Big post-industrial cities, bleak wilderness, and a seaside to gladden the hearts of both hedonists and masochists – Scotland has a huge variety of settings to attract the most demanding of location scouts. It is hoped that plans for a dedicated studio and investment will bring more film-makers north of the border. But what sort of movies and television programmes would they make when they get there?
Here are nine pitches just waiting for the green light from a producer with the imagination to see that constant rain and an annual plague of biting insects are opportunities, not drawbacks. So, Mr Weinstein, Mr Bruckheimer, will ye no come back again?
1. Waverley
A bear from darkest Peru gets off at the wrong stop and is asked back to the handsome New Town flat of a well-meaning but prudent Edinburgh family. Unimpressed by the standard local assumption – “You’ll have had your tea?” – he leaves them and catches the next train for Dundee which, though not so bonnie, serves a better class of marmalade sandwich.
2. Mòd Men
Tweed-suited advertising executives at an agency in the bustling fishing port of Oban pull all-nighters in an effort to win the account of an annual Gaelic arts festival, the Royal National Mòd. But the most brilliant and square-jawed exec, Donnie, has a secret: he grew up in Tunbridge Wells and his real name is Jasper.
3. Seven Bridies For Seven Brothers
Douce, droll and full of soul, small-town Scotland is an underrated pleasure that deserves to be seen on the big screen. Welcome, then, to Forfar, home of that fabled delicacy the bridie, a kind of superior pie, that would grace any wedding table in any MGM musical.
4. Fraudzilla
The ultimate monster movie … without a monster. Every year 300,000 tourists visit the tiny Highland village of Drumnadrochit, on the banks of Loch Ness, in the hope of spotting Nessie. And every year around 300,000 go home saying, rightly: “Well, hon, we may not have seen nuthin’, but it’s goddam beautiful up there all the same.”
5. Dreich Encounter
A hitherto respectable couple – Peter Capaldi and Rebecca Front – begin an affair while sheltering from a downpour in a railway tearoom. Wemyss Bay is a lovely station in a lovely town with a nice line in downpours. The heartbreaking final scene sees Capaldi depart for the bright lights of Rothesay, while Front goes home to her boring but steady husband, Armando Iannucci.
6. Deep-Fried Mars Attacks
Aliens intend to colonise the Earth, and they begin in Stonehaven. At Hogmanay. This picturesque coastal town is not only the place where the infamous deep-fried Mars Bar was invented, but is also well known for the spectacular fireball-swinging ceremony with which locals see in the New Year. The invaders are thus repelled by a triple threat of fire, drunkenness and hardened arteries.
7. The Ecksorcist
Biopic set in the attractive rural constituency of Gordon during the general election of 2015, where Alex Salmond – “Eck” to his detractors – attempts to take possession of the seat and haunt Westminster once again. Alex “Taggart” Norton to play Salmond. Head-spinning by those Tory and Labour MPs who lament his return.
8. Fifty Shades Of Grey Granite
A wealthy Aberdonian oil billionaire woos a cub reporter from the Press and Journal, the city’s local paper, with a grand tour of the city’s sombre stone buildings. She is shocked, however, when he shows her his “Reds room” – a secret chamber full of memorabilia from Aberdeen FC’s 1983 European Cup Winners’ Cup triumph under Alex Ferguson. Most erotic scene: the hairdryer treatment.
9. The Midge
Bilingual noir as two mismatched cops – a grizzled veteran of the old Glasgow polis and a female detective local to the islands – are thrown together to solve the case of a tourist seemingly bitten to death by midges – the ferocious Scottish beasties that nobody ever mentions in the glossy travel brochures. To be filmed on and around the Skye bridge, in the centre of which the body is discovered.
