Hard lines

Knife wounds? Sectarianism? Colourful language? It must be the return of Peter McDougall, chronicler-in-chief of Scotland's violent underbelly. Meet the Glasgow writer who talks a good fight

IF YOU'VE ever drunk the afternoon away, you'll know that by eight at night people feel like punching each other's lamps out. The craic has long since been exhausted and you're probably staring into an empty glass having a deadly serious conversation about something grim when you could be at home with some chips and the telly. At this stage, it's time to go as tempers can fray.

After a day spent with Peter McDougall, I haven't gone home - primarily because he is good craic. In fact I quite liked him until he insulted me by calling me something that ended in "unt". And actually, I still quite like him, but what else can you expect after an eight hour drinking session? Anyway, I insult him back, which makes us even, so I shouldn't grumble.

Another reason I haven't gone home is that the subject of the serious conversation is morality, of all things. Now, I've heard that morality exists, I'm just not very clued-up about it, so I'm labouring after two or so bottles of wine to make either head or tail of McDougall's peculiar moral code.

McDougall is, of course, one of Scotland's greatest screenwriters. He pulled down the Prix Italia aged just 25 for his television play Just Another Saturday about Scottish sectarianism; then stumbled across three Baftas, wrote the movie A Sense Of Freedom, about the life and times of the Glasgow gangster Jimmy Boyle, and polished off a series of critically acclaimed screenplays including Billy Connolly's tour de force Down Among The Big Boys, the brilliant tale of a gangland heist gone wrong, which has inspired the likes of Guy Ritchie and Martin Scorsese.

I visit him at his home in Glasgow's west end, which he shares with his partner of ten years, Morag Fullerton, the highly successful television and stage director, to talk about his "comeback". Not a comeback in the sense of someone like Andrew Ridgeley would have a comeback. There was never a question of McDougall's talent fading or the powers-that-be turning their backs on him; he just hadn't been writing his guts out over the last few years the way he had been since the Seventies. Now, he's decided to get back to writing his guts out. And I want to hear what he's planning.

McDougall came to be seen as Scotland's answer to Brendan Behan - the archetypal drinker with a writing problem. He was punching producers, waking up in gutters and saying "f**k" on TV in the days when the Sex Pistols were just a glimmer in Malcolm McLaren's eye. Like most gentlemen of the saloon with a taste for the pen, he's obsessed with morality - what makes a man a man, and more importantly what makes a man a good man. The name-calling incident arises when I ask McDougall what point he is trying to make in his latest movie script, Come The Time.

Movie gossips are calling it a parable, a morality play - a modern- day western, even. And it's rumoured that the film, which is being made by Muriel Gray's Ideal World production company, is going to be big. The gist is this: there's a small Scottish town plagued with young hoodlums whose violence is getting out of hand. The townsfolk manage to secure the services of a mysterious gangland figure to sort the town out. A bit like Clint Eastwood in A Fistful Of Dollars. But once he starts there is no stopping him - and the question posed is "which violence is better - his or theirs?" Alongside such worthy metaphysical dilemmas come great scenes, primarily involving terrified neds tied to chairs in basements while the Clint character threatens to cut up their kids.

So I ask McDougall what type of violence is acceptable. He tells me the tale of the first razor fight he saw - in the playground of his school when he was about 13. "Two boys just went at it. It was almost medieval in the way they faced up to each other all alone," he says. "No one else stepped in or interfered.

"It was like they were sword fighting. It was so calculated. I'm not glamourising it and I'm not saying what they did was acceptable, but the way they faced up to each other was almost a form of bravery - and decency. It wasn't mindless."

So I ask him if the morality of Come The Time is like that. Does the movie fall down on the side of the "square go" code: the idea that it's honourable if two guys rip lumps out of each other to clear the air? Sort of, he says. Even with knives or baseball bats? I ask. "Don't be a stupid c***," he says.

I return the compliment. After all, his story of the two lads fighting in the playground implied that as long as the sides are even then all's fair in war and war.

By this time, one of McDougall's movieland pals has joined us. People tend to come and go from the table in the far corner of Hubbard's bar on Great Western Road, which he calls his office. Hubbard's is one of those bars where lads who used to be bad boys drink and the staff call you pal, not sir. McDougall is a regular - and obviously much loved and over-indulged - punter here.

His pal's a producer who's putting together a deal for McDougall's other project, the script of a movie about Captain Kidd, the infamous pirate from Greenock - McDougall's home town - whom McDougall's old mate Harvey Keitel has promised to play. Ridley Scott is planning a similar movie, but McDougall dismisses any rivalry as "cosmic spontaneity". I have no idea what he means, but it sounds cool. He explains, saying: "Cosmic spontaneity is when five guys all decide to write a movie about heroin addiction at the same time, without knowing the others are doing the same."

Anyway, this producer chap has been getting a little stick from McDougall. He's got a production company with a rather daft name - let's just say it's a little girlie for McDougall's tastes. So, he's been on the receiving end of his own fair share of scathing lines during the afternoon.

Mr Producer is positively delighted when he hears McDougall getting a taste of his own medicine. "Wah-heeey!" he shouts. "Not many people say that to you, Peter." McDougall strokes his big scary walrus moustache, with eyes narrowed and a wicked smile on his lips, in a positively satanic fashion that reminds me of a scene in GoodFellas - a movie directed by one of McDougall's biggest fans, Martin Scorsese.

Gangster movies are playing on my mind even more than they usually do today, principally because I've been spending a large proportion of the afternoon in the company of one of McDougall's rather sinister friends. This chap is, as they say, "heavy-duty", and he has a weird affectation of calling McDougall "Pedro". I had to turn my Dictaphone off when he came into the bar, but if my memory serves me right he'd just done 14 years for some kind of seriously painful crime. Underworld-type is a perfect gent, of course, generous and funny - as long as you like jokes about syphilitic hookers - but you can never really relax in someone's company when you've heard tales of them nailing people's lips to the nearest available flat surface. The gangster and the producer provide a neat short-hand symbol for McDougall's life. He writes about "nasty f**kers", as he calls his characters, and he drinks with them in brownwood boozers, but he goes to dinner parties with Robbie Coltrane and Jennifer Saunders.

He's just never really fitted in, is all - he's just done his own thing with aplomb. But he particularly didn't fit in to the vacant lot fate found for him in 1950 in Greenock. "I hated it," he says. "I felt in a complete and permanent malaise - an utter dissatisfaction. It wasn't right to me."

He flirted with Loyalism, joining a flute band, winding up Catholics and brawling, but he only "ever paid lip-service to sectarianism", he says. "I used to jeer with the rest of them, shouting, 'Every chapel, every steeple, f**k the Pope and all his people'. I have no time for Protestantism now; I'm much more comfortable with Catholics - there is less malice in them.

"Even when I was a child I'd wonder what I was doing in Greenock. Eventually, I jacked in a trade in the shipyards - which no one did in those days - and went to London at 17."

His life then became a little like a TV script. A spot of breaking- and-entering, an affair with a woman ten years older than him which ended in marriage and two kids and a chance encounter with Colin Welland, who scripted Chariots Of Fire, which ended in him becoming a writer.

"I was painting this guy Colin Welland's house one day - I didn't know who he was - and telling him about my time in the flute bands and all that and he said I should write about it and I thought 'Yeah - I will,'" says McDougall.

"I'd never written a thing before. In fact, I'd barely read a book. My family wasn't an environment in which a kid's brain could develop," he says. "I wrote Just Another Saturday then - but I didn't tell my wife. She was middle-class, a teacher, older than me and I was just a bit of rough - so I hid it under the bed. I'd written it phonetically as I couldn't spell. I still can't actually, but who gives a f**k? Someone is paid to fix my spelling these days.

"What could I say? I'm in Hampstead and I'm surrounded by writers. Am I gonna say, 'I want to be one of them'? I was just from a different class."

I ask him if he felt somehow beneath his wife - and he tells me another story. "A friend of hers had come over from Australia. He was a dentist or an anthropologist or something. We were sitting around chatting and she asked me if I would get him a drink. As I walked off to get one, I heard him say, 'F**k me, Glenn, what do you do with him? Read him poetry?' They laughed and I never forgot it."

Ten years ago, he and Glenn split and he moved back to Scotland, almost immediately falling in love with Morag. She tends to keep quite a close leash on him. Before we set off to Hubbard's bar, we spend a couple of hours in his perfectly bohemian apartment, greedily stuffed with all the books he never had the chance to read as a child, a laptop open on the kitchen table and scripts littered across its surface.

McDougall is far less at ease in his own home than he is in the pub. When I start asking gentle questions about his life as a child, he changes the subject, making me feel a little like an invader.

Then he drops his voice low. "We'll maybe retire to the pub, in a wee while. It's much more conducive to interviews." He nods to the left in the direction of his living room where Morag - or Mo as he calls her - is sitting. "Make sure, if you're asked, that it's you taking me to lunch, rather than it being my idea to go to the pub," he says.

He only starts to open up as we make our way around the corner from his flat to the boozer, telling me that he recently went to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, but thought it was "shite".

"I can be a little rough on drink. I was getting sick of waking up in bushes, so I thought: f**k it - I'll go along, but it wasn't for me."

He shows me his two twisted little fingers, the result of a beating he received some years back, on this very spot. Then he points at his eye. "They stabbed me up through my eyelid," he explains, his finger tracing the stubby scar tissue on his brow. "And in my f**king ear - and in me arse too. The c***s."

The attack was random, pointless and extremely violent. His son managed to escape the attackers, but McDougall wound up in hospital. The Glasgow hardman was deeply shaken. "They were mindless bastards bored out of their heads. They just walked up to me and said, 'Do you want some of this?' And bang! That was it. Whoever said the pen was mightier than the sword was an arse. What was I gonna do? Write this c*** a love sonnet while he chibs me?

"That's what I'm trying to write about in Come The Time. We have an underclass of people who have f**k all. They're bereft of morals and soul. People say that I was mugged. That was no mugging, they weren't after my wallet or my money or my coat, they just wanted to have fun kicking the shit out of me.

"They are a trial to my liberalism, people like that. I try to think like a good man and be good, but when you see some f**king bully menacing someone it's hard to stay liberal. But I won't let that change how I think. We've come to the point where society has been reduced to people saying: 'As long as me and my family are okay, the rest of the world can go f**k itself. But if we do that we are all f**ked."

That doesn't sound like the reactionary dinosaur pilloried in the press for calling Andrea Calderwood a "wee lassie" when she was made head of drama at BBC Scotland in the mid-Nineties. But it is. "I got called a chauvinist, misogynist prick for that. Prick I may be, but never a chauvinist," he says. "I had a good pal who was up for the job, he was experienced and an excellent operator. It wasn't a pop at her, it was a defence of my friend.

"I withdraw nothing. I'd say it again. All the while that this was going on, Andrea and I were working together. She didn't take it badly and I didn't mean it to hurt her - which it didn't. I was attacking the BBC. Today, BBC Scotland is a joke. They asked me to write a ten-minute short for the opening of the Scottish Parliament and I got Robbie Coltrane and Brian Cox to agree to act in it, then the Beeb told me they couldn't afford it and London wouldn't give them a slot to put it on. They're a disgrace.

"I want to know just who is reading scripts these days. Some of the stuff on TV is just dreadful. I mean look at Monarch Of The Glen - it's pish. It's the creative equivalent of a coal fire - you just stare at it and it makes you feel comfortable, but it means f**k all."

It's a mark of his own indomitable belief in himself that McDougall can metaphorically moon the BBC. After all, he doesn't really need them. He's off soon for his yearly jaunt to Cannes with his old mate, Jimmy Boyle, where he is routinely feted and sucked up to by lots of movieland people. And when you have Harvey Keitel on record as saying he'd "play a blade of grass for Peter McDougall", you needn't worry about your reputation.

McDougall gives you the impression that nothing penetrates his big, hairy hide - but that's not quite true. He can handle his liquor, so he's not the type to show his emotional hand after a few bevvies, but he does let the mask slip momentarily when I ask about his father.

In most of his work dads are the equivalent of genital warts - something to get rid of as quickly as possible so you can get on with enjoying yourself. I ask him what he thought of his dad. "I never liked him. He was a seaman and he was away a lot. He wasn't a bad man. He never beat me, or shouted and he had a good brain, but I just never liked him.

"I can remember one time, when I was about five years old. The pubs used to shut at nine then and he came home drunk with these two Dutch sailors on shore leave. He fell asleep almost immediately " He pauses, trailing off, then begins again: "I can still feel and smell the redolence of the atmosphere. They were waiting for him to conk out so they could f**k my ma. I didn't know it then, but I worked it out later.

"Here was a young, good-looking woman with these strange sailors in a strange house. She was scared. She eventually got them out, but I saw fear in my ma and disgust at him - my da - for lying there oblivious to this going on. I never liked him."

Where's your father now, I ask, still alive? "Aye, he's in a home up at Parkhead - I never see him. I still see my ma all the time." I ask him what he was like as a dad. "I was a house-husband. My wife taught and I wrote, so I raised the kids. I used to go everywhere - even into meetings at the BBC - with my boy strapped to my hip. I love them. I'm proud of them and I think they love me." Do they respect and admire you, I ask.

"I don't believe in the words. I was brought up in the Protestant culture where respect was everything," he says. "We used to look down on Catholics as my family was the scruff of the scruff. There was no one else for us to look down on but Catholics. I'm not into respect."

He pauses, before describing the gospel according to Saint Pedro. "I milk life for everything it's got. I wake up in the morning and think that's a bonus. I look at most people and they have dead eyes. I haven't. I've never schemed or connived. I've been a straight guy. I haven't taught my kids any lessons. I've just been me."

Come The Time is currently in production

Copyright 2001
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