PEOPLE: Douglas Rae, Brideshead producer on bringing a classic to the big screen

STUFFING his phone back into the pocket of his jeans, Douglas Rae, children's TV presenter turned successful film producer, slides his hands through his mop of snowy hair.

"That was Hollywood," he says, adopting a Yankee drawl. "They're just waking up, so it's about now that my phone starts ringing."

He's grinning from ear to ear. Even after some 20 years at the helm of Ecosse Films, with a clutch of successes under his belt, such as Mrs Brown and TV drama Mistresses, talking to Haaw-lee-wood still gives the Edinburgh-born ex-Magpie presenter a kick.

He's talking to people in the film capital of the world about LA-based Scottish actress Ashley Jensen, star of Extras and Ugly Betty and a former student at Queen Margaret College. He's pondering whether she might pop up in a future episode of hit TV show, Mistresses. "The idea is one of the girls is getting married, they all go off for a holiday together in LA and bump into Ashley Jensen. How does that sound?" he grins.

At the moment it's just a thought, but his whimsical thoughts have a habit of turning into reality - such as the time several decades ago when he sat in a cinema at the French Institute in Randolph Crescent, watching subtitled foreign films and thinking it might be nice to be involved in movie making.

"My clan motto is 'fortitudinem' - fortitude," he says by explanation of how he has evolved from Evening News Saturday copyboy to children's TV icon, to documentary maker and head of an expanding, successful film company.

He used to file Hearts match reports, these days he chats about A-list celebrities - Billy Connolly, Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe, Yoko Ono, Emma Thompson - in the same way that the rest of us talk about the person at the next desk.

"I suppose it's about being ambitious and wanting to grow and looking at new markets," he says. "And once you've worked as an Evening News copyboy, making the tea and running the errands, then the only way, really, is to go up!"

He's back in Edinburgh now, sitting in the Filmhouse, not far from Bruntsfield where he was raised and the Meadows where he used to play. He's been shifting the advertising board for his new movie to a more prominent position, and quizzing staff about its screening times.

He says it's like his baby. "You have given birth to this thing, you've got this paternal love for it. You send it out into the world and you don't know what people will think."

Whatever they think of it, his production of Brideshead Revisited will remind many of wintry Monday nights in the early 1980s spent glued to the TV, desperate to find out what would happen to Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte.

"It was quite incredible really," says Douglas, reflecting on the impact the TV dramatisation of Evelyn Waugh's classic tale of love, aristocracy, religion and angst had on the viewing public. "It had around 20 million people watching it every week. I can remember the streets being completely empty - that only ever really happened when there was a massive sporting occasion - because people were inside, watching Brideshead.

"It was beautiful, the music, the story . . . people were gripped."

He'll be hoping for the same response early next month when Ecosse Film's version, starring Emma Thompson as deeply devout Lady Marchmain, Hayley Atwell as her daughter Julia, Matthew Goode as love-struck Charles and Ben Whishaw as the foppish, louche Sebastian.

Hopetoun House was seriously considered as the potential location for the opulent Brideshead home of the Flyte family until Douglas and his team realised they couldn't really shoot the film without the Forth bridges sneaking into the shot, so instead they went back to the setting of the original TV version, the splendour of Yorkshire's Castle Howard.

Waugh aficionados and fans of the original 1981 series can rest easy - Douglas confirms that the key character Aloysius - Sebastian's teddy bear - is in the final cut.

"Well, of course! We couldn't really have left the teddy bear out," he declares.

Nevertheless, some people are already grumbling about aspects of his movie, such as whether it closely follows the storyline, whether it's too risque and whether tinkering with the screenplay has taken it too far from the original masterpiece. Grumble they might, but Douglas, has just one response. "I had the full support of the Waugh estate," he reveals. "They had consultation rights, so if I changed anything in the story it had to be fully approved by them. And they approved."

He sat nervously as the author's descendents watched the movie. "The silence at the end of the film was the longest I'd ever experienced. It's a very cerebral film with a lot of big issues and people can be quite stunned. It doesn't have a typical Hollywood ending. So there was this silence, then they all went, 'Yes, very good'."

In two decades at the helm of Ecosse Films, Douglas has overseen its evolution from a minor documentary producer to a key player in the British and international film world. Not bad for a lad from Broughton Secondary School, though there was a time when even the Rae family's milk deliveries had an air of Hollywood glamour about them.

"Big Tam delivered our milk," he grins, speaking about Sean Connery's pre-stardom job, "but then I suppose half of Edinburgh says that.

"And Gordon Brown used to make my tea at STV. He was a researcher when I was presenting programmes. I said to him, 'Give up this ludicrous idea of becoming an MP'. After what's been happening to him recently, he might wish he had."

Douglas - now 61 with three children, Leonara, 14, Rory, 16, and Jamie, 20 - worked his way up at the Evening News from copy boy to trainee reporter. By the age of just 17, he was editor of the Kirriemuir Herald in Angus - the youngest editor in the country.

Later he opted to specialise in cinema and arts reporting before Thames Television scooped him up as one of their key presenters for Magpie, their funkier, cooler version of the BBC's Blue Peter.

Inspired by those arthouse films from his youth, he yearned to be on the other side of the camera though, so he took a course at the National Film School, became a director and producer, and Ecosse Films was born.

Documentaries were its bread and butter until its first sensational film in 1997, the Oscar-nominated Mrs Brown starring Dame Judi Dench and Billy Connolly.

Today, the London-based company has some 30 projects on its books, including Nowhere Boy, a film about a specific point in John Lennon's adolescence which has involved his widow and Sir Paul McCartney, and a movie about a group of birdwatchers who become involved in murder. He's also working on a cinematic version of Wuthering Heights.

On the TV front, there's a four-part drama about Lillie Langtry, and The Body, a drama about a middle-aged man whose brain is transplanted into a 25-year-old.

Douglas is the driving force behind them all, even if he's more likely to be recognised from his presenting days. "That's the thing about being the producer, you're pretty much invisible," he grins.

"I love going on to the set and there are young enthusiastic runners, doing what I once did. They don't know me, they come up and ask 'Can I help you?'. I just say, 'oh I'm here to see how it's going'.

"They ask what my involvement is. 'Well', I say, 'I write the pay cheques . . .'."

Brideshead Revisited is due for release on October 3.

COMPLEX, COMPELLING CLASSIC

IT was one of the most successful and addictive television series ever made. Evelyn Waugh's classic Brideshead Revisted finally made it on to screens in October 1981, starring Diana Quick, Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons.

Viewers were instantly hooked by the lavish setting, the weaving inter-war tale of middle class Charles Ryder (Irons) who suddenly finds himself mixing with the aristocratic Flyte family and, of course, with teddy-bear toting Sebastian, played by Andrews.

Charles is quickly seduced by an exciting new world of money, glamour and outrageous behaviour. The friends spend a careless summer at Brideshead before the relationships between Charles and the Flytes get ever more complex.

Charles becomes infatuated with Sebastian's sister, Julia, while his relationship with his friend Sebastian remains ambiguous.

Eventually Sebastian turns increasingly to drink, while Charles, now married, begins a doomed affair with Julia.
It's all played out against the Flyte family's strict Catholic faith - at odds with their extravagant behaviour.

The series propelled Irons and Andrews to international fame. It was voted tenth in a list of the 100 greatest British television programmes, compiled by the British Film Institute in 2000.

PEOPLE: Book pair's Mainstream success

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IN another life, Bill Campbell and sidekick Peter Mackenzie might have been tabloid newspapermen, foot-in-the-door types with a nose for a saleable story and a gift for teasing out the line that would grab the front page headlines.

Celebrities, sportsmen, curious new age health quacks, hard men criminals and middle aged women with tearful tales of childhood hardship . . . Bill would be the tough one, urging them to reveal a little bit more; Peter a bit more reserved, with the chequebook at hand - strictly to cover expenses, of course.

Certainly the books crammed on the shelves in their boardroom scream tabloid headline-style titles. There's Jihad! and Mr Nasty; and there's Ma, He Sold Me for a Few Cigarettes, and Saved By My Face. For the sports fans, there's Toon Army side by side with Forever Everton, real life tales from Sir Alex Ferguson, Gavin Hastings, Shane Warne and dozens more.

But while they may talk the talk of the tabloids, it's the world of publishing, brimming with plummy accents and long lunches at The Ivy, which the straight-talking duo have brazenly shouldered their way into.

Two thousand-plus books on, the Edinburgh-based business they founded exactly 30 years ago on two GBP 1000 bank loans - "We said it was for home improvements," grins Bill - is thriving.

Today Mainstream Publishing has a generous back catalogue of titles brimming with tabloid-style tales, factual accounts of hardship, war-time Boys' Own epics and memoirs of sporting glories. It now occupies a three-storey block in Albany Street.

It's a long way from the days when Bill's Barony Street flat was its publishing HQ, when piles of books covered every spare bit of space, including beneath Bill's bed, and the likes of Lord James Douglas Hamilton could be found crouched on the floor wrapping up the books they had just lovingly written ready to be sent off to the bookshops.

Having been conceived against a background of social change and national pride courtesy of the ultimately doomed devolution debate, Mainstream went on to seize sport in the Eighties, self help in the Nineties, real life crime in the Noughties and, most recently, tear-jerking "misery memoirs".

Sniffing out a good story and then exploiting the niche in the market has been their forte . . . and no-one's more proud of that than the pair dubbed the "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" of Scottish publishing.

Today Bill sits in the boardroom, casual in a black sweater with a shiny black Rado watch gleaming on his wrist, books piled floor to ceiling across three walls. That he's been 30 years in the job surprises even him - it's passed by so quickly.

"Many people would give their eye teeth to do what we do, which is a job that brings enormous satisfaction and, if you get it right, can make you decent money," he reflects.

"But the beauty of it all is you end up making friends with some genuinely interesting people, each of them important in their own way, whether they are politicians, princes or paupers."

Peter nods in agreement. While Bill has the greater creative spark in their partnership, Peter has kept Mainstream afloat with a keen business mind that has tackled the legal issues, administrative tangles and deftly sorted out the accounts - even when they didn't amount to much.

For while Mainstream is now a GBP 4 million business, half of it nestling under the umbrella of London-based Random House, back in the days when the notion of launching a publishing house first crossed Bill's mind, the small matter of money was well down the list the priorities.

Bill, born in Glasgow and raised in Kilmarnock, came to the Capital in 1969 to study history at Edinburgh University. Peter arrived from Strathpeffer to wade through economics and accountancy. They might never have met had it not been for a joint interest in the student magazine and later Edinburgh University Student Publications Board.

The board branched into publishing books including Alternative Edinburgh - penned by Bill, current PM Gordon Brown and Barry Wright, who would go on to launch Regular Music. It was regarded as controversial for its student take on how to save precious pennies - including the suggestion that students avoid the pay-as-you-go toilets at Waverley Station and instead nip into the Balmoral Hotel via a services lift located on the railway station forecourt.

Not surprising then, that when Bill first mooted the idea of running a publishing house, Peter wasn't exactly biting his hand off.

"I was thinking 'What a stupid idea'," he laughs. "We had no idea of what it involved, never mind that we had no money. It was lunacy."

Still, Mainstream was launched from Bill's humble flat using those home improvement bank loans.

Their break came when a contact at Edinburgh publisher Canongate suggested they might be interested in a book it had rejected. Incredibly, it was previously unpublished diaries of Robert Louis Stevenson's journey through France - The Cevennes Journal became a Mainstream international hit.

Still, times were hard for the fledgling publishers. "We had to pack every book ourselves and carry armfuls of parcels to the post office and put the stamps on. We had to load up the car and drive around the whole of Britain to independent bookshops in the hope they'd take some books," recalls Peter. "We typed every invoice and every statement ourselves and then had to phone and harass people to pay us."

They went on to turn down Ian Rankin - his fictional cop stories didn't quite fit the factual niche Mainstream was carving - but there were scores of successes to come.

By the time the business had moved to an office at East Thistle Street Lane and then Albany Street, it was scoring on the back of a string of sports-themed factual books.

"It was 1986," recalls Bill, " a real eye-opener. Aberdeen had won the UEFA Cup and we did Light in the North with Alex Ferguson.

"There was a signing session in John Menzies in Aberdeen. They had to call in the mounted police for crowd control. We both thought 'oh, we're on to something in this' and we exploited it pretty ruthlessly."

But as football players' earnings soared and clubs curtailed their freedom to speak out in controversial autobiographies, Mainstream's attention turned to other areas.

There followed gritty real life tales of crime, war exploits and diplomatic incidents thanks to Craig Murray, the former ambassador to Uzbekistan whose biography sent letters of protest flying between the Foreign Office and Mainstream.

Most recently, however, it has been the niche market of tear-jerking tales inspired by the likes of Angela's Ashes that has kept the catalogue bubbling along.

"I call it guerrilla publishing," says Bill. "We see an area, move in and fill it as quickly as possible."

As for the moral questions over some of Mainstream's books - they have flirted with controversy with books about football hooligans and the story of Glasgow crime lord Paul Ferris - Bill is unfazed.

"We reflect society," he shrugs. "I don't have a moral dilemma with it."

But amid all the upwards trajectories on the bestsellers list and smiling book launches - Aussie cricket legend Shane Warne is in London as the pair speak, launching his Mainstream autobiography - Bill and Peter have also had their share of sticky moments too.

On the shelf behind Bill's desk is that copy of Jihad! - a Mainstream success story if you skim over the embarrassing chapter that involved the author being accused of having made up a key element of his own story.

Then there was the time in 1999 when they had to pay out around GBP 22,000 after one author was found guilty of a "spectacular and sustained act of plagiarism". James Mackay's biography of John Paul Jones, the Scottish-born founder of the United States navy, was withdrawn amid claims he had copied material from another book. Then there was the family furore surrounding Don't Ever Tell, a disturbing memoir involving sex abuse and neglect. Cue the author's family, and claims that the harrowing account was, in parts, fictional.

Bill's smile fades and he shakes his head. "I'd rather not go into that. There's a lot of family issues involved," he sighs. "We are strong in our investigations of these kinds of stories."

With that, they look forward to the future. What does it hold for Mainstream?

Next year come books from Tour de France hero Lance Armstrong, a real-life heartbreaking tale of a soldier burned while stationed in Afghanistan, a dissection of Kate Middleton, and Being British, a book penned by celebrity authors on what it means to be a Brit, with contributions from JK Rowling and their old university mate, Gordon Brown.

"The future is to go on, stronger than before," says Bill. "I suppose ultimately the hope is that long after Peter and I are gone, there will still be a Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh-based and still a forward-thinking company."

SELLING THEIR STORIES

AMONG the biggest successes for Mainstream Publishing, launched in 1978 by Bill Campbell and Peter Mackenzie, was its decision to publish the "true story" of William Wallace after Bill spotted a small news story about plans to release a movie starring Mel Gibson called Braveheart.

And among the tabloid-style crime stories and misery memoirs have been a string of more serious books. Scottish Art 1460-1990 cost the company GBP 100,000 to produce but paid off massively. Scotland's Shame, a book that detailed religious bigotry, opened a debate that has raged for years and still continues to fuel discussion.

Among the most controversial was The Big Breach by former MI6 agent Richard Tomlinson, which sparked a dispute with the Government over the proceeds.

But it's the human stories that have moved Mainstream's founders most. Among them is the story of Eugenie Fraser from Morningside - the daughter of a Dundee woman who married a Russian, she wrote about growing up during the Russian Revolution.
Another is Henry Allingham, a 112-year-old veteran of the Great War, whose memoirs have just been published.

"When you get that collision of creativity with genuine interest and commercial value, there's a huge buzz," says Bill.

PEOPLE: Writer who juggles life and death.

 

IT'S no laughing matter - two bouts of cancer within five years, both slipping under the medical radar, one diagnosed just weeks after the all-clear for the other.

By rights, crime writer Paul Johnston - a man who has dwelt more than most on death, and gruesome death at that - shouldn't really be cracking jokes.

Yet here he is, chuckling away at his own misfortune, a little angry but also utterly determined to make the most of what life's just handed him.

"A tennis ball," he snorts, "the tumour they found in my bowel was the size of a tennis ball. Quite what Roger Federer was doing hitting an ace up there, I have no idea."

He roars with laughter but while he can joke about it now, the best-selling Edinburgh-born, Athens-based author wasn't always quite so laid-back.

He had just been told he had passed the 'five years clear' stage from an entirely separate cancer which cost him a kidney and, in true 'kick them when they're down' style, coincided with him being ditched by his publishers, when he realised he wasn't feeling as good as he should.

He put it down to the stress of wondering whether he would pass his cancer check-up combined with the imminent birth of his first son, but of course, it wasn't.

"It was literally the day after I'd been signed off and told I was clear of cancer," he recalls. "I began to feel not that great, really tired. I was getting pains in the bowel area that weren't going away.

"The doctors in Athens fairly rapidly realised there was a tumour the size of a tennis ball lurking in there. You've got to laugh really."

How such a sizeable malignant growth slipped through just as the creator of a string of books famous for their raw and grizzly death scenes - he is best known for his Quint Dalrymple series set in a futuristic independent state of Edinburgh - was undergoing stringent cancer checks is a medical conundrum.

It didn't help that his first encounter with the condition, a growth beneath his kidneys, also went undetected for much longer than it probably should have.

"Subconsciously, your body knows there is something going seriously wrong," he reflects. "You don't know what, so you rely on the doctors to tell you. I relied on the NHS but they didn't see it until very late.

"It had been there a long time, in soft tissue and hard to spot. When they finally opened me up to get it, the thing virtually sat up and barked at them like something from Alien. It was stage three and very, very aggressive."

That news floored him and the double sucker-punch from his publishers and the rapid departure of his agent didn't exactly help. It might all have led other authors to throw their PC out of the window. Instead, it set him to work.

In breathtaking time the crime novelist who blew up his former school, Fettes, in his first highly acclaimed book, Body Politic, had created a new bitter and twisted central figure for a book driven by revenge and played out against a violent backdrop of serial killings.

The result was The Death List, acclaimed by Ian Rankin as "a classy serial killer thriller' - and Paul has returned the compliment by praising his fellow city crime writer's work - and fellow Scottish novelist Kate Atkinson as "a modern revenge tragedy with even more blood, gore and ingenious twists". Better still, it has sold more than 30,000 copies.

Not bad going considering Johnston hammered it out in a fury in just over a month, his most violent book taking shape in a massive outpouring of 5000 words a day, driven by his battered emotional state.

Having introduced hacked-off crime writer Matt Wells in that novel - and personally vented his spleen in the process - Johnston is back for more. Last month he unveiled the second book in his Wells series, The Soul Collector.

"The whole point of this series is revenge," explains Johnston, 51, back in Edinburgh for a string of personal book store appearances and to catch up with his father, crime novelist Ronald Johnston.

"It's fair to say that after the first cancer and being dumped by my publishers there was a fair amount of anger floating around. Bitterness is a bad thing, it's unavoidable, it's part of the human state but it's a bit toxic.

"So I got some of that out in my first book which seems to have done the trick.

"Revenge is such an interesting emotion because we all feel it at some time, though possibly not to the murderous extent that I did."

Blood and gore, human passions and their frailties have long been part of Johnston's make up. He was just seven years old when he picked up a copy of The Odyssey from his father's bookshelves and became instantly hooked on fabulous tales of life, death, love and war.

"It opened at the episode where Cyclops sharpens a stick and then pokes it in someone's eye - exactly what a seven year old boy wants to read!," he gleefully recalls.

"I started nagging my dad from then on, I wanted to know more. Eventually he said 'OK, go to Fettes'. After a week there I realised what I'd let myself into and probably bankrupted my poor old dad at the same time."

He recalls a youthful Tony Blair a few years above him in the school play displaying a flair for acting, but he struggled to embrace the ideology of public school. Hence its explosive fictional demise in his first novel.

His love of Ancient Greece and the Classics endured though. He studied at Oxford and worked for shipping companies in London and Belgium before moving to Greece in 1987 for a string of jobs, among them one as a "ham-fisted tourist guide".

Along with his Quint Dalrymple series and the newer Matt Wells books are a trio of Greek-based books featuring his private eye Alex Mavros.

Amid it all, he divides his time between Athens - where he lives with second wife, Roula, and their children, Maggie and Alexander - and Edinburgh.

Today, he is still undergoing chemotherapy for his latest cancer but the bitterness and anger seems to have subsided at last.

Things are looking up professionally too. He has a new upbeat publisher and a new series of books on the shelves, while talks to develop The Body Politic into a movie have crossed the vital hurdle of securing finance.

It's not been easy though. "It's like a grieving procedure," he explains.

"There's anger, denial, melancholy, bitterness and acceptance. There have been times when I've wondered 'Is this it?.

"As a crime writer, I've juggled constantly with life and death in my imagination.

"Coming face to face with the real thing... well, it does make you reconsider a lot of things.

"But now," he adds with a smile, "I'm just really very happy."

The Soul Collector is out now, published by Mira Books.

ODYSSEY OF A MAN WITH THE WRITE STUFF

PAUL JOHNSTON was born in Edinburgh in 1957. His father Ronald was a successful thriller writer.

After Fettes, Paul studied ancient and modern Greek at Oxford University. He left in 1982 and began working for shipping companies in London and Belgium.

He moved to Greece in 1987, and worked on a newspaper, in shipping and then taught English. His daughter Silje was born in 1988. He started writing seriously in 1989, when he went to live on the small Aegean island of Antiparos.

The author returned to Edinburgh to study in 1995. His first novel, Body Politic, won the Creasey Dagger for best first crime novel of 1997. Since then he's written and published another nine books.

In 2005, he married his second wife, Roula, a Greek civil servant. Their daughter Maggie was born in Athens in January 2006 and their son Alexander in January 2008.
His chemotherapy is due to continue until November.

PEOPLE: There's been a murder... in fact, quite a few.

HE was the rough, tough-talking Glaswegian copper, a fiery lawman cleaning up crime in No Mean City.

Twenty-five years after he hit television screens, it's impossible to imagine Taggart being set anywhere other than in the city streets, grim housing estates and bustling cop shops that line the River Clyde.

Yet creator Glenn Chandler, who grew up in Meadowbank, whose first jobs involved silver service at what is now the Balmoral Hotel and behind a counter in Jenners, thought differently.

"I rather hoped it would be set in Edinburgh," he admits, thinking back a quarter of a century to when he was first approached to create the one-off police show that would evolve into a national phenomenon.

"I was pretty quickly slapped down by the powers at STV at the time. I was told they couldn't possibly film it in Edinburgh because everyone was based in Glasgow and they weren't prepared to meet the expense of driving the production team through from Glasgow and back again.

"So there I was, an Edinburgh boy living in Hertfordshire having to write about a Glasgow policeman," he laughs. "So I'm afraid it meant something of a crash course in west-coast culture.

"But I suppose it's just as well it worked out that way," he adds with a wry smile, "or poor Ian Rankin might have ended up out of a job."

It's hard to imagine now, but if Taggart had worked in the Capital, there wouldn't have been a big empty space marked "Edinburgh detective" waiting to be filled when Rankin started to write.

Of course, what started as a three-part murder mystery tale called Killer and based around a gritty Glasgow cop is now television history.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the show - it is the world's longest continually running cop show, seen in more than 80 countries from Iceland to New Zealand and there's no sign of a let up: ITV recently commissioned ten new programmes. Not bad for a one-off plot which Glenn, now 57, hurriedly researched by driving around Glasgow in the back of a black cab and mingling with punters in the city's pubs.

"To be honest, I don't really know if it would have worked as well if it had been set in Edinburgh," he concedes.

"Taggart has this raw edge to it and Glasgow is much more suited to the kind of Taggart formula than Edinburgh. "So it didn't work out too badly."

In fact, it was a dream come true for Glenn, who suddenly found himself catapulted from writing plays for small London theatres to the high pressure demands of churning out quality television scripts to tight filming deadlines.

And it was a world away from his first foray into writing - an end of term school play which introduced him to his first experience of censorship.

"It was my final year at the Royal High," he remembers. "We did a satirical production looking back on the past term.

"During the first show we did a song about a master's sexual predilection and I was pretty quickly sent straight to the rector's office and told to cut verses with immediate effect.

"It was my first lesson in the fine line between satire and libel."

Writingwas his vocation despite a family gene pool that suggested his talents might lie in music. Born at home in Meadowbank, his mother Joan was an amateur opera singer and his father Andrew played piano and accordion with the Al Bertino Swing Band, a dance hall ensemble. His maternal grandfather had music in his bones too, he was frontman in Frank Moy and his Orchestra, a regular fixture at hotels around the city.

The young Glenn was encouraged to practise his scales at the piano, but it was writing and theatre that were his passion.

"But I didn't know how to go about being a writer," he remembers, "so I took a succession of jobs instead."

There were spells as a commis waiter at the North British Hotel - now the Balmoral - until he spilled tea in Oscar-nominated actor Laurence Harvey's lap. Then he worked on the floor in Woolworths and Jenners before he finally boarded a train at Waverley for London. He ended up in Notting Hill writing radio plays which more often than not were returned with rejection letters and later short dramas for London fringe theatres.

One of them - Moonlight Across the Heather, a tale of murder set around a lonely mountain bothy - caught the attention of STV's controller of drama at the time, Robert Love. Soon the pair were meeting over a table in Covent Garden to discuss the possibilities of a Scottish-based crime drama.

"I already had an interest in murder," he explains. "I had a commission from Granada Television to write three episodes of daytime drama Crown Court and I had started to go to murder trials at the Old Bailey to listen to what people can do to each other.

"So wWhen Robert Love suggested working on a whodunit about a Glasgow detective, my first thought was 'Wow!'"

There was a similar reaction when he met Mark McManus, the actor who would become Taggart and who he immediately realised was perfect for the part. The character's name, he admits, was plucked from a gravestone in a Glasgow cemetery. Glenn's involvement with the programme spanned 1983 to 1998, evolving throughout the difficult period of McManus's sudden death and the introduction of new characters - including another Edinburgh presence in the form of actor John Michie, who plays DI Robbie Ross.

Soon he will return home to Edinburgh from his Hertfordshire base, to take part for the first time in the Festival. It's a journey back to his roots that is both personal and professional. "I'm coming full circle," he grins. "I'm coming home and I'm back in theatre."

He is bringing two plays, one - Boys of the Empire - is a political satire set in a 1920s boarding school which draws on today's Iraq conflict and Britain's historic role in the area in the aftermath of the First World War. It was inspired, he explains, by a chance discovery of boys' comics in an antique shop. "These comics were all 'ripping' and 'spiffing'. I found a Boy's Own one with an incredibly patronising tale about these upper class public school-types dealing with the 'foreigners' in Iraq. Of course, it all has these parallels with what is happening today. So the play makes a sly political point about what is happening now."

He takes the role of producer for the other play, What's Wrong With Angry, a comedy-drama based in 1992 at a time when debate raged over lowering the age of homosexual consent from 21.

Yet while he may have moved on, there's no escaping the gritty Glasgow cop, whose gruff mannerisms and catchphrase 'there's been a murrderr' - even though Glenn insists the line was never written in any episode - spawned dozens of imitators.

"I never miss it," he admits. "It's terrific entertainment - my only gripe is that at an hour, it's not long enough. There's never any danger of running out of stories either," he adds, casting an eye around his library, stuffed full of books based on real life crimes. "Because really, there's no limit to how badly we can all manage to treat each other."

Tickets are on sale now for Boys of the Empire and What's Wrong with Angry, both at C venue 34, Chambers Street from July 30 until August 25, priced GBP 8.50-GBP 11.50. For further information and tickets go to www.cthefestival.com / 0845-260 1234 or www.edfringe.com

PILOT SHOW 'KILLER' REALLY TOOK OFF

GLENN CHANDLER wrote every episode of Taggart for 11 years, starting with the pilot show, Killer.

The twists and turns of the original episode were so successful that none of the actors reading for parts correctly guessed the identity of the murderer.

It was a hugely successful format that catapulted the series to the top of the viewers' rating charts.

The most viewers - 18.3 million - tuned in for Violent Deaths in 1992, a story of a student with a crush on a teacher who witnesses an apparent murder while spying on her.

Two years later Taggart, Mark McManus, died of pneumonia midway through filming an episode. The script was hastily rewritten - he was said to be in meetings with the chief constable.
Edinburgh Evening News: June 2008

PEOPLE Spinning out a new Skinner

AS a spin doctor for the Tories at the height of their Eighties reign, Quintin Jardine may have been forgiven for having told his fair share of tall tales.

It was the Poll Tax era, Scots were smarting over the dismantling of their coal industry and braced for the shutdown of British Steel at Ravenscraig, watching with bitterness as the Iron Lady's policies created a London Yuppie culture while unemployment and discontent north of the Border soared.

There's a wicked chuckle in Jardine's voice as the publicity man turned bestselling crime author reflects on a period most Scots might prefer to forget. "The Eighties were a great time," he grins broadly. "We had a war, we won the European Elections, we won general elections, we crushed Scargill. And we had a damn good laugh doing it."

Incongruous as that sounds coming from a son born within Labour's heartland - Jardine now lives in Gullane but he hails from Lanarkshire - he maintains supporting the Tories when everyone around him was hoisting the red flag was, for him anyway, the logical thing to do.

"British Steel was going down the tubes anyway," he shrugs. "That wasn't Thatcher's fault but she was blamed for it. Having experienced ten years of Tony Blair we now have something to measure Thatcher by," he concludes. "Talk about 'never mind the quality, feel the width!'"

Bucking the popular trend appears to have become Jardine's niche. His fictional cop Bob Skinner is no down-at-heel ordinary copper, he's a deputy chief constable with cases of middle-class skulduggery, fiddling businessmen and crooked lawyers to deal with.

Where other crime writers may prefer to pick over drug-fuelled crime on sink estates and bloody bust ups among gangland crime lords, Jardine's books have an upwardly mobile touch.

The clever formula has served him well. Father of two Jardine, 62, is now preparing for a busy UK tour publicising his 18th Skinner novel, Aftershock, due to hit the bookshelves on May 1.

It is, he explains, a natural follow-on from his 17th Skinner, Death's Door, spinning events from its pages into a new series of murders across the Lothians for his no-nonsense, straight-talking deputy chief constable to crack.

"Aftershock picks up from where Death's Door ended," he confirms. "At the end of Death's Door, the crimes appear to have been solved, but Aftershock picks up from that right at the start.

"There's a body found, the 'MO' is disturbingly similar to the way the victims in Death's Door were killed, and the police quickly realise they have seen this before. But is it a serial killer or is it a copycat?"

Of course, to find out you have to read the book. For there are no plans - right now, at least - to transport Skinner and his fictional Lothian and Borders coppers and criminals from the printed page to the small screen.

"There might be a move away from cop series on television at the moment," reflects Jardine, before hinting that he is preparing for at least one meeting with a television companies executives soon. "That said I'm not that bothered about TV. A couple of years back I had talks, I was sent a screenplay, I looked at it and thought it was awful.

"They'd got a highly rated screenwriter for it, yet I didn't recognise half of the characters. Somehow Skinner had acquired a brother-in-law who was a lawyer who I'd never heard of!

"There were secondary characters that I didn't have a clue about and the most damning of all was that there was hardly anything in the storyline that I actually recognised."

He laughs out loud, bemused and astonished at the notion that the characters and twisting plots he'd slaved over for so long could be so drastically reinvented.

"I know it's happened with other author's work - the Rebus series with Ken Stott wasn't half mutilated," he continues. "For a start, they made Rebus a Hibby! Ian Rankin's work is scrupulous in not adhering him to any football club."

Born the son of two teachers in Motherwell in June 1945, Jardine went on to Glasgow University to study law only to drop out in favour of a career in journalism working for a local paper. He moved to East Lothian in the early Seventies, switching jobs to become a government information officer and later political spin doctor for the Conservatives and later the SNP. Writing novels for a living didn't enter his head until his late first wife, Irene, responded to his declaration that he could have written a better book than the one he had just read, by suggesting that he should.

The result was his first stab at crime writing, Skinner's Rules, published in 1994. Three years later his wife lost a desperate fight against cancer: today a wedding ring dangles on a chain around his neck.

He remarried five years later, to Eileen, yet his late wife's impact on his life remains - the touching foreword on his last Skinner novel was in her memory: "Her special light wasn't extinguished. It will shine on until the last person who ever knew her is gone, and beyond, I hope, through these words, on whatever library shelves they may come eventually to gather dust."

For more information on Quintin Jardine's work to go www.quintinjardine.com
Edinburgh Evening News April 2008

PEOPLE: Confessions of a serial wordsmith

 

A WEARY look crosses author Alexander McCall Smith's face as he makes a string of confessions. First up, he doesn't actually know how many books he's written.

Next, he's not seen the finished film of his first and possibly most famous novel, destined for television screens in the next few weeks.

Finally, he's not even glimpsed the slightly cheeky tea commercial clearly inspired by his "traditionally built" heroine, the courteous, sensible and witty Mma Ramotswe - a character whose giant personality and slightly bumbling approach to solving crime has become one of the best-loved figures on the bookshop shelves.

As one of the most prolific writers around, who churns out beautifully crafted, often witty and absorbing chapters of two books at a time, he can be forgiven.

Still trying to balance his body clock after a trip to the other side of the world - he's not long back at his Merchiston villa after an event for writers in Florida and prior to that a literary festival in Sri Lanka - McCall Smith has rather given up on trying to keep track of anything other than what his writing duties are for the day and when he can head for his afternoon nap.

He is sitting at his busy writing desk in a cluttered study on the first floor of the home he shares with his wife, Bruntsfield GP, Elizabeth, co-founder of his other great interest, the Really Terrible Orchestra, in which he plays bassoon badly.

The writing room - walls lined with heaving bookcases - is bathed in gentle sunlight, his desk groans under the weight of African objet d'art, a strikingly modern Apple iMac dominates the vast worktop alongside a credit card-sized iPod and a note from his PA listing three key writing jobs that are, for the day at least, his priority.

He sips from a battered blue and white china mug, a v-shaped chunk is missing from the rim, yet the bestselling author who by now must have made a decent fortune from his 60 or so books and the sale of at least one set of film rights, clearly doesn't mind.

Instead he is dwelling on the transformation of his 1988 Botswana-based novel, The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, from the printed page to the small screen courtesy of Oscar-winning English Patient director Anthony Minghella and leading lady, jazz songstress but movie novice, Jill Scott.

"I haven't seen the film," he concedes, "but the excerpts I have seen have been very powerful. The trailer is really lovely.

"I saw them filming in Botswana, I saw the set and met the actors."

It's been a tall order transposing a bestselling novel, remarkable for its fine morals and lack of blood and gore, to the screen. Indeed, original thoughts that it might be for cinema release were eventually replaced with a realisation that Mma Ramotswe's gentle pace and the relatively minor crimes she solves might not have cinema goers queuing around the block.

Nevertheless, McCall Smith does let slip that the first television screening of his books - thought to be scheduled for Easter - will be one of many.

"Anthony Minghella wants to make a series. So there will be a TV series which will have many films. But I'm really not to say anything," he chuckles, eyes sparkling.

"It seemed to take a long time from when I first sold the film rights, but I gather that is often the case," he explains. "Then Antony Minghella said he wanted to make the film - I very much admired the films of his that I had seen. But it's a very complicated business getting everything lined up. It involves such large logistics, it was complicated, but they did it."

His initial concerns that the book would be given glossy Hollywood treatment were unfounded. Instead, Minghella and his crew headed to Botswana - a country which had never before hosted a movie, but which greeted the opportunity with the same courtesy and enthusiasm you might expect Mma Ramotswe to welcome a troubled client with.

"I was pleased it was filmed in Botswana, I was keen that something that had such a strong association with that country should continue to be associated with it," he remarks.

"It's much cheaper to make things in a studio in Hollywood than to make them on location in Botswana, but I'm happy to say they did."

It's a major milestone in the softly-spoken, acutely intelligent author's career. Now retired as Professor of Medical Law at Edinburgh University, he first set about writing in 1980 when he cautiously entered a Chambers competition for new writers and found himself a winner in the children's book category.

It was 1988 before Mma Ramotswe made her first appearance. Today he is seamlessly working on two books from two other series, both at the same time.

"It's a pretty busy existence," he says, masterful in understatement. "I'm writing four books a year. Now I have two books on the go: volume five of Isabel Dalhousie and volume five of Scotland Street, which is in The Scotsman.

"I'm often up at 4am, I'll write for several hours before going back to bed briefly. So far today, I have written a chapter of Scotland Street and will write a chapter of Isabel Dalhousie later."

The results are a string of books which frequently top bestsellers lists. Not bad for an author who originally reckoned his style would be appreciated by only a niche audience of readers.

"I was reconciled to being a writer with a small readership," admits the 59-year-old father of two daughters, Lucy, 23, and Emily, 19. "At the stage my books were published everyone seemed to be more interested in rather grittier sorts of books."

Their popularity exploded thanks to the American market, where readers couldn't get enough of the simple, highly moral and respectful ways of the Botswana detective and her associates.

Indeed, it's a perfect antidote to a society which McCall Smith agrees has lost track of its own morals.

"We have always had social problems, we have to keep what we see today in perspective. In some respects, Scotland is a better place to live then it was some time ago.

"But the society we have created can have its negative side. Statistics about the unhappiness of children suffering are really rather bleak and there are fundamental questions we need to ask ourselves about what is going wrong," he declares.

"We need to recreate a civic society and part of that is having a sense of respect for one another. We are now creating a totally amoral generation where none of the basic building blocks of society have been instilled in people."

Perhaps a little dose of Mma Ramotswe, a journey to Botswana and an insight into its people's courteous ways, brought to us by Edinburgh's Alexander McCall Smith is exactly what we need.

OUT OF AFRICA

ALEXANDER McCall Smith was born to a Scottish father and Southern Rhodesian mother and was raised in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. He went to school in Bulawayo, near the border with Botswana.

He came to Scotland when he was 18 to pursue his academic career and has lived here ever since. His wife, Elizabeth is a GP in Bruntsfield and they have two teenage daughters.

The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency was the first in a string of Botswana-based novels featuring his best known character, Mma Ramotswe. It was later followed by a series of novellas featuring a fictional German professor, Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld; the Isabel Dalhousie Sunday Philosphy Club series featuring a quaint 40-something Edinburgh detective; and his Scotland Street serial.

In addition he has published several books of short stories.

He lives in Merchiston in an area dubbed "Bestsellers' Corner" within walking distance of fellow authors Ian Rankin and JK Rowling.
Edinburgh Evening News, Feb 2008

PEOPLE: Preparing to close the book on Rebus

 

UNSHAVEN and just a little bleary-eyed, Ian Rankin spoons instant coffee into a set of unmatched cups and proceeds to apologise half-heartedly for the clutter in the spacious kitchen of his sprawling Merchiston home.

There hasn't been much time for tidying up, he explains. Not when you've just driven 1000 miles from Dordogne in France after an emotional weekend spent clearing out what was the family bolt-hole - and the place where he wrote many of the Rebus novels - to make way for its new owners, packing up favourite belongings and even making space in the car for a crate of windfall apples from the orchard that they couldn't bear to leave behind.

If breaking up the Rankin retreat was hard - "My wife was in floods of tears, pointing to things like the kitchen sink and saying: 'Remember we bathed the children there when they were babies'" - there hasn't been too much time to think about it. So far, his plan to take a year off and do as little as possible have been thwarted by simply having too much to do.

Before the manic 2000-mile round trip to France, there was a string of interviews to be done, more to be organised - including a bizarre bus trip in which Ian will accompany a group of German journalists on a tour of Rebus's Edinburgh haunts with the author chatting into a microphone and pointing out places of interest as they go. All that plus the small matter of attending GQ magazine's glittering awards ceremony, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Pierce Brosnan, Charlotte Church, Jamie and Louise Redknapp, the Little Britain stars and Robbie Williams.

"Actually I rubbed shoulders with Robbie Williams' bodyguards," he stresses with a laugh. "They kind of shoved me out of the way to let him past." At least he won the magazine's writer of the year award - beating the likes of Salman Rushdie, Tony Parsons and Ian McEwan in the process - and received a personal invitation from Gordon Ramsay to call his restaurant any time and he'd make sure he'd fit him in for a meal.

"Oh, and I got my award from Carol Vorderman," he says excitedly. "Now that was really quite good..."

In fact, life is pretty good for the man who has put Edinburgh's criminal underbelly on the modern literary map, whose Rebus novels have dominated international thriller bestseller lists for almost a decade and who appears to be doing as much for the city's tourism industry as anything VisitScotland has so far managed to come up with.

Fans from Australia, Canada and the United States make regular pilgrimages to Rebus's beat, desperate to see for themselves St Leonard's Police Station, the Oxford Bar and his fictional home in Arden Terrace. "They want to find out about the city they've been reading about for years," explains Ian. "So they come and walk into the bar where Rebus drinks and see the street where he lives.

"It's not like fiction, he becomes a real person. Sometimes they come into the Oxford Bar while I'm there but are sadly disappointed when they meet me. They want this complex, damaged alcoholic. They don't want the creator, they want the character."

Dressed in loose jeans and a faded black T-shirt, Ian sinks into a large comfortable settee in the sunny lounge of his Victorian mansion in one of the city's most affluent areas.

In a millionaires' row of homes - fellow authors Alexander McCall Smith and JK Rowling live nearby - this is every inch a lived-in, busy family home, with tomato vines growing in the conservatory and the cats' litter tray on the floor. And it's still a far cry from those humble beginnings as a shopkeeper's son in the small Fife mining community of Cardenden.

From what he calls a "slow burn" which almost led to him being dropped by his publishers, these days his books fly off the shelves selling at least 500,000 copies in the first three months of their publication. His novels are the most borrowed books in Scotland's libraries and one - Black and Blue - even features on the school curriculum. The Rebus industry is rumoured to earn the author a tidy GBP 500,000 a year.

Soon his audience will expand further when ITV viewers tune in to a new Rebus played by craggy Edinburgh-born Ken Stott - with Ian appearing for an instant in a Hitchcock-like cameo.

It's all been ticking along nicely... there's just one small blip on the horizon, a niggling issue that needs to be dealt with and one that Rebus fans the world over have been dreading. It's also partly the reason why he's opted to take a year off.

"I wanted to take stock. Rebus is 60, he's got to retire. There are two books to go. Does he retire and stay in Scotland? Does the smoking ban in public places force him to move to Marbella?"

Ian, who is 45, laughs. Marbella, he stresses, is a bit unlikely, but so far at least, even he doesn't know exactly how the final chapter in the last Rebus novel will pan out.

To help him along, he's spent the last few months re-reading his own work, retracing his leading character's steps, identifying gaps in his personality, hoping to tie up loose ends and surprising himself along the way.

"I'd never actually read my own books before," he explains. "I'd write one and then it would be straight on to the next story. But I'm enjoying reading them now - I've even found myself wondering what happens in the end. So it's been an interesting experience."

Revisiting his literary past has also provided the platform for his latest work, Rebus's Scotland, which intertwines his own journey from Fife to becoming a best-selling author, with a biography of his famous fictional detective - revealing striking similarities with the author.

Its publication coincides with another Ian Rankin trip back in time: his first novel, The Flood, which sold just a handful of copies back in 1986, has also been re-released. So with two books to publicise and an up-and-coming television drama in the pipeline, Ian's year off was never really going to be spent relaxing in the front room, stroking the cats. "I was a bit tired of it all," he admits. "The book tours, the interviews. It's not just the UK, there's Australia, Canada, America and the 27 other countries. I wanted time out to think about things about Rebus I've not said, things I wanted to say, tie things up."

So what can the Rebus fan expect from those two, final books? Perhaps reading the Evening News will help provide the clues, hints Ian.

"I get a lot of stuff from the Evening News," he admits. "I'll tear out a page and stick it in a folder. The paper is a great source for me."

"The final book will have to tie up a few loose ends including the relationship between Rebus and Cafferty, the main villain.

"But I've not really thought about the final scene," he admits.

All I know is that it will be weird to write that last chapter. The blokes at the Oxford Bar say I should just go and get a real job. I've been thinking a bit about radio plays and working more with actors.

"Then again, JK Rowling said when she finishes Harry Potter she might write a thriller. Maybe I'll do a swop with her and write a children's book... who knows?"

* Rebus's Scotland: A Personal Journey by Ian Rankin, price GBP 20. The Flood is GBP 14.99, both published by Orion Books
Edinburgh Evening News: September 2005