Classic TV

Despite being the European city of culture not so long ago, Glasgow has a reputation for being rough and its people have a reputation for being just as tough. Consider 17 things overheard in Glasgow if you want proof.

But 1979’s Play For Today, Just A Boy’s Game, depicts a Glaswegian wrestling with the notion of hardness, which some might argue is ‘just a boy’s game’. Jake (Frankie Miller) lives in the shadow of his dying grandfather (Hector Nicol), who was once Greenock’s hardest. Jake hates his grandfather – and vice versa – but his sole aim is to be as tough as him. But one day, Jake’s life of drifting, drinking and fighting leads to a bleak realisation. 

The play, written by Peter McDougall, a former Glaswegian docker and the recipient in 2008 of a BAFTA for services to Scottish broadcasting, and directed by fellow Scot John Mackenzie (The Long Good Friday), has an absolute degree of authenticity and is unafraid of showing every miserable, decaying facet of Glasgow in the late 1970s. Look hard enough and you’ll even spot the likes of Glasgow’s favoured son, Gregor Fisher.

As always, if you like it, support the makers by buying it on DVD.

If you’re a modern Christian, you believe (or are at least supposed to believe) that Jesus was both man and God. However, the Bible is a bit sketchy about much to do with the man part of the equation, particularly the 30 or so years before Jesus’s ministry began, favouring instead the God part. Over the years, many writers have accordingly tried to humanise Jesus and to depict the man, rather than God, and just after Easter 1969, for one of the BBC’s Wednesday Plays, Dennis Potter threw his hat into the ring with Son Of Man

In the play, which was directed by regular Potter collaborator Gareth Davies, Potter portrays Jesus (Colin Blakely) as a hearty, fiery, well-meaning carpenter who believes that people should try to love their enemies rather than fight all the time, but who is racked by self doubt as to whether he is the popularly anticipated Messiah. Co-starring Edward Hardwicke as Judas, Brian Blessed as Peter and Robert Hardy as Pontius Pilate, the play eschews everything divine in Jesus’s story, as well as details such as the 30 pieces of silver and Mary Magdalene, in favour of psychological investigation of the characters, starting with Jesus’s struggle with his own divinity in the wilderness up to his crucifixion on Golgotha. 

Although shown just after Easter and despite Potter’s long-time bête noir, Mary Whitehouse, accusing him of blasphemy, the play met with little controversy or resistance, perhaps due to its obviously low budget. Indeed, Potter later expressed regret that it was “shot on video in three days in an electronic studio on a set that looks as though it’s trembling and about to fall down”. All the same it’s a powerful piece that was later adapted for the stage at the Roundhouse, London, with Frank Finlay as Jesus and a slightly different, less cruel ending, a mere six months later.

But you can watch the original below.