IN our regular Sunday feature, we ask Scots for 10 things that changed their life. This week, Fortitude writer Simon Donald...

1 The Woman

The National:

I WAS meeting a gang of mates in a pub in the Grassmarket. It’s gone now, I think – it was called La Sorbonne. I got there before everybody else and bought a drink and was stood at the bar waiting.

At the far end of the bar was this young woman, on her own, and the moment I saw her I got goose-bumps and felt a bit faint and a bit floaty. My mates arrived and her pal arrived and it turned out one of us knew her pal so we all ended up talking and drinking.

The young woman’s name was Carol. My attempts to engage her might have been a teeny wee bit too intense because at one stage she hid in the bog for 40 minutes hoping I’d have gone by the time she came out. I hadn’t.

We all headed off to the end of term disco at the Edinburgh School of Art and she danced with me. We saw each other in secret for a year.

This was in 1984. We got married in ‘87 and I now realise that that moment alone at the bar in La Sorbonne when our eyes met (before she hid in the bog) was the best thing that ever happened to me in my life.

We had no money at all for years – I was a theatre actor earning equity minimum and Carol went to Napier to do a degree in photography – it didn’t matter.

We lived in Guy Peploe’s flat as his friends and tenants – when Guy went off to work in the morning we had to search through his pockets to find enough change to buy roll-up tobacco (chucked that 20 years ago). We discovered there is always money to be found in a golf bag.

2 Chinatown

The National:

I WENT to a comprehensive school outside Wishaw called Garrion Academy. It’s gone now, they bulldozed it flat and built a brand new school on the top of it called Clyde Valley High. My old school’s like the graveyard in Poltergeist.

When I was 15 one of the teachers briefly started up an after-hours cinema club – he showed 16-mil prints of great 70s Hollywood cinema and one week he screened Chinatown. I vividly remember the moment when Evelyn Mulwray revealed the truth to Jake Gittes as he slapped her... “My sister... my daughter... my sister and my daughter...” – and the awful, hideous wickedness of her father’s crime suddenly became clear. I remember the feeling of vertigo that it left me with as all the consequences of her dreadful confession unspooled in my head. Chinatown has remained my favourite movie. When Ben Frost, the composer on Fortitude, asked what kind of tones and colours we needed for the show, I said to him I wanted something heart-breakingly romantic in the mix, like the fluglehorn theme over the opening credits of Chinatown.

3 John Peel

The National:

MY dad was a science teacher. He could fix things with a soldering iron. The soldering iron in Fortitude season two is a wee nod to him, though it’s used to cauterise a self-inflicted castration wound which wasn’t something my dad ever used his for ... that I knew about, anyway.

My dad scavenged a car radio from a car and installed it in my bedroom. This became the basis for my personal hi-fi set-up. We gradually added speakers and a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

I discovered the John Peel Show which came on every weekday at 11pm. It was a world of noises way, way beyond anything I’d heard in my life before. I remember one night I recorded the show as usual and there were three new things on it. The Damned, The Clash and The Stranglers: Neat Neat Neat, White Riot and London Lady. I’d read about this punk thing which was just appearing in the NME which I bought every week. I didn’t get it. I couldn’t hear past the aggression and the tumult. I bought the Clash album. I didn’t get it. They scared me.

Then I got it.

4 A Tenant For Edgar Mortez

The National:

I’D graduated from Aberdeen University with a degree in Eng Lit and Language. When I was a student I used to do voice-overs at Northsound radio for cash. We got about 20 quid for a 10-second commercial.

I did loads and loads, along with Nicky Campbell (pictured). Nicky became a DJ at the station. He presented two shows – Nicky Campbell’s World of Opera (he knew nothing about opera) and The Other Side Of Nicky Campbell (which was known in-house as Nicky’s Arse) They gave me a job as commercials producer/writer. After about six months I was losing my mind. A 30-second script for fireplace surround furniture finished me off.

In the evenings I wrote a play. A story about a shy, lonely, manipulative young man who rented out a room in his dead granny’s house to a much older man who was a holocaust survivor. The play was called A Tenant for Edgar Mortez. Northsound Radio, amazingly, gave me a whole year’s holiday pay to finance the play at the Edinburgh Festival. My great friend Mick Duke directed me in the play I’d written. I was so nervous it would bomb that I put a pen name on the poster so I wouldn’t get two loads of flack – one for writing it and one for performing it. A Tenant won Best Performer On The Fringe and Best New Playwright. Everything changed.

The awards were simply a kind of validation. Me and Mick toured the play around the UK for a year, playing student unions and small theatres. We persuaded Equity, the actors union, to give us our cards.

5 The Traverse Auditions

The National:

THIS was my first foray into the world of professional acting. Jenny Killick had taken over the Traverse Theatre from Peter Lichtenfels and there was enormous excitement about the new company she was putting together in the hottest theatre on earth.

She brought some actors up from London – Tilda Swinton and Simon Russell Beale. Irene Macdougall, Carol Ann Crawford and the great Ralph Riach were to join. I had an equity card but had never been hired professionally. It seemed that every actor in Scotland was auditioning for the Trav. The final company was going to number 10 actors. I made it to a short list. Then there was an excruciatingly long wait while they made up their minds. I was recalled and re-auditioned. I had a mole in the office and she told me the last place was between me and one other actor and Jenny couldn’t make up her mind. Finally they called my agent and I got the job. I was cast in two plays: Jo Clifford’s Losing Venice and Chris Hannan’s Elizabeth Gordon Quinn. Losing Venice was a smash hit and toured the world. Elizabeth Gordon Quinn was a wonderful work. Chris Hannan became a best mate – I learned so much about writing from being at the Traverse.

6 Fortitude

The National:

I WAS doing a rewrite on a screenplay for a terrible horror movie. A sort of script-doctoring job. In the evenings me and my script editor, Mat Chaplin, would discuss other horror movies and the whole notion of horror movie monsters, how fantastic it was when a definitive new monster came into the world, like Alien or The Thing.

I had an idea for a monster – I’d been reading about parasites and how recent research revealed they sometimes had a profound influence on the behaviour of the host organism. I pitched Mat this idea for a bleak, grainy black and white horror movie set in a Russian gulag. An independent film cast with unknown Russian speaking non-actors.

I was having a catch-up coffee with an old friend, Patrick Spence. We’d worked together way back on Doctor Findlay and Patrick was now a producer with his own company. I told him the horror idea. He said Sky Atlantic were looking for something left field but it would have to be a bit more civilised than this idea. I cleaned it up and we pitched “Fortitude” to Anne Mensah. It was the most straightforward greenlight I’ve ever had. We found ourselves at the helm of 22 hours of big budget drama with huge stars.

7 The Life Of Stuff

The National:

I WAS doing a rewrite on a screenplay for a terrible horror movie. A sort of script-doctoring job. In the evenings me and my script editor, Mat Chaplin, would discuss other horror movies and the whole notion of horror movie monsters, how fantastic it was when a definitive new monster came into the world, like Alien or The Thing.

I had an idea for a monster – I’d been reading about parasites and how recent research revealed they sometimes had a profound influence on the behaviour of the host organism. I pitched Mat this idea for a bleak, grainy black and white horror movie set in a Russian gulag. An independent film cast with unknown Russian speaking non-actors.

I was having a catch-up coffee with an old friend, Patrick Spence. We’d worked together way back on Doctor Findlay and Patrick was now a producer with his own company. I told him the horror idea. He said Sky Atlantic were looking for something left field but it would have to be a bit more civilised than this idea. I cleaned it up and we pitched “Fortitude” to Anne Mensah. It was the most straightforward greenlight I’ve ever had. We found ourselves at the helm of 22 hours of big budget drama with huge stars.

8 Low Winter Sun

The National:

I WROTE a BBC film, Deacon Brodie, beautifully played by Billy Connolly, amid a staggeringly classy cast of Scottish actors.

I wrote for the David Rintoul Doctor Finlay and then I wrote a Channel Four thriller called Low Winter Sun (LWS).

Mark Strong and Brian McCardie played the two leads. I knew Brian well from The Life Of Stuff and I knew he’d wrench up his innermost demons to bring us the character in LWS – I love those actors. Tam Dean Burn’s another one - I go looking for them when I need a performance convincingly dialled up to eleven from a standing start.

Low Winter Sun was beautifully directed by Adrian Shergold. I’d acted for him in a comedy film, Stalag Luft, and he kept offering me parts.. My cat Frank was in it. Briefly my cat had a higher rating than me on IMDB.

9 Shaw Donald

The National:

MY dad’s 91 and he recently had a stroke. He still lives on his own, cooks for himself, looks after himself. He played piano in dance bands in the RAF at the end of the war. He should have been a professional piano player but instead he became a science teacher.

All my life growing up in Wishaw my dad played the piano. Our house was a party house; my dad at the piano and my mum standing behind him with her hands on his shoulders singing. My mum died three years ago after a terrible descent into a bleak, merciless dementia. I don’t know how he survived this but he did. He just did.

10 Home

The National:

FOR the first 30 years of our marriage me and Carol rented a home in various parts of Edinburgh. Then two years ago we bought a dilapidated, run-down property in Haymarket and Carol started doing it up. The flat has huge windows facing the Pentland hills. It floods with light every morning. It’s home. It’s bliss. Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.

Fortitude, season three, began on Sky Atlantic last Thursday, December 6