In the 1970s, when the French film director Bertrand Tavernier filmed the cult movie Death Watch, starring Romy Schneider and Harvey Keitel, he chose Glasgow as a backdrop to his nightmare vision of where Reality TV might take us. He filmed in the West End, and I recall a panning shot of Romy Schneider walking past my aunt’s house and around the crescent that joins Crown Road North to Crown Road South. In fact, Tavernier visited my aunt, looking for a location for some internal shots. In the end he didn’t opt for 4 Crown Road North, and I suppose my aunt should have been gratified that M. Tavernier remarked, “The ’ous – it is not sufficiently… decayed.”
Since then, Glasgow has become a favoured location for film directors, not just because, no doubt, the price is right, but because the architecture within the grid system of Glasgow city centre can reasonably easily be converted to resemble somewhere like Philadelphia. Brad Pitt filmed World War Z here, and I recall crossing a George Square full of zombies smoking cigarettes and waiting for the next take. Now Batman, aka Robert Pattinson, is haunting the Necropolis; plenty of decay there.
George Square is currently fenced off, apparently being refurbished. The statuary has (temporarily, we are told), been removed. There is a rumour that they might not all be replaced on their pedestals. Not so long ago there was a proposal that all the statues be placed in museums, with accompanying plaques apologising for Glasgow’s links with the slave trade. Sandy Stoddart, Sculptor in Ordinary to Her Majesty, wrote a blistering critique of what he saw as an act of philistinism, perhaps not unlike the proposed demolition of the Red Road flats which was to take place during the opening ceremony of the last Glasgow Commonwealth Games. The destruction of people’s homes was to be turned into un coup de théâtre. Stoddart’s scorn for this proposal was expressed in I think the finest letter to the Herald I have ever read. You sense a common theme. A dumbing down.
Glaswegians are inclined to mock statues. The Duke of Wellington sits on a horse outside the Gallery of Modern Art, a traffic cone permanently on his head. (Actually, I have a notion the cone has been replaced by a chicken, a smaller cone on the chook’s head.) Apparently Banksy admires the traffic cone. It’s a reflection of Glasgow’s anarchic bravado – dead gallus. I don’t. The statue is, after all, a work of art. Would you deface the Mona Lisa? Even some people in Extinction Rebellion have stopped pouring tomato soup over Rembrandt and Van Gogh.
There is an article by Philip Rodney in yesterday’s Sunday Times, “Glasgow desperately needs an intervention”, with its subtitle, “Andrew Neil was right about the city being mired in managed decline”. Naturally, as a Glaswegian, I bridled. Didn’t Glasgow shine last week, at Hampden Park? Four glorious goals. I particularly admired the last one, lofted into an empty Danish goalmouth from the halfway line. Wha’s like us? Dam’ few, an’ they’re a’ deid.
But you know, Mr Rodney is right. The city centre is a mess. An obstacle course of mud, bollards, and barricades. It has been like that for so long, certainly since the Art School went on fire, perhaps even since St Andrew’s Halls went on fire, that it feels permanent. The tragedy is that the decayed environment conceals those elements of which Glasgow should be proud. On Saturday evening, for example, I attended the RSNO’s concert in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. Quite magnificent. The RSNO is on top form. In the first half we heard George Antheil’s A Jazz Symphony, and then George Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F, arranged for Jazz Trio and orchestra. Conductor Patrick Hahn swapped places with pianist Frank Dupree for the Antheil, and there was a bit of dumb crambo as the pair swapped Hahn’s black dress shoes for Dupree’s white sneakers, apparently the dress code for the jazz trio, including Jakob Krupp on bass, and Obi Jenne, on drums. Then they swapped back for the piano concerto.
I was initially a bit ambivalent about the prospect of hearing the Gershwin in the guise of Frank Dupree’s arrangement. But I was completely won over. The jazz idiom, in the context of Gershwin’s fusion of jazz and classical styles, was completely convincing, both within the trio, who included a cadenza of dazzling virtuosity, and within the orchestra itself. As an encore, the trio was joined by the RSNO’s percussionists, and an array of bongo drums etc, for a rendition of Caravan which brought the house down. Follow that!
Well, they did, in the second half, with Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony. I love late Rachmaninov. Such nostalgia. A five star occasion. It was recorded, so you can catch it on BBC Radio 3 on December 4th.
There is no crit in today’s Herald, which I think is regrettable. The attendance at the concert was, shall we say, modest, and I wondered if a cold night, plus the obstacle course of mud and bollards, had put people off. But in Glasgow, of all places, we need to trumpet our successes.
I can draw another contrast, with my latest visitation to the Far East. Last Thursday was my medical school class’s 44th reunion, in Edinburgh. It was the first one I ever attended. They have been held more or less every 10 years, and for the 10th anniversary I was in New Zealand, for the 20th, in the Isle of Skye, which strangely felt more remote. By the 30th, I’d just got out of the way of it. Then the 40th was postponed, due to Covid. So we reconvened last week, and I thought if I didn’t go, I might not get another chance.
I’m so glad I went. We met in the afternoon at the entrance to the old Edinburgh Royal Infirmary on Lauriston Place. It closed early this century, moving to a new site in Little France. The medical wards at the back of the Infirmary, overlooking the Meadows, were converted into flats, but the surgical wards went to rack and ruin and could well have been demolished. Instead, they were converted into a learning hub, the Edinburgh Futures Institute. What a transformation. It was surreal, to pace these well-worn corridors. I had a coffee in the Canopy – the old Emergency Department. No sense of decay here. No managed decline.
In the evening we met in the City Chambers, on the Royal Mile just opposite St Giles, for dinner. A sweet occasion. On several occasions I chatted with people whom I had not seen for over 40 years, and it was as if we were resuming a conversation from last week. How could this be? I think we must have all been bonded by a shared experience which was certainly intense. A baptism of fear and intimidation. We seemed to hold simultaneously in our heads the notions that we had been institutionally bullied, yet we had experienced a Golden Age, before computerisation, digitalisation, and managerial pseudoscience tore Medicine apart. We had each been asked to supply an anecdote, a reminiscence of undergraduate days, for publication, and I was struck that the majority of us, myself included, recalled something from 2nd MB. That gruelling year. I remarked to a friend that we must all be suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. PTSD. He laughed, and didn’t disagree.
jamescalumcampbell 