SCOTLAND: THE PROMISED LAND, BBC2, 9pm
BRILLIANT series like this leave me wondering why history has a reputation as a boring subject. Where did its dusty image come from? I suppose it’s in the divide between social history and the more academic “drums and trumpets” history generations of us endured at school. The latter is just one approach; this new series presents another.
It’s a social and political history of Scotland, describing in three episodes how modern Scotland came to be.
It begins with the ending of the First World War, as the soldiers returned and looked for the “homes fit for heroes” they were promised. When it became clear nothing much was changing, rebellions broke out and the red flag was famously raised in George Square.
But when the poor were finally given the vote they had a more direct way to express their anger, and the story moves to Dundee, showing what the city’s poor lived like. Archives show drunks arrested with broken noses, missing teeth and eyes. Alcohol was an escape from endless work and poverty – but now they had the vote.
Their MP was Winston Churchill. He was carried to the polling station in a chair due to illness, with each man paid one pound to hoist him, but the crowd shouted “We’ll give you two pounds if ye drop him!”
EMPLOYABLE ME, BBC2, 11.45pm
I URGE you to watch this, despite the late hour. I’ve watched it twice, and I laughed, wept and got furiously angry.
It’s a documentary series about people with neurological disorders and their struggle to find work.
We meet Paul, 52, who developed Tourette’s and it has ruined his chances of getting a job. I admit, even though some may complain, that I was laughed madly at some of his tics. He shouts things like “Baby Jesus loved petrol stations!” and “I’m made of cats and kittens!”
No employer will give him a chance but with some help from experts will he find a job which accommodates his outbursts?
The second person featured almost broke my heart. Brett, 34, has autism and finds it difficult to speak. He’s perfectly intelligent but just can’t get the worst past his mouth, so he often has to jot down his sentences then read them aloud. This has battered his confidence and he manages to say that his worst fear is “Not having a job and being by myself. Being a lonely old man.”
Both men want to work but no-one will employ them. To think that Iain Duncan Smith would label these men “scroungers” almost strangles me with rage.
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