote his novels anonymously,
as novel-writing had no real social standing
and it wasn't clear if it was something
that a poet should be concerning himself with.
The ambiguity about the authorship of the novels
contributed to the popularity. It's the same reason
that Prince Harry is more popular than Prince William.
Scott was not without his critics,
but in his romanticising of Highland tropes among Lowland Scots,
Scott hit on a vision of a more unified idea of Scotland
that has persisted to this day.
A couple of miles south of Edinburgh city centre is Morningside.
It's a genteel and refined part of Edinburgh,
and even has its own accent,
which sounds a bit like Jacob Rees-Mogg gargling pound coins.
They say, "Write what you know,"
hence crime fiction in Scotland is incredibly popular.
It's far removed from the romance of Sir Walter Scott,
but its appeal is just as international.
I've put on my best bunnet and come to Morningside
to meet writer Val McDermid,
whose crime novels have been translated into 40 languages
and sold over 16 million copies.
I just started reading your new book last night, so no spoilers.
They found a bunch of bodies. As usually happens in my books.
BOTH LAUGH
Unprompted by the director, we silently agree to take a seat.
I think we nailed that. Totally. We walked in and sat down.
Nobody fell over or anything.
It's so nice to meet you, Val. It's lovely to meet you too.
Cos I've kind of known you through books for years.
You wrote a really good book on forensics,
and apparently, one of the slabs at Dundee Pathology is named after you.
Yes, the whole mortuary's named after me! Oh, right!
Why did it take so long for crime fiction to take root in Scotland?
You don't really get here till the '70s. It's interesting, isn't it?
Somebody has to make that imaginative leap
to get to a place where it's possible, and I think for us
it was Willie McIlvanney's book Laidlaw in the late 1970s.
Nobody had written a crime novel like that in Scotland before,
and I remember reading it and being astonished
that there was actually a book written
with working-class characters, and a murder in it as well.
It was a crime novel. It was accessible.
People talked the way you heard people talking in the streets,
and that was revelatory for me. How do you write dialogue?
Do you feel some people just have a natural ear for it?
With dialogue, it's about making it how people expect dialogue to be.
One of the things I do is go and listen to local radio
on the internet and listen to the phone-ins, and listen to the bams.
That's where all the criminals are, on the phone-ins.
And listen to how they speak, and you start to hear the speech rhythms
in your head so you can render it on the page and it becomes credible.
For me, there's a wee bit of subversiveness,
because I always like to slip the odd Scots dialect word in.
So I'll talk about the weather being dreich, or "I used to could."
"I used to could do that, but I cannae dae it noo".
I love that, "I used to could".
You say that to an English prison and they go, "What?"
MUSIC: Get It Right Next Time, by Gerry Rafferty
This sequence can mean only one thing.
My gig material at the end of the show is unbroadcastable,
so we're bulking up with road shots.
I've left Edinburgh to travel north in this very comfortable
and surprisingly fuel-efficient Volkswagen van.
During the war, a considerable percentage of Volkswagen's workforce
was slave labour from concentration camps,
but that's a whole different documentary.
For now, I'm travelling up Scotland's east coast
to Peterhead, where tomorrow, I'll spend a day in prison.
Before that, I'm spending the night in a hotel that has a unique role
in one of the world's most famous novels.
I'm here in the Kilmarnock Arms Hotel.
Kilmarnock arms sounds a bit like a euphemism for a heroin junkie.
"He's wearing a long-sleeved shirt today,
"he's got the Kilmarnock arms".
That's a horrible joke about a very nice hotel.
And this is apparently where Bram Stoker
wrote the first few chapters of Dracula.
If you want to write about the undead,
then the greater Peterhead area in the off-season
is a good place to start.
Some people say about Dracula
that Bram Stoker was a deeply sublimated homosexual.
Um, he was in a sexless marriage.
He spoke out against homosexuals publicly,
but he started writing Dracula
a couple of weeks after Oscar Wilde went to jail.
So some people think that Dracula's
an expression of his frustrated sexuality, you know,
you get bitten on the neck by a guy, and life changes forever.
Isn't that just a case of wanting to imagine
that public figures were really unhappy, you know what I mean?
I like to think that Bram Stoker came up here every year or so
and got shagged really hard
by a local farmer or a gillie or something,
and he'd just look down at his own white knuckles,
and then he'd come back here to the hotel
and write Dracula standing up.
Peterhead Prison was once the most notorious in Britain.
Thankfully, it's now a museum
and they've built a nice, shiny new prison next door to it.
I've never been in prison, something which I attribute
to being lucky enough to get a proper education,
where I learned that bleach destroys DNA.
Perfect. Thanking you.
You don't have any mobile phones, communication devices? No. Perfect.
Could you just walk through there for me?
Can I get you to take off your belt, your shoes and glasses as well?
Sometimes that sets off the metal detector. Right.
VOICEOVER: Any filming that requires me to take off my belt,
trainers and glasses gets me a little nervous.
And your glasses as well.
And through the metal detector... Perfect.
But it's all reassuringly thorough.
People are certainly going to struggle to break into this place.
And turn round for me.
Perfect, thanking you.
My glasses have fallen into my shoe. That's a good start to the day.
HE CHUCKLES
Not surprisingly, entering a prison has a certain tension about it,
which I try to ease with my legendary small talk.
Wow. It's a beautiful day to go to jail. It's lovely.
This is where we are in terms of our education department.
The education department is deep inside the prison,
a space for inmates to express themselves artistically,
give them a much-needed outlet for their frustrations and hopes.
I'm here to join a Scots language class
that's part of the prison's rehabilitation programme.
How are you doing? I'm Frankie. Nice to meet you.
How are you doing, buddy?
The new facilities are disarmingly modern, and the following section
will probably disappoint viewers who've tuned in
hoping to see someone blinded with a sharpened lunch tray.
The class is run by Alistair Heather,
who encourages the guys to see their local dialect of Doric
as just as valid as standard English.
Something that we're trying to push at Aberdeen University
is the validity and legitimacy of Doric as a means of self-expression
as part of the Scots language family.
Chris, you're quite a confident, educated guy.
What's your experience of Scots been?
I speak Scots with my pals, you know? We'll all speak it,
but at school, you're taught to speak English,
try to speak "properly."
So you get pulled between the two.
That kind of biding in two worlds simultaneously, linguistically,
is a really common experience for Scots speakers.
So, the different dialect regions of Scots,
some words are popular in A dialect,
and will fall out of favour in others.
In Glasgow until quite recently, they would say "bairn" for child,
and they would say "ken" for knowing something.
But they dinnae dae that any mair,
and things go in and oot of fashion in different dialect areas.
I had a friend who worked in a comedy club, he was from Fife,
and he was always talking about his bairns.
He was going through this divorce.
And I had another pal who used to come down to the comedy club
who was from Northern Ireland
and this guy kept going on to him about his bairns
and how worried he was about his bairns.
And it turned out weeks later,
that the Northern Irish guy thought he was talking about his balls.
He'd never head this word before.
He thought he was getting separated from his balls!
So you've got sports vocab.
Yous were saying "fitba park," absolutely.
Head-the-baw actually has nothing to do with football,
it just means a nutter. Heid-the-baw? Heid-the-baw, aye.
Heid-the-baw does mean nutter, aye.
And stoat-the-baw means a paedophile. Is that right? Yeah.
Different dialect regions hae different influences
and different fashions in speech.
Absolutely, especially in Ayrshire.
Everyone I've known from there is dead different from Glasgow.
So you get people who say, "Whit dae ye cry him?"
Would you say that around here? "Whit dae ye cry him?"
In here, it's like "What's your crime?"
LAUGHTER
Which is a subject we're no covering the day, thank you!
VOICEOVER: We're put into groups and assigned the task
of writing a sports report that uses Scots vocabulary.
"Lionel Messi is not a stoat-the-baw..."
To the best of our knowledge.
HE LAUGHS
That's our fifth sentence.
Despite a dreich day and a minging pitch, the Broch blootered Celtic
10-0, all doon to their new star signing Lionel Messi,
who recently transferred fae Barcelona
after being exposed as a stoat-the-baw,
who flitted to Scotland as, due to the lack of
extradition treaty post-Brexit, he cannae get booted oot the country.
Legal disclaimer - Lionel Messi is not a stoat-the-baw,
to the best of our knowledge.
LAUGHTER
Ali, you get this thing from people sometimes where they go,
"The thing with Scots is, I don't know anyone who speaks it."
And I always think, "No, they don't speak it to YOU.
"They have different registers for people,
"and they know you're the sort of person who's not receptive".
You could wonder aboot
the north-east only speaking English and think,
"Nobody here speaks Scots, they're all speaking English".
But if you go to Belgium, and you only speak English,
Belgian folk will just speak English to you.
It doesnae mean their languages there dinnae exist.
50 years ago, there was naebody much teaching Scottish history
because Scottish history was considered to be a minor adjunct
to English or British history.
And noo there's a whole industry of Scottish history
and Scots language is part of the same process of rediscovery.
It's noo OK to be Scottish again,
and we're exploring what it is to be Scottish,
and to dae that, you need a language.
I left Grampian Prison filled with a sense of hope,
but also a lingering regret that I had not managed to sell
any of the pornography I had strapped to my torso.
I enjoy a moment in the fresh air,
contemplating the many crimes I have got away with
over the course of my life. I'm a lucky man.
Scots is one of three individual languages in Scotland,
alongside English and Gaelic.
In 1462, the laws of the Scottish parliament were recorded in Scots.
Either that or the guy doing the writing was having a stroke.
Scots has a number of sounds that are never used in English,
notably the high-pitched guttural sound of anguish we make
when we find we're sat next to someone from Hampshire at a wedding.
Scots is a Germanic language in its own right,
as is English, which makes it confusing
when Americans say if it wasn't for them,
we'd all be speaking German.
The truth is that, if it wasn't for Germany,
you wouldn't be speaking English.
Mary, Queen of Scots' ancestor James I wrote poetry in Scots,
including a famous poem he wrote in prison called The Kingis Quair.
But that happens to a lot of guys when they're in prison.
Imagine, the king hands you his book of poetry.
No matter how bad it is, can you really be honest?
"Really good, you managed to rhyme dog with cupboard. Clever you".
James VI was another Scots poet,
but when he moved to England as the British monarch,
he sought to develop English as the unifying language of the kingdom.
Shakespeare wrote Macbeth for James
to satisfy his obsession with witches.
English began to eclipse Scots in Scotland.
Now that court had moved to England, rich Scots wanted to sound English.
They eradicated Scottish sounds, grammar, and vocabulary.
Scots was seen as unsophisticated, backwards and vulgar.
We speak Scots in the form of Burns for one week a year at school
where if we speak it well, we win a prize.
But then for the rest of the year, if we speak Scots,
we're given a punishment exercise and sent to the headmistress.
It's a perverse situation, and confusing for our population.
It's like being allowed to play the trumpet for a week
and then getting the belt for whistling.
I've played every city and major town across Britain,
which goes a long way to explain why I'm like this.
Each town has their own unique character.
It can be anything from pessimism all the way through to despair.
The grey granite buildings of Aberdeen have an imposing feel,
but when the sun shines, the city is stunning.
The people of Aberdeen have a phrase
to describe the way the city's granite sparkles in the sunshine.
The phrase is "Almost never."
I like playing in Aberdeen. The people are really friendly.
People get the wrong idea about Aberdonians.
They think they're very dour, and maybe they are at first,
but they're quite jolly people. The city it's most like is Bristol.
You know how Bristol's like a place
where a whole bunch of country people
seem to have decided to just live in a city?
It's a bit like that.
And the gigs can be good here.
For me, the most judgmental crowds are actually Glaswegians.
Glasgow is the only place I've ever actually managed to lose an audience
during an encore.
"Get this guy back, see if I hate him or not!"
My stage material isn't designed to be for everybody,
but I've never wanted any potential audience member to be excluded.
That's why every tour I've done for the last 20 years
has included a signed show for the deaf.
Why shouldn't deaf people have the chance to hate me too?
Catherine King is the unfortunate person
who's interpreted almost all of those shows for me,
and will be on stage with me tonight.
Do you find it comes into your life, being an interpreter?
You were saying
you find you have to sit a certain distance apart from people...
Yeah, I'm really uncomfortable right now.
..because you have to face people and present.
Yeah. This feels almost sexual to me.
This feels really uncomfortable and intimate!
I'll budge up!
That might just be because we're Scottish. Maybe, I don't know.
Do you get feedback from deaf people about the shows? Yeah, sometimes.
A deaf man came to see you in Glasgow last year
because he knew I was working the show. He said he wanted to see you.
He'd never seen you before. He was a big comedy fan,
and he left after the show and went home on the bus,
and sent me an e-mail that said, "Thanks very much for the ticket,
"that was great fun, well done. I don't like him".
BOTH LAUGH
He'll be back tonight, the miserable bastard.
I got one of those Apple phones with facial recognition technology.
I think the trick is to set it to your cum-face.
So if you get mugged for your phone,
at least they'll have to wank you off first.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
It's weird getting older as well.
When I was a teenager,
ejaculating was like a fucking firework going off.
I'm 47 now.
When I ejaculate, it's like Tim Robbins escaping from Shawshank.
I quite like Jeremy Corbyn. I think he'd be a good Prime Minister.
He's, like, 70,
he'd get assassinated with an air horn or something.
You know what I mean?
It'd be a good couple of weeks, wouldn't it?
But I don't vote Labour, and the reason I don't vote Labour
is that Labour supports the renewal of Trident.
Trident is positioned just up the road from where I live in Glasgow.
And the reason Trident is up the road from Glasgow
is in case there's an accident. Think about it.
If there's a nuclear war, London is fucking getting it.
The Russians aren't sitting there going,
"Don't blow up London, we'll only destroy our own flats".
London's gone.
The reason Trident is up the road from Glasgow
is in case it blows up accidentally, and if that happens,
it won't even be the top story on the British news that day.
It'll be in the sports round-up or something.
AS ENGLISH NEWSREADER: "In other news,
"it looks like Aberdeen will win the Scottish Premiership
"this year..." CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
"..as Celtic's squad are now a huddle of screaming shadows."
What the fuck happens in Aberdeen anyway?
I don't think I've ever really got a proper handle on the place.
The two statistics that I know about it
are that it has Scotland's biggest funfair, which is weird.
You wouldn't naturally associate Aberdeen with the concept of fun.
It's like hearing there's a giant elocution centre in Fife,
you know what I mean?
And the other one is always
that Aberdeen has half the rainfall of Miami,
presumably because quite a lot of your rain falls
as sleet, hail and snow.
I often wonder if there are people in Miami
looking up at a rainstorm going,
"I wish to fuck I was in Aberdeen right now.
"This would be over in half the time
"and I'd be able to get myself down that funfair".
LAUGHTER
I can't really see the front row too well.
I like this guy, though. You look like a male model or something,
fronting a campaign urging women not to leave their drinks unattended.
What's your story? You from here? From Troon. From Troon?
Who would move from Troon to here?
Are you in witness protection or something?
What do you do up here? Work offshore. You work offshore.
Two weeks straight, two weeks gay, is that it?
LAUGHTER
Can we hear it for Catherine King?!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Take care of yourselves, Aberdeen, all the best!
As my journey continues, I'll meet a martial arts master...
It's a one-shot kill.
..be humiliated on the dodgems...
All the fun of the fair, Frankie!
..and perform for the first time in the town of Ayr.
I'm Frankie Boyle. There comes a time in every comedian's career
when he decides to do travelogues.
Comedians love travelogues.
They get us out and about and give us a plausible excuse
for being too busy to go into therapy.
So, I'm exploring Scotland, avoiding the standard tourist stuff,
playing some gigs,
and meeting the people that make this nation unique.
I'll be receiving a harrowing warning from my future self,
giving my advice as a father on family planning,
encouraging the population to explore their sexual fantasies
and training for a show in Dundee.
Wherever the tour takes me, I'll be talking to folk along the way,
and occasionally escaping when I'm taken hostage.
And if you think I won't be staring into the middle distance
from the deck of a ship - wrong, motherfucker!
I'm from here - I'm from Glasgow -
a city where people think that hepatitis B is a fucking vitamin.
LAUGHTER
Recently came top in a study of European happiness -
the European Happiness Index.
And what we can learn from that is that researchers
do not understand sarcasm.
LAUGHTER
It's a very different city from Edinburgh.
There's a far lower crime rate in Edinburgh.
Far fewer people get stabbed in Edinburgh.
But there is a tragic side to Edinburgh.
There are a lot more people there who need stabbed.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
I'm starting this journey in Glasgow.
Most of my journeys have to start here, really,
because it's where my house is,
and it's fitting for what I'll be thinking about
while I'm on the road from Glasgow to my gig in Ayr -
what does it mean to belong?
Stand-up comedy can be a solitary profession,
but I'm curious about what it's like
to belong to a close-knit community in Scotland.
I suppose the last time I felt a sense of belonging
was a few years back
when I was training at a martial arts class in Glasgow.
Glasgow has a lot to teach the world,
for example, that you can be an extrovert without being friendly.
And it's home to a legendary teacher in the world of martial arts.
Tommy Carruthers taught me Jeet Kune Do,
the martial art devised by Bruce Lee.
He's one of the world's leading practitioners of Jeet Kune Do,
and some people have described him as
"turning being Glaswegian into a martial art".
I remember, one day, we were all waiting to go into class,
and it was quite a rough part of Glasgow.
And a woman was fighting with her boyfriend across the road,
and he was trying to grab her handbag off her,
and she just, by instinct, threw a perfect back fist.
You know, and back fist was a big thing for Bruce Lee.
And she just opened her body out and cracked this guy
and broke all his teeth. And we were standing there with Tommy,
and it's, like, one of the only audiences in the world
that would have fully appreciated what she'd just done.
And he went, "Back fist," like that.
I was inspired to learn a bit of self-defence
after getting threats from some far-right groups
back in simpler times when the British far right
was basically a fat bloke who filmed himself shouting at kebab shops.
It's been a few years since I've been here
in Tommy's studio in the East End.
You don't remember when you side-kicked the guy one time?
Remember his knee? Oh, yeah. Right.
I didn't really have the greatest control.
No, I remember that. THEY LAUGH
I remember how his kneecap kind of went that way.
Oh, no. Did I...? Aye, dislocated it.
Don't remember it?
We were doing the 360 stuff and you were standing
and I shouted, "Number," and I just think you kind of saw him
out of the corner of your eye and just kind of went...
It was a good side kick.
It's sort of amazing that you CAN learn that stuff.
See, like, with me, I've always felt I can't learn that stuff.
And then, when I was going to class,
we were doing, like, forward rolls and stuff,
which I was obviously really, really bad at.
But my daughter was doing gymnastics... Mm-hm.
..and one day, I went in to pick her up, and there's all the mats out,
and I thought, "I'll just go in and forward roll to embarrass her, right?"
And I sort of did the roll and I stood up,
and all the change pished out of my pockets,
but I'd come up in fighting stance cos you're taught to do that.
So, I'm just standing there like that and, like,
all these parents are looking at me going, "What's wrong with this guy?"
Aye, had some good times in that old club.
So, you first got interested
when you saw Bruce Lee movies when you were a kid?
Aye, round about maybe '74,
close to '75, I remember I saw Way Of The Dragon.
But I've been my own teacher for a long time,
even though I trained with a lot of people
that Bruce Lee taught, you know? One of my teachers, Jesse Glover,
he was the first student that Bruce ever had, you know,
and he ended up, you know, being one of my best friends, definitely.
Do you remember there was an old flyer
where there was a quote from Jesse Glover?
It said, "I think, if Tommy punched a man in the chest,
"it would stop his heart."
Jesse Glover. That was, like, the most amazing advert!
So, are you going to show us some stuff? Aye, I want to...
Aye, OK. Get back into it?
Tommy walks me through the essentials
with a quick refresher course.
The primary targets in Jeet Kune Do -
the longest target would be the kneecap here, OK? So, this...
You can hit the kneecap, you know, various ways.
You could hit it with your heel like that.
And the idea, when you kick this thing for real,
if your life depended on it, would just be to break this leg.
And it only takes a few pounds of pressure,
and that leg would be finished, as you can see like that.
You can come up and you can actually kick the kneecap that way,
and the kneecap would just come straight off that way.
Then we have their eyes. Take the headguard off.
So, from here, you could actually just go like that and touch him.
Aye, that way. See that? From here.
If I show him the kick and he reacts to the kick,
you can see how I could go straight in here.
And this would be straight in like that
and right through from here, OK?
Like that. Finished. You're here. Finished.
So, it's kind of one-shot kill.
So, if you want to just... HE CLEARS HIS THROAT
He's got a history of dislocating kneecaps.
He remembers me.
Aye, that's why he's standing there looking like that.
"OK, Frankie, watch my kneecap."
Right. So, if you just kind of gently touch him on the knee,
just go right side up. There we go.
Aye, control's got a lot better. THEY LAUGH
I was worried about that one.
There you go. Simple. You've not forgotten it.
How's that? Aye, it's good. I've still got that trained into me.
THEY LAUGH
Bruce Lee's philosophy was one of simplification.
The daily decrease, he called it. I wonder, for the first time,
if that is so different from comedy -
trying to pare punches or punch lines down
to their absolute essence.
It's good to see him again. Behind that gruff exterior,
there lurks a pretty gruff interior, let's be honest.
I think things like that are really interesting
because they're about simplicity, aren't they?
And sometimes, I think, when people try to complicate things,
it almost lacks cleverness.
You know like when a writer uses a lot of very obscure words?
I often think that comes from insecurity.
And then you look at someone like Hemingway
who's making things really incredibly simple,
and that's what Tommy is, really.
He's sort of the Ernest Hemingway of kicking someone in the balls.
Someone who never quite felt she belonged in Scotland
was Mary, Queen of Scots.
Brought over from the French court
to try to rule a bitterly divided Scotland,
she always felt like an outsider.
There are still a few places in Glasgow associated with Mary.
I'm going to meet historian Fiona Watson at Crookston Castle,
where Mary was betrothed to her husband, Lord Darnley.
Today, the ancient castle is nestled bang in the middle of Pollok,
a housing estate that looks like its town planning has been done
by an Exocet missile, and where you still have an outside chance
of being executed...for your trainers.
This would have been a number-one drinking location
when you were a teenager, wouldn't it?
Like, trying to break into this place.
Why is she such a standout figure in Scottish history?
Because, you know, there's lots of people who met a sticky end.
There's lots of dramatic royal stories.
But she seems to be the one that... She sure is.
She was young and beautiful and tragic and, you know,
nothing seemed to go right for her and you kind of...
I think lots of people feel that it really should have done.
You know, she had everything going for her,
and then it all went totally badly.
She sort of came from France, didn't she?
So, she was brought up in France. Yeah.
And then she was pitched in to Scotland and, you know,
two religions that were opposed to each other. Absolutely.
Was she prepared for that? Oh, no, not even slightly.
She was never meant to come back from France.
She went when she was five from Scotland.
She was meant to be the Queen of France.
Well, she WAS the Queen of France briefly.
And she was meant to live out her days there
as a kind of ornament to the King of France.
Ruling Scotland was never really on the agenda,
but then her husband dies very young and she's sent back, you know,
because she IS the Queen of Scots,
into this sort of febrile environment.
Scotland's Parliament had chosen to go Protestant,
but the Queen was Catholic.
So, she'd been in France and she'd sort of learned
how to hunt with a falcon, and Latin, and needlepoint. Yes.
Dancing. She was very good at dancing. All that stuff,
it probably wasn't brilliant in the middle of a sectarian Scottish...
No. The hunting was good. They liked hunting here, as well,
and she did a lot of that in Scotland, too.
But council meetings would be held.
She would be there, but she'd be doing her needlepoint
and they would just be arguing, because the thing about Scotland is,
Scotland had been pretty well governed.
It's a very un-centralised country, so nobles do have a lot of power,
but it needs the strong monarch in the middle
to keep the balance of power, and that's what she proved
completely incapable of doing,
to be fair, at a very difficult time.
As you say, you've got Protestant lords on the one hand
and still some Catholic - some powerful Catholic -
lords on the other. It's not easy.
Mary, Queen of Scots was tall by 16th-century standards -
about 5ft 11 - although she was shorter by the time she died in 1587
because her head had been chopped off.
The clumsy executioner took three strokes of the axe
to get through her neck.
When he finally managed it, he picked up her head by the hair,
her wig fell off and her head dropped onto the scaffold,
which must have hurt.
And then her tiny pet dog scuttled out from her petticoats
where it had been hiding, and sat in a puddle of her blood.
According to an eyewitness, her lips stirred up and down
a quarter of an hour after her head was cut off.
What was Mary saying for her final disembodied quarter of an hour?
Some historians think she was telling the executioner in detail
what a useless bastard he was.
Others think she was apologising to her dog for farting.
Over the years, royals have gradually increased crown sizes
in an attempt to build up sufficiently strong neck muscles
to survive a beheading, and it works.
To decapitate our Queen, you'd have to take her by surprise,
or she'd strain and her neck would firm up
like a bollard outside a US embassy.
Of course, these days, beheading a troublesome royal seems barbaric,
which is why they switched to tampering with brake cables.
Anyway, it's fitting that this link to Mary
is situated in a modern housing estate.
While other kings and queens have been forgotten,
she has survived into modernity,
and is still our most famous monarch.
Of course, the monarch you hear mentioned most in Scotland
is William of Orange, although Scottish people always had
mixed feelings about him, possibly because he's named after a fruit.
And let's face it -
he wasn't exactly getting our poets onside, either.
Mary, Queen of Scots was never happy in Scotland,
but it's a much more positive story for a lot of new arrivals.
Beneath Glasgow's grey and drizzly exterior
beats a bright, multicultural heart.
People come to live in Glasgow for lots of reasons.
They might be fans of rain bathing or carbohydrates.
Others can be refugees fleeing religious wars.
Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
Amal Azzudin was born in Somalia, but belongs to Glasgow.
She's better known as one of the Glasgow Girls -
five teenage schoolgirls who fought against the inhumane treatment
of fellow asylum seekers.
What kind of life is this just to live in fear?
They're terrorising us.
They're coming early in the mornings,
taking us with our pyjamas.
I remember finding it an inspiring story at the time,
and many people across Scotland felt the same.
One of my close friends, Agnesa, she's from Kosovo,
and she was basically dawn raided and detained.
So, we were 15 at that time, and, basically, on a Sunday morning,
14 Home Office officials went to Agnesa's flat
and handcuffed her father
and they separated the family into two vans.
You know, the blacked-out vans so they can't see outside.
And they took them to a detention centre in England,
and they basically locked them up like criminals.
I decided I had to do something about it,
so I spoke to my bilingual teacher, Mr Girvan - total legend -
and I said to him, "Look, sir, you know, I have to do something.
and I'm allowed to stay here,
"but this is not right. That could have easily been my family.
"And, you know, the UK is a country that champions human rights,
"so I want to stand up for that because I believe in human rights."
And next thing I knew, I was on the BBC News and the newspapers.
And I still remember my mum waiting for me that day at home.
She was like, "What are you doing? Are you crazy?"
But she could see how passionate I was
and how determined I was to help my friend.
And other girls in the school joined me
and we became known as the Glasgow Girls.
What's that like, the first time you start to get media attention?
Cos I've had that myself.
I find that quite frightening, do you know what I mean?
Like, I suppose I'm actually in a profession where
you're trying to get attention, do you know what I mean?
But if you're just trying to do a campaign, and then, suddenly,
that eye turns on you, is that frightening or is that exciting?
I think it's a bit of both, but I think,
because we were so determined to raise awareness,
that that didn't really play much into our heads, kind of thing.
We were just like, "We need to highlight what's going on."
So, that attention was about Agnesa and her family,
and we were using our voices collectively to say,
"This is wrong and something needs to be done."
There's a lot of solidarity, as a city, isn't there?
There's a lot of kind of like...
Folk do help each other out.
People go over and beyond to help, as well.
Like, certainly from the people that I work with, as well.
So, I work with asylum seekers and refugees,
and the stories I hear are so uplifting, as well,
which is really great. And I think, in a negative environment
around refugees and immigration right now, it's good to hear
and it's important to hear that human connection,
the friendships that people make.
You know, things like having food together
and going for a cup of tea
and just treating each other as human beings
rather than status or where people come from
or what religion they believe in or anything like that.
As I leave Amal, I think about how she's taken her part
in the rich history of protest in Glasgow.
In 1919,
during the Red Clydeside protests,
the government feared the revolution,
and tanks were sent into Glasgow.
During the Battle of George Square,
amazingly, no-one died.
Is that even a battle?
You expect at least one death on a hen night.
I like to imagine a Tiananmen Square-style protest
by a Glaswegian. He's steaming. He's shouting at the tank.
He's got an Iceland bag in either hand and thinks it's a taxi.
I'm heading south down past Kilmarnock on the A77 -
one of my favourite dual carriageways.
When I eventually decide to walk out into traffic,
it will almost certainly be on the A77. It's a great road.
I'm on my way to meet some of the people
who run Scotland's fairgrounds.
Showmen are a distinct community in their own right,
and on my way to my gig in Ayr,
I've decided to pop down and visit the shows in Troon.
The family running these Ayrshire shows, the Codonas,
are among the most prominent showmen families in Scotland.
I'm hoping to speak to Geraldine.
I tracked her down to a hot dog stand
behind the rock-and-roll waltzer.
She tried hiding from me behind a vat of chopped onions,
but to no avail.
Oh, here we are. It's just me. HE LAUGHS
This is a fucking health and safety nightmare.
Made it? Oh, Geraldine! How are you doing?
Did you jump over the top?
There's probably health and safety reasons I shouldn't do that.
Oh, I can't do that one. I've got to do this one.
How are you doing? Fine, thank you.
So, you're part of the showman community here? Yes.
You're part of the family? Yes, I am.
And you've been doing this your whole life? All my life.
Travelling around in different kinds of shows?
Yes, the whole of Scotland. So, how far back does it all go?
Like, your family were showmen for generations?
Well, my family actually came from Italy in 1790,
and they were entertainers.
And it's still going. And this one's always on here in Troon?
Definitely. I can remember being here
with my grandmother and my grandfather.
I was born in Ayr. Right.
We're going to Ayr later. What's your tips for playing Ayr?
What do people in Ayr like?
Well, they say it's honest men and bonny lassies.
Not any time I've been there!
The showman life is very different to comedy,
and yet we've probably toured a lot of the same small Scottish towns.
When I got into comedy, it was billed as the new rock and roll,
but only in the sense that it's full of unprosecuted sex criminals.
With the temperature just above freezing,
it's the perfect day for eating candyfloss in a damp field.
I stood about near the dodgems with another member of the Codona clan,
Albert, and asked him about inheriting the showman lifestyle.
What was it like growing up? Did you travel about a lot? Yeah, yeah.
Well, I got left at my aunt's for about five years,
at primary school, and I did get quite a good schooling, so...
But as a kid, it's great. You're running about.
It can be a wee bit different, I suppose,
if you are on the road a little bit, but most of the kids love it.
When you're young, you're on the dodgems.
Once you get to 12, 13 years old,
you're kind of then having to help out.
Yous are off to Irvine tomorrow, Albert? Yeah.
Well, some of the boys are. They're off to Irvine to the Marymass.
It's a very traditional fair again.
Irvine can be quite wild, from what I remember.
Bit of a wild town, Irvine, yeah.
Years ago, did people used to be able to drink in the shows?
Till about ten years ago or something? It was about ten years ago, yeah.
Saturday night, go till ten o'clock at night, wild.
And there'd be two or three punch-ups here and there,
and it was always pretty... "You've won a prize. Crack."
And then the greasy pole -
that would be another thing that they would be doing at Irvine.
You had to climb the greasy pole and...
It's kind of traditional again.
You get the strongman, and the guy that can climb the greasy pole,
he's the champion.
It's good to see Irvine's got a system
for deciding who becomes mayor, do you know what I mean?
Well, we're going to get you on something, I know that. The dodgems?
I always liked the dodgems cos it's like...
When I go on the dodgems, it's usually with one of my kids,
and dads have a lot of aggression to take out.
The people you're trying to avoid are dads, man.
They've had, like, five hours' sleep over three years
and they're going to take it out on your bumper.
Right. Now, you know what you're doing here, don't you?
In no way whatsoever, Albert. Well, this is going to be fun.
All right, lads? Go easy, now.
Oh, here we go. Steady now.
Go easy, now, yous two!
Imagine doing this pissed!
Go for that back corner. Oh, whoa! Bingo!
He's in your sights. Whoa!
Whoa! Look out, Philip!
All the fun of the fair, Frankie.
That was great, man. Is that us?
What a laugh. Well done, man.
You got me a couple of absolute beauties.
Right. Thanks, Frankie. That was great, man. Cheers.
What a laugh.
My gig is tomorrow night in Ayr - a town 30 miles south of Glasgow.
Ayr boasts one of the finest beaches in the whole of Central Ayrshire.
Bathed in glorious sunshine for an average of 250 minutes every year,
the seafront at Ayr is the perfect place to come
and contemplate the sheer, unbridled absurdity of human existence.
Ayr Racecourse is host to the Scottish Grand National.
Recent winners include Paris Pike, Cockle Strand,
Hot Weld and Captain Dibble,
which are also four of the pseudonyms I use on Grindr.
We're going to Ayr Gaiety to see it,
and we're going to meet Elaine C Smith first.
And Elaine's been famous in Scotland since literally I was at school
cos I remember her husband was my modern studies teacher for a bit
because Scotland's tiny and we all know each other.
And she's a patron now of the Ayr Gaiety,
which is run by volunteers.
The community kind of reopened the theatre themselves,
which always tends to be really good
when you go to a place that's run by volunteers.
It's when they're run by the council that it can go either way.
Elaine has been a national TV star since the days of Rab C Nesbitt
right the way through to Two Doors Down,
and is well known in Scotland for her one-woman shows.
Like many small seaside towns across Britain,
there's a sense that Ayr struggles to offer more
than a Mr Whippy and a fight.
How amazing, then, that the theatre has been preserved
by the community in all its Art Deco glory.
Elaine's so famous in Scotland,
her appearance in the streets of Ayr could cause a riot,
so that's her being delivered covertly through the stage door.
First time I met you, we were doing a gig for Palestine. Remember?
Gaza. Yeah, for Gaza. I need to tell you this because...
There was a painter-decorator - this lovely guy Johnny -
out painting the hall, from Balornock.
And I was telling the story about we had done a benefit for Gaza,
and he said, "He was my favourite player."
I felt terrible. I had to go,
"Oh, no, not that Gazza. As in Palestine."
I remember doing it. It was a really worthy audience at the Edinburgh Festival.
And they're really nice people who have just come to see charity and stuff,
and they weren't expecting me or you, probably. No.
But, like, I can remember being on there and I was looking at them
and you could tell they were kind of like, "Oh, my God."
And there were these two old women sitting together. One was maybe 70.
The other one looked about 80 or something.
And in the middle of my thing, as they were watching me,
they kind of held hands.
"Let's get through this."
"We'll be OK. It's for a good cause."
Yeah! Oh, that's fantastic.
You're a completely different kind of performer to me.
Cos you've been trained. Yeah, trained. Classically trained.
And, you know, you can act.
Whereas I kind of started out in clubs
that were really sort of pubs to start with,
and they had, like, tiny wee stages, so you never moved.
So, I used to do everything behind the mic,
like a kind of bonsai comedian.
I don't like being behind the mic. I like...
I do it now, but I like having a mic there so I can walk around.
I feel it's a barrier between the audience. You don't, obviously.
I want barriers between me and... You want 20!
I want a fence! Yeah.
And, actually, when I'm doing stand-up, I feel very masculine.
Right. Can't do stand-up in my frock.
I need to wear trousers and sometimes boots
and a jacket or something. I don't mean I dress like a man,
but I've got to feel rooted and powerful.
I've got like the... This is the worst analogy ever. Right.
I admit that. But, like... I've got a few.
..people used to talk to me about, like,
trying to get women onto shows, when I've been script editing
or been presenting shows or whatever, right?
There was always a resistance, certainly years ago,
and it's got loads, loads better... Yeah.
..but I used to think of it in terms of...
You know like special forces when they storm a hostage situation?
They're told to kill the female terrorist first
cos they're going to have to have worked much harder
to get to the same position. Yeah, that's right.
And it's exactly the same when you're choosing a comedian
cos you're like... It's quite an analogy, by the way.
If you've got two people at exactly the same stage,
the woman's had to do twice as much work to get there.
There'll be certain things I'll go, "Oh, it's a 90% male audience.
"I'll do that stuff. I'll do that." I find I do the opposite.
I find I go, "What will totally self-destruct?"
"What will...?" Well, see, I'm totally admiring of that
because I still have that wanting to be liked.
There is something about trying to make a room happy,
but I envy the fact that you really sometimes
don't want to make the room happy!
Well, I don't mind splitting them sometimes,
you know, cos there's some of them you think,
"Well, you were never going to love this." Yes.
"You've made a mistake."
ANNOUNCER: The one and the only Mr Frankie Boyle!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Hello! AUDIENCE: Hello!
It's great to be in Ayr for the first
and, let's be honest, final time.
LAUGHTER
All I know about Ayr, right,
is that, in the Visit Scotland website,
there are three reasons to visit Ayr,
and number two is free parking.
LAUGHTER
"You on your holidays? Have you parked yet?
"Brilliant, isn't it?"
LAUGHTER
I watched the Michael Jackson documentaries.
If you didn't see them, to summarise,
do you remember when Bad came out and people said,
"Oh, bad actually sort of means good now"?
Turns out, it didn't. LAUGHTER
Thank God he died before he'd perfected the forwards moonwalk...
..and was able to sneak up on children...
..while it looked like he was moving away.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
It's the energy of the guy, that's what gets me.
He was 6st and he was on animal tranquillizers,
and he was still putting in a solid shift as a paedophile.
LAUGHTER
I mean, kids can be tiring when you're not fucking them.
LAUGHTER
Hats off to Michael.
He did literally the one thing that could have kept him out of prison -
he stopped being black.
LAUGHTER
I know it's very fashionable at the minute for people to say,
"Oh, everybody that voted for Brexit is stupid."
I really don't think that they are stupid.
I think they're just people who voted
to put an end to immigration from Europe
because they don't like Pakistanis.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
Imagine what it's like being an immigrant in Britain at the minute,
being told that you need to integrate more
by people who spend their holidays
pointing at a picture of egg and chips on a menu.
LAUGHTER
Brexit is just endless, isn't it? It will never end.
I'm convinced it will never end.
It's like you've jumped out of one of the towers on 9/11
and just before you hit the ground, someone opens a manhole cover.
LAUGHTER
I want to have Brexit now.
I want to find out what happens when we run out of antibiotics.
ENGLISH ACCENT: "Oh, I've bitten my tongue. Goodbye."
LAUGHTER
HE LISPS: "Goodbye, everybody."
Let's have a no-deal Brexit
and find out how many people with asthma are faking it.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
That was pretty good. I enjoyed it. I forgot my lines at one point.
Think I got away with it.
I had less kind of hecklers and mad power drinkers
that I tend to get in than usual tonight,
so there was a couple of things that happened in the audience
that I really pounced on cos I was just glad to have
something to deal with!
But then I wonder if maybe, like,
those really kind of like difficult people
in my audiences might be dead by now. Do you know what I mean?
Cos I started touring in 2008,
and they've been drinking pretty solidly
every time they've seen me since then, so this might be it.
This might be me just emerging
into the peace and calm of a sober audience.
The last leg of this tour will take me south, from Oban to Glasgow.
En route, I'll pick up a sword with mixed results...
I think you could get me quite easily if you tried. Yeah, I could.
..be coaxed into picking up a paintbrush...
Are you going to have a shot? Sure, but I'm a really hopeless artist.
..and come home to perform the final gig of the series.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
I'm Frankie Boyle.
There comes a time for every comedian to do travelogues.
Often, it's because they want to connect with people
and their attempts to do so
through more prestigious TV formats have failed.
I've decided to tour round some smaller theatres in Scotland
to get my show ready for a big run in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
In my sort of career as a stand-up comedian,
I've spent a lot of time away from home.
I've masturbated in so many hotel rooms
that nowadays every time I see a miniature fridge,
I automatically ejaculate.
So I've decided to reconnect with home
and go on a tour of Scotland in this van,
which unfortunately has a miniature fridge in it.
I've already had to pay a £90 cleaning fee.
I'll drive around Scotland, see stuff, get on stage
and then do jokes about the stuff I've seen.
Unbelievably, that's the premise of this entire show.
That's me looking at stuff already, pre-titles!
So that being said, you're either with me or against me.
I'll hit the road as soon as this dude finds the car keys.
Watch me train to be a marriage counsellor in Orkney.
Wherever the tour takes me,
I'll be making friends and avoiding eye contact
as I take part in the world's slowest hokey cokey.
And from the top deck of that ferry, I'll fight every impulse
to jump into the beckoning ocean
as I'm filmed on a long lens by a flying pervert.
I think I get less interested in sex as I get less capable of having sex.
I couldn't really lift a woman up against the wall any more.
Depends on the wall, obviously,
but it's very few women's sexual fantasy
to be jack-knifed over a garden wall.
LAUGHTER
Your options really narrow in your forties.
You're pretty much reduced to going out with people
that you've already gone out with,
the sexual equivalent of eating out of the bin.
I mean, there's upsides, obviously. I've got kids now, that's amazing.
One of your orgasms now has a face.
It's mind-blowing.
I'm starting my final journey on this tour.
I'm travelling south from Oban back to Glasgow,
possibly stopping along the way to buy a pasty cooked by a light bulb.
I'm leaving Oban behind, but part of me will always be here,
in the form of DNA on the hotel room ceiling.
Along the route, I'll have a think about something
in that way you do
when you're contractually obliged to have a theme.
On this stretch, I'll think about creativity
and how it applies to the ways in which Scotland thinks of itself
as well as meeting some remarkable people
who create in their own unique way.
Between Oban and Glasgow
are some of Scotland's most majestic landscapes,
and in amongst the breathtaking scenery
lives one of the world's most celebrated
and accomplished comic book writers.
Now we're off to Dunoon. We're going to go and see Grant Morrison.
Grant is, I mean, the greatest comic book writer of his generation.
He'll probably be remembered
like someone like Jack Kirby or someone like that, eventually.
But more than that, he's a kind of ideas machine, really.
I always feel like I have problems and Grant has answers and ideas,
so it'll be interesting to talk to him
about some of the stuff that I've been thinking about
on this wee tour.
Grant Morrison has given new life
to the world's most enduring superheroes
as well as creating original work
that mixes the playful with the profound.
Grant works between Scotland and Los Angeles,
but he began life in the nightmare shadow
of Europe's biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons,
stored in the naval base at Coulport,
just a few miles from his door.
Many Scots would respond to a four-minute warning
by wondering if that was long enough
to drag a sun lounger onto the patio.
But for Grant, his upbringing ignited a formidable creativity.
The west of Scotland, because it was a poor area,
because it was a post-industrial area,
it could easily be spared during any potential nuclear cataclysm.
Everything was sited here,
so I think a lot of working-class people at the time
felt really scared for their children.
And so they brought us all up in an atmosphere of terror
without realising it, in the midst of the glory of the '60s.
Even into the '80s, I had that.
I remember I had a drawing of a nuclear bomb under my pillow
that I used to sleep on for some reason.
And there used to be a car showroom across from us
and its alarm would go off and to me, that was a nuclear alarm.
The alarm, if you heard the siren, it was "Oh, my God, that's it".
If a plane flew especially low overhead,
that was the end of the world.
It was a constant pressure, and how often did you dream of it?
I constantly would dream of these post-apocalyptic landscapes.
Hats off to whoever invented the air raid siren
for getting the most terrifying noise in history bang on.
I think that's like the sound of Cthulhu finally rising, isn't it?
They managed to tape that.
That's what it'll be like when the water's breaking,
it just comes out and it's all over, folks.
Do you think it had an effect on your imagination?
Yeah, I think the apocalypse hanging over you
has a profound effect on your imagination.
You're always trying to think of ways around it
because it becomes an intractable problem as a child.
There's a kind of horror to realise even my dad,
who is this big, tough guy, an ex-soldier who can do anything,
he's scared of the bomb.
My mum's scared of the bomb. She's smart.
They're all scared of the bomb.
So it became a problem that was hard to solve
like a Rubik's cube that would go around your head as a kid.
The solution to that problem was Superman,
or the Hulk could stand in front of an atom bomb
and just get more power.
Superman can shake it off and get a tan.
So imaginatively, these things became,
"Oh, there's a way around this."
And even if they're not real,
all it took was the imaginative key and I think that's probably why
I've been unnaturally fixated with these things,
because they did give me that way out of an existential conundrum.
Do you think of yourself as a particularly Scottish writer?
Do I think of myself as a Scottish writer? Always.
I think there's a love-hate relationship
you have with this place.
You're scarred by it.
Your sense of humour is nihilistic and bleak
in a way that has to be explained to people in other parts of the world
who have never experienced anything like the weather here
or the sense of crushing disappointment.
Is it just that there's a kind of Venn diagram
of Catholicism and all its kind of bleakness,
and Presbyterianism and that stuff,
and somewhere in the middle
has developed this Scottish identity that's quite fatalistic?
Yeah, I think there's a fatalism
that comes from the Presbyterian strand,
the grave-digging, the ghoulish strand of Scottish culture.
But there's this other strand
which I always think is the strand of dreams, you know,
Robert Burns, Tam o'Shanter, Justified Sinner, Hogg,
that kind of gets shoved under the carpet.
I think it's important to realise
that it's as strong as it's ever been, you know?
JK Rowling came here to write Harry Potter.
The strands of the weird
are still part of the Scottish identity.
There's a lot of contradictions to it, isn't there, with Scottishness
because there's a lot of optimism in people,
but like you say, there's also this kind of profound nihilism.
But the optimism's always tempered with absolute bleak certainty
that the minute you voice an optimistic thought,
you'll be struck down by Scotland's God, you know,
which Kristan, my wife, and I call Sod. It's Sod's law.
Sod is ever waiting for you to have a triumph
and a moment of success,
and instantly there will be something that will happen
to undermine the whole thing.
I love Grant. I've never met anyone who puts such an inspired spin
on the apocalyptic darkness inside the soul of Scotland.
I'm now taking a dogleg from Dunoon to central Scotland,
where I'll set foot on some hallowed ground, Bannockburn.
Scotland hasn't won much,
not since Slimmer of the Year said it didn't count
if you lost a limb to diabetes.
But Robert the Bruce scored a decisive victory
by beating the English at Bannockburn,
making the overall score 7000-1 to them.
For a place that practises a lot,
we're clearly not that good at fighting.
In what looks like an opening scene from Casualty,
I decided to learn what I could about weapons
from battle re-enactor John.
You must do a lot of Bannockburn stuff.
Yeah, a lot of Robert Bruce stuff. We like to do the ones we win. Yeah!
Well, it was a big win for Scotland and famously,
he fought in single combat with someone
the day before the main battle.
An English nobleman, Henry de Bohun, charged at the king.
Robert the Bruce waited to accept the charge of Henry de Bohun
and when he got close, he sidestepped him,
stood up in his stirrups and smote him down with his battle-axe,
allegedly cutting all the way through his helmet,
his skull and his collarbone.
Good start, isn't it? It was a good omen.
Can we have a look at some of the swords and weapons?
Yes, we've got our broadswords here,
so I actually have... This is a hand and a half sword.
The hand and a half sword,
that's what they used to call the bastard sword,
halfway between a broadsword and a shortsword?
Yeah, it's got a longer blade.
A footman sword might be as much as 12 inches shorter.
Every part of it is for killing people. This bit's the pommel.
If you hold this hand up,
then we're going to smash somebody's skull in.
That's where the word "pummelled" comes from, isn't it?
That's right. The other piece here, the quillon,
if you were to slide your blade down my blade,
this would protect my hand.
But if I was to punch up with this against your chest
and under your helmet, this would come into your throat here.
Very messy, very hard to breathe, lots of blood.
That's the murder punch.
Horrible phase, murder punch.
"Did you have a good night?" "Oh, I got murder punched."
Shall we have a go at it with the shields?
This should just slide down now.
Imagine heading down to the pub in that.
Feels safe now, eh?
HE LAUGHS
Cheers, John.
That's got to be awkward on the battlefield
when you're trying to get your strap back in. "Wait a minute!"
Shall we have a wee go at it, very gently? OK. Right.
Good, I can see the concentration on your face.
There's something about a huge sword that really concentrates the mind.
Exactly!
Remember, your shield is for defence
but your sword is also good for defence.
So if I was to stab at you, you want to parry,
so just push my blade away
and you've automatically got an opening there. Right.
I think you could get me quite easily if you tried. Yeah, I could.
What you're doing is pointing up.
So you've got lots of armour on the top,
so if I was to come down like this,
you need to get your sword down to block that. OK.
Your footwork's good. That's it.
The change in where your hand needs to be
and where your sword needs to be is really quick, isn't it?
The quicker it is, the more likely you are to succeed.
That's one of my favourite ways of finishing people off
in re-enactment, coming in for a big, obvious overhead.
Everybody wants to put their sword up
and then I flick my wrist and it's through the belly.
What's it like to take one on the shield?
If I give you a gentle whack there, that doesn't hurt.
If I hit harder, you can't feel it, it's not doing any damage,
but you start to feel the impact.
Thanks for showing us that, John. No problem.
There goes my helmet!
I've slowly circled and gently tapped swords together,
so fuck you, Simon Schama, I'm now ready to speak at length
about Scotland's most famous king.
Robert the Bruce remains an inspiration to many in Scotland,
having lived to 54.
In 1305 Robert the Bruce, taking refuge from battle in a cave,
was inspired by a spider to spend four days trapped in the bath.
Robert went on to defeat the English at Bannockburn and Berwick.
Even today as a mark of respect,
everyone in Berwick continues to look defeated.
The Battle of Bannockburn
was perhaps the most famous of Scottish victories,
closely followed by getting a London taxi driver
to accept a Clydesdale Bank 20.
Robert was a warrior, but also a cunning ruler
who managed to use an alliance with France
to capitalise on English fears of an invasion.
Can you imagine if England had fallen under French rule?
Right now from Newcastle right down to Plymouth,
they would be speaking...
Louder English.
Ultimately, France didn't invade, possibly because they needed England
as a vital safety buffer between their own and Scottish cuisine.
Robert led Scotland to its first war of independence,
700 years before Nicola Sturgeon took on his mantle and his haircut.
And yet many people, I suppose, will only know him
from the section of Braveheart
where he was played by Angus Macfadyen
in a role so cherished by the makers of the film
that they spelled his name wrong in the credits.
Angus Macfadyen has been in the headlines recently
when a cinema chain didn't pick up his biopic of Bruce.
A story caught on that the film was banned
as a result of some pro-union conspiracy,
rather than it just being a small-scale film
based in a country people enjoy ignoring.
But for the record, I would like to state
that my pornographic rewriting of the career of pop duo Hue and Cry
was unfairly suppressed by a fearful British government.
With my edged weapon skills polished,
I feel more than ready to head west back to Glasgow.
Bannockburn still carries a message of Scottish glory and defiance.
Somewhat less glorious
but equally defiant are the messages daubed on Glasgow's walls.
But recently, some of the aesthetics of street artists
have become incorporated into civic murals.
Once, murals would have been popular
for the chance to huff paint fumes,
but today they're created to spread civic pride,
celebrate heroes and cover up quite a bit of racist graffiti.
Every year Glasgow stages a Doors Open Day,
a brief chance to see inside grand buildings without a court summons.
A 30th anniversary mural celebrating Glasgow's most iconic buildings
has been commissioned.
So I'm going to a car park to meet four artists
who studied together at art school
and now work together as the Cobolt Collective.
This looks great, how long have you been doing this?
We started on Monday, so it's only been two days.
How much longer will you have to do it?
We're hoping to have it done by next Sunday. We'll see, though.
There's going to be 40mph winds,
so that will put a halt on things.
They need the car park back, so we need to be as quick as possible.
Of course, this overlooks... They're kicking us out.
..one of Glasgow's bleaker car parks,
but you've got this very optimistic mural.
It'll be sad when they first find a body under this.
So you're going to have a crack at this now?
Yeah, are you going to have a shot? Sure, but I'm a hopeless artist.
That's fine, the wall's so bumpy
that you can't do a straight line anyway.
But what if I'm looking at that in a hundred years going,
"I fucked that bit up"?
THEY LAUGH
Is it hard painting murals in Glasgow with the weather? Yeah.
It's the worst city we probably could have chosen to do this.
You always see pictures of people in LA in the sunshine,
and we're battered with the winds and the rain.
Rain must be your worst enemy. Yeah.
You're neater than me, that's pretty good. I fucked that up.
It just adds character.
I've seen a few of your murals. They seem so upbeat and hopeful.
My thing is, when I try and do something optimistic,
I find that I'm having to manufacture that to some extent.
I'm having to go, "I want to say something positive."
Do you have to do that, or do you find it comes naturally?
The subjects we choose to talk about aren't necessarily positive,
but I feel like the way the country and the world is at the moment,
it wouldn't reflect well if it was really political. Sectarian.
Sectarian! There's plenty of those murals.
How are you finding the wobbliness?
I'm not minding it at all.
I find that as you get into middle age, you start to think,
"I've lived my life.
"I'd just like to go out in an entertaining way."
Do you see these things, when you go about
and you see something you've done on a wall? That must be a buzz.
It is weird. You can also see them from Google Earth when you zoom in.
Really? You can see your paintings from space.
I don't think you get used to that.
Do you know that thing in Islamic art,
where they put in a tiny imperfection
because only God is perfect? I didn't know that.
Yeah, only Allah's perfect, so if you see, like, a carpet,
there's always one little bit that's out of symmetry.
That's amazing. I feel like I've brought that here.
THEY LAUGH
Thanks for coming in.
No, it's been cool. Cheers. Cheers.
I took my helmet off for the bit where it was most likely
that I was going to fall!
Glasgow's murals are remarkable, but what lies beneath is problematic.
Many of our buildings come from a dark chapter in the city's history.
Much of Glasgow's grandest architecture and wealth
was created off the back of slavery in the British colonies,
and some streets still commemorate the merchants
who profited the most from trading humans.
I'm meeting with local councillor Graham Campbell
in Glasgow's Merchant City,
who's uneasy with his city's shameful past.
I'm always a bit conflicted
about the fact that this is called the Merchant City.
It shouldn't be named after them, really.
Tobacco, sugar and cotton, those are the three commodities.
It started with tobacco. Glasgow is here because of the tobacco trade.
If you had a cigarette habit, you got your tobacco from Glasgow.
Glasgow's to blame for that. Right. All that cancer, it's all us.
But we became rich because we monopolised the tobacco trade.
I understand why the slogan's, like, "Glasgow's miles better"
and not "We used slaves to make cancer", right? It's not as catchy.
But why have we known so little about it historically?
Because Glasgow, unlike Liverpool, Bristol or London,
doesn't have a conscious memory
of actually selling slaves on the market.
We were known for shipping the commodities,
so we were at a distance from the trade itself, the trade in people.
So anybody who was a merchant sold tobacco, then sugar, then cotton.
They were up to their necks in slavery.
And loads of streets round here are named after them.
When I'm on stage, I go to people sometimes,
"We benefited from slavery,
"so that's why we have the Kingston Bridge
"and that's why we have Jamaica Street".
And you can tell, people go, "Oh". They've just never even heard that.
The evidence is in plain sight. This is Virginia Place.
Virginia is after the tobacco plantations. It's telling you,
"We're very proud of getting our tobacco wealth
"from slavery plantations
"but we're not going to mention the slavery bit."
Jamaica Street, of course, that whole spot on the Clyde
was where you sailed away to Jamaica to go and make your fortune.
And there's Jamaica Streets all over Scotland.
There are. You never think of it. It's like people think
maybe Peterhead had a really thriving reggae scene or something.
Where do they think it came from?
I suppose people need to envision
just how Scots were involved in Jamaica.
About one third of the white plantocrats were Scots.
As the profits from the plantations in the New World flooded in,
Glasgow began to expand and was transformed.
Every one of the major buildings in this area
was paid for by sugar plantation slavery.
Plantations is the nice word for it.
They were death camps for forced labour till they died.
It was cheaper to work them to death
and then replace them with another one
coming from West Africa from another slave ship.
So what do you think about the idea
of maybe changing the names of streets?
I want the names to stay up there, but I want it also to say
that Ingram was the such and such owner of plantation slavery,
or Glassford was the person who exploited people.
I want it to say where they got their money from. I'm a Campbell.
My name is Graham Campbell.
You couldn't get more Scottish than that.
My name is proof that the Scots are part of my history.
When you're part of the crime scene,
you can't let the evidence walk away.
Glasgow has resembled a crime scene for many comedians.
It's a city with such a cavalier attitude to drink and drugs
that a common greeting here is simply the words "What's happening?"
I've played at the King's Theatre countless times.
I mean, I could count them, but I can't be fucked.
It's much bigger than the venues I've played on this tour so far
but often, that just means
there's twice the mob to chase me afterwards.
I think there will be upsides to Brexit, obviously.
I think it will be nice for the Irish to watch a British famine.
LAUGHTER
I wonder if English politicians have just forgotten
what Northern Ireland is like.
To me, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland
are like two halves of one bipolar personality.
"Let's get the jolly old fiddle out."
"And stick it through some cunt's head."
It terrifies me over there.
Even just the number of places that begin with the word "Kill".
"I'm from Killafewmore.
"Just up the road from Killemallagain."
LAUGHTER
My parents are from Donegal.
And I know it's very fashionable at the minute
for comedians to have their parents on a TV show with them.
Not an option if your parents are 80 and from Donegal.
"I don't trust elevators.
"And I'll tell you what else I don't trust.
"Ham."
LAUGHTER
My parents have very, very mournful Donegal voices,
very, very sad voices indeed.
My dad could make the lyrics to Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah...
..sound like a fucking cancer diagnosis.
When I was growing up,
there was still quite a lot of anti-Irish racism in Glasgow,
which had two parts to it.
One was "Irish people are really stupid"
and the other part was "Irish people are taking Scottish folks' work",
which wasn't even true.
It's an incredible self-own when you think about it.
"If they import any more idiots,
"I'm going to be out of a fucking job here."
RIPPLES OF LAUGHTER FOLLOWED BY MORE
HE LAUGHS
The Irish people are finding it quite ironic
that it took the Scottish people a long time to get that one.
When I first went down to London as a teenager,
they had anti-Scottish racism and that had two parts to it.
One was, "Scottish people are all alcoholics", and I was.
And the other part was, "Scottish people are all really mean.
"They're really tight with money." That doesn't even make sense.
I don't know how many alcoholics you've met.
They tend not to be brilliant at budgeting.
Of all the mornings I woke up going,
"What the fuck did I do last night?"
I never discovered that I'd changed energy provider.
LAUGHTER
Oh, here's a joke that goes really differently in England
from the way it goes in Scotland, see if you can work out why.
When I was at school, there were two guys in my class
who were really badly bullied but luckily,
it didn't affect them in later life because they both committed suicide.
I'm not kidding, that gets a huge laugh in England.
That gets a huge, uncomplicated laugh,
whereas by the time you get to Glasgow,
people are going, "Yeah, they probably did.
"Sad story."
I was taken down from my school's wall of fame.
I salute them for doing it. I admire them for doing it.
It was because I did a joke about this guy
and he was a brilliant guy,
a wonderful human being,
but it was his job to teach us sex education.
So he'd come round once a month and preach the withdrawal method.
And he had nine children.
And a twitch.
I'm always amazed
that the Catholic Church still take the moral high ground about anything
after the stuff the priests did.
Even the incense was just so they could create a fog
that they could emerge from.
You'd smell that at school and everyone would scatter.
One wee asthmatic boy would go missing.
"What happened to Gregor?"
"The last I saw, he was being raped by a cloud!"
Like a 16-year-old labrador heading to the vet's,
sadly, I have come to the end of my journey.
Where better to reflect on the vibrant pulse of modern Scotland
than at the top of Glasgow's necropolis?
I hope to be buried here myself someday,
probably in about six months,
maybe seven if I can give up crack, which I can't.
When I look back on the last month or so of this tour,
I see a Scotland that's in quite a predicament,
filled with wonderful, open, talented, generous people
and owned by arseholes.
About a quarter of the country is sporting estates
given over to people shooting grouse, a sort of chicken in drag.
I actually grew up on a sporting estate.
We always gave someone a head start before we mugged them.
Another problem here is this inaccurate idea we have of ourselves
as a historically oppressed nation.
In the late 18th century, Scots owned 30% of Jamaica.
Now we own approximately 30% of our own furniture, and teeth.
We weren't colonised by England,
we were complicit with the British Empire's colonial endeavours,
but have conveniently decided to redefine ourselves
as another of its victims,
a bit like Rose West hearing the police sirens
and quickly burrowing under some paving slabs.
Our history even before that isn't really that of a proud nation
seeking self-determination.
Scotland was historically a thing passed around among the powerful
in much the way that nowadays, they might pass around a sexy orphan.
The long death of the union has led to Scottish culture
being increasingly marginalised and patronised.
When James Kelman won the Booker Prize,
he accepted by saying,
"My culture and my language have the right to exist.
"No-one has the authority to dismiss them".
That is an incredible thing for someone to have to say,
to have to insist on their own validity,
their right to speak in their own voice.
I think that in the years ahead of us
there'll be a lot of new Scottish voices
charting us away from the cultural cringe
and the nuclear missile-based status and the food banks
and the religious neuroses
and the difficulty that we have, let's be honest,
in allowing ourselves to find joy in each other
and towards a new enlightenment,
of which we're well capable now that we've had a good, long rest.
MUSIC: Some Candy Talking by The Jesus And Mary Chain