Dundee: Dour Fun, Weird Love

(The following is the original version of the script to the STV programme Dour Fun, directed by Valerie Lyon, and presented by that tcheuchter Herbert. It was quite sensibly cut in half for broadcast, but he can't find that version. No, really, sometimes inefficiency is bigger than vanity.)

Dundee is the Scottish city no-one seems to visit, or if they do, they don't stay long. Its inhabitants tend either to stay very put, or to move very far away. I've had conversations with Dundonians as far afield as Moscow, in which they claimed it was the perfect place to live -- if it wasn't for the place itself. No-one once caught up by Dundee ever seems to really leave. It seems to inspire a very weird kind of love often indistinguishable from hate.

In the last fifteen years or so something has changed. Suddenly the city is full of writers, poets, dramatists, painters -- passing through or learning their trade or have-always-been-here, always-will. Exiles like myself, Lundonians and Dunwegians, look at Dundee now and wonder how their jobs and families got them stuck so far away. All those unwritten books, unpainted pictures, lost plays and unrecorded music are at last being accomplished. Why? What's happened to turn things around, and how deep has the change actually gone?

Do these new Dundonians have any sense of our complex layers of past? Are they really representing the city or simply inhabiting it? Will we see a true image of Dundee at last or simply another quick-fit photo-shoot, a shallow cut and paste, a few new labels slapped over the old, just as shabby and inadequate? Or is this a good time, the best of times, to look at the hame toon of McGonagall?

You can't call Dundee's the city of the 3Js anymore. Jam? A city built on jam? It was marmalade really, but you'd be forgiven for imagining us all jiggling away to Bob Marley. Dundonians dance? Like hell -- except we've got Scotland's only full time professional dance company, Scottish Dance Theatre , based in the Rep, and Dundee College runs the only contemporary dance course in Scotland. Then there's jute -- what exactly is jute again? And as for journalism, well, that gives an accurate picture. Read us through our comics and we're all juvenile delinquents in stripy jumpers and spiky hair, we've all got bunnits and handlebar moustaches, and we obsessively spy on each other like old pointy nose herself, Keyhole Kate. Our newspaper magnates, the couthy auld Thomsons, may have modelled themselves on Hearst, but no-one set Citizen Kane in Dundee. What about all that anarchic cartoon energy pouring out of a company that's only just taken the classified ads off the front page of The Courier: are we a toun capable of dour fun?

In recent years there have been attempts to label Dundee the city of Discovery, after the ship that delivered Captain Scott to the pole for one last icy stroll, but these are almost as daft as continuing to package the 3Js. Perhaps the problem is that Dundee doesn't really have an image of itself to sell to Scotland and the world. Maybe we don't have a strong enough image anyway, or maybe the truth about Dundee is a little too complex to fit on a car sticker.

Other cities have writers and artists that chronicle their histories and their lifestyles, that reflect the city back at itself. Edinburgh's got Robert Louis Stevenson, Norman MacCaig and Irvine Welsh; Glasgow's got Rennie Mackintosh and schools of painters, not to mention Alasdair Gray and Edwin Morgan and James Kelman and Liz Lochhead and Tom Leonard and (somebody stop me). Even Oban's got Iain Crichton Smith and Alan Warner. What has Dundee got? A terrible novel about burning a witch and an even worse one about the rail bridge faain doon -- and McGonagall. The Worst Poet in the World. Definitely. The one that enables chumps and numpties to laugh at the whole idea of poetry and culture at large. A cartoon icon as Desperate as Dan, a monster as problematic as Mister Hyde. He's Dundee's very own Don Quixote and Sancha Panza all rolled into one. We hate him and love him almost as much as we hate and love the city itself. He's our idol with the heid of clay and the Tay Whale's his Greyfriars Bobby.

What can be said about this city, this radical toun, that can crawl out from under the shadow of McGonagall's mediocrity? Look at it, sitting right on the broad and very silvery Tay, spread out between three ex-volcanoes: Balgay, the Law, and Reres. The city looks south under big hopeful skies, it looks to Europe for its trade and its ideas. What a beautiful location to spoil with incessant demolitions, moronic constructions and two heartbreakingly average football teams.

Dundee has always been a mercantile city: open to the continent since medieval times, receiving goods from France and Holland and Germany. Knee deep in claret for centuries and, like any port, awash in infectious thoughts. This was where Wallace caught a bad dose of Liberty whilst attending the High School, and stabbed the Englishman Selby. And this was where that plague Calvinism was unloaded from ships and packed off to the depths of the Scottish psyche. In a sixteenth century full of political turbulence and religious chicanery, this was the Geneva of Scotland. Dundee tends to stand in for Moscow in BBC dramas, but in the sixteenth century, there really was a revolution going on here.

When a culture goes into crisis it suddenly starts to think about its own identity, it starts to need, desperately, some clarity. That was what happened in Dundee as Timex closed in the early nineties. And one upshot was cultural: Alan Spence's On the Line . In the sixteenth century the Reformation was doing much the same destructive work to our sense of ourselves. The overthrowing of Catholicism, the destabilising of the Scottish throne, engaged some of the most brilliant writers Dundee has produced: the Wedderburn brothers, James, John and Robert -- the 3Ws. In poetry, prose and drama they addressed all sides of this debate -- and James's agitprop satires were performed at the West Port, attracting an audience of ordinary Dundonians in exactly the same way the Rep has done: imagine They Fairly Mak Ye Work and The Mill Lavvies rewritten by Ben Jonson and you'll get some idea of the trilogy of Dundonian dramas now lost to us. And these were times when people got burnt for writing a play.

In the seventeenth century the various small sackings and puttings to the sword endured by most Scottish cities coalesced for Dundee into one big Cromwellian apocalypse called General Monk. Only in Ireland were worse deeds done. He removed the town from history for a spell, especially as, when he was massacring the last defenders holed up in St Mary's Tower, he burnt most of the town's records as well. Its history, its whole sense of itself, went up in smoke. When it came to, there was no culture left: only merchants and guilds, industrialists and workers, quick profits and radical protests.

Ready obliteration and hasty regeneration became our model. We grabbed onto new industries as they arrived, gave our all to them, then watched as they each turned belly up and floated away. We jumped on the jute bandwagon and made money while the slave plantations were elsewhere engaged during the American Civil War, then lost out to cheap labour in Calcutta. Floods of cheap Catholic labour came in from Ireland, fuelling sectarian divisions and putting the final shine on our distinctive accent. And incidentally ensuring Dundee was the city where McGonagall came to a kind of maturity -- throttling folk art into his dreadful poetic whine. We jumped in whale boats and harpooned the blubbery lot to near extinction. Just imagine if Moby Dick had been written by a Dundonian.

And we made watches with precision and typical dogged determination till Timex found it cheaper to go to the equivalent of Calcutta. And all the time our buildings were being thrown up and torn down with a tasteless relish for the latest monstrosity or biggest backhander that knocked our sense of civic identity sideways into that capacious pit: the working class memory.

Only by remembering everything did our fathers and mothers and grandparents maintain a sense of the place: all those things that keep you going when you work in the mills and the docks and you don't earn enough to feed your children or for them to get enough of an education to get out -- dance halls and cinemas and shop names; configurations of streets and closes where the relatives lived: the smell and the feel of the buildings being knocked down all round you till only the litany of the names survived, streets and shop owners and the products you could afford and the tools you used and the names of friends and relatives and when and how they died.

What turns a city round from industrial desert to cultural oasis? Not just a crisis or two or three: we lost whaling, then jute, then watchmaking, before we seemed to open our eyes and our mouths. Not just good education as the continuing brain drain to far-off or exciting or well-paid positions demonstrates. If Dundee is really going to turn any cultural corners, it has to waken up to all of its resources, to every art form. Because we have a unique collision of high and low culture, where the under-appreciated meets the profitable, and the popular influences the hard-to-get-a-handle-on. There's nothing simple about Dundee, nothing you can turn into a slogan. We're not cool like Britannia, nor miles better like Glasgow. God knows the first thing you find out is we're not the city of Discovery. We're deadpan, stare-ye-out, kent-yir-faither but nivir-heard- o-you. We're difficult and decent, Calvinist and Communist, good hearts and complex souls. Christ that's it -- we're the real thing. No wonder naebody wants to know us.

Links

http://www.ukguide.org/uk/dundee.html

http://www.taynet.co.uk/users/mcgon/

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