The comedian and fiddler follow in the footsteps of poet Norman MacCaig.
Over the years, the average television viewer in Scotland will have heard a fair bit of Aly Bain’s fiddle playing, but perhaps relatively little of his voice. One of the side-line delights of Billy Connolly And Aly Bain: Fishing For Poetry (Monday, 9pm, BBC Two), a film that’s rarely less than delightful, is the chance to hear the man talking at length.
He would probably concede he’s more eloquent with bow in hand, but Bain, narrating, speaks in a way that shares with his music the quality of directness. It’s a voice with its own lilt, its own roots; one that hasn’t had the edges knocked off or the tone adjusted for broadcast. The effect is refreshingly less like watching a TV presenter presenting than just having a guy talking to you. (Billy Connolly talks a lot in the programme, too, but chances are you’ll know what that sounds like already.)
Fishing For Poetry has a slightly more mellifluous flow to it, but a more accurate title would be Fishing For A Poet. To be precise, Bain and Connolly’s friend, the great Norman MacCaig, who died in 1996, and whose birth 100 years ago they are setting out to mark, ideally by catching some trout.
Unsurprisingly, given that he wrote some of the 20th century’s greatest, most focused, least fussy evocations of and meditations on the Scottish landscape, MacCaig was a man who liked to be out in it, particularly the wilds of his beloved Assynt, in the North West Highlands. For a long part of his long career, he was also a primary school teacher, and he made the most of those long holidays, spending every summer up there for 40 years. In a superb archive interview that punctuates the film, MacCaig, sly, slightly mordant and seemingly hard-wired to the place words pour from, talks of those summers as supplying the vital stuff his writing was made of: “When I go up, as I do every summer, for 10 weeks – the stuff is there. Hoist your Venetian blinds, there it is. And I never write a thing. But I fatten my camel’s hump then feed on it all winter, quite unconsciously. I never say, ‘there’s a nice skinny rosebush, that’ll make a nice skinny poem.’ But sitting here, a year later, that skinny rosebush will scratch my mind and demand an utterance.”
If he was rarely happier than when out in Assynt, it seems MacCaig was happiest of all when out fishing. His favourite spot was The Loch Of The Green Corrie, a small, plain, secretive loch that hides far away, some 1,600 feet up a mountainside. MacCaig spoke about the place often to friends, among them the writer Andrew Greig. The last time Greig visited MacCaig, a few months before his death, the older man, knowing he would never again make the remembered journey himself, set him a challenge: find the loch, try to catch a fish.
“If you catch a fish, I shall be delighted. If you fail, then looking down from a place in which I do not believe, I shall be most amused.”
After MacCaig died, Greig eventually set out to do just that. To discover whether or not he succeeded, you’ll have to read At The Loch Of The Green Corrie, the remarkable book he was moved to write about the trip, which, in turn, inspired this curiously wonderful little programme, as Greig joins Bain and Connolly to travel to the loch again. Three friends of MacCaig, making an odd pilgrimage, increasingly confident that, wherever he is, “the old bugger” is laughing his socks off at them.
Around their journey, Bain narrates a summary of MacCaig’s life and career, and the film is peppered with striking images of the man: that extraordinary long face which, tweaked slightly in one direction suggests Christopher Lee, in another direction Terence Stamp, in another Wilfrid Brambell.
What we get is a small memorial to a lost era of noise and smoky breath, when great writers and artists roamed at large in Scotland’s grainy city pubs. The focus, though, is always MacCaig’s work, and the director, Mike Alexander, invites a roster of writers to read selections, a celebration of his words and their voices: Seamus Heaney, Liz Lochhead, Alasdair Gray, Douglas Dunn, Jackie Kay.
Meanwhile, the fishing expedition is taking a curious turn. MacCaig described himself as “a Zen Calvinist”, and the trip becomes a little Zen puzzle whose meaning is to be figured out by each individual. Fish seem reluctant to show themselves. The programme was filmed in late May, and, as they strike out, Bain is wearing an optimistic pair of shorts, which is no doubt why nature decides to throw a freak blizzard at them. It’s a bare part of the world, and Connolly, who is on fine form and has packed his banjo, is almost lost for words as he tries to describe the eerily haunted feel of it. As the temperatures drop, he asks a question that seems to get right to the heart of the whole affair: “Could Norman no’ have liked Jamaica or something?” From the place in which he did not believe, you might hear the poet snigger.
If poetic trips are your thing, there’s an unfortunate scheduling clash, as the MacCaig film goes out at exactly the same time as Gods And Monsters: Homer’s Odyssey (Monday, 9pm, BBC Four). In it, the poet Simon Armitage dons a corduroy Greek fisherman’s cap and tours the balmy Mediterranean, floating blue seas in the wake of the voyage Odysseus undertakes in Homer’s epic, to work out his response to the poem. (If Billy Connolly happens to watch as the very beautiful, very warm, scenery rolls by, he may ask, “Could Norman no’ have liked Greece?”)
The Odyssey is one of those things you just kind of know, by osmosis, but, if you’ve never read it, Armitage offers a handy set of crib notes as to what actually happens in it. If nothing else, it saves you mixing the plot up with the Jason And The Argonauts movie.
All the films Armitage has made for BBC Four have been great value, and, even if this one isn’t as good as the excellent programme he made about Gawain And The Green Night, he’s the best kind of teacher, interesting and still interested.
For Coronation Street fans, there comes an added bonus: screw your eyes up a little, and it’s easy to pretend you’re watching The Street’s own rogue teacher, John Stape, escaped from Weatherfield and out in the world, living the life he always dreamed abou
No comments:
Post a Comment