THERE is nothing like a hit TV series to make an area a booming tourist destination … even if it is portrayed in a less than flattering light. Drugs, violence, gangsters, corruption have all served as plot lines in TV shows that have raised the profile of the areas in which they are based.
Scottish independence, it seems, has to be treated entirely differently.
The author of the books on which the hugely successful Starz television show Outlander is based revealed this week that the BBC contacted her before a scheduled interview in 2014 to make sure she didn’t wander into a discussion on Scottish independence.
Diana Gabaldon told The National that the BBC was worried about her making any “inflammatory” comments about independence in the run up to the referendum.
They telephoned her to explain they wanted to avoid “inflaming” the situation.
You might think a democratic vote on a constitutional issue is hardly an inflammatory issue compared to the subject matter of other hit shows.
I just happen to be more than halfway through a third viewing of Breaking Bad, the brilliant but disturbing story of a chemistry teacher who turns to producing crystal meth to raise enough money to look after his family.
Set in Albuquerque, it explores the drug dealing activities of cartels, gang violence, the horrors of drug addiction and murder within the prison system, all in particularly graphic detail.
READ MORE: The BBC has blown its cover – The REAL Scottish Politics
It would be wrong to suggest that the Albuquerque authorities were over the moon at the portrayal of New Mexico’s most populous city. The city mayor was particularly unhappy, mainly because it followed another hit series, Cops, which showed regular raids on crack dens.
He eventually banned Cops from filming in the city so you can imagine his reaction when Breaking Bad achieved significant viewing figures as well as acclaim from critics, who described it as about as good as television gets.
Even worse, the show went on to win 16 Emmys and seven Golden Globes and went on to spawn a spin-off hit series in Better Call Saul, which has just screened its last ever episode after five series.
When this success began attracting tourists as well as plaudits it was hardly surprising that the city changed its attitude.
The Albuquerque Convention and Visitors Bureau began promoting Breaking Bad on its website and this summer statues of the series’ main characters – Walter White and Jesse Pinkman – were unveiled at the convention centre.
David Simon’s classic TV series The Wire portrayed Baltimore as a similarly cursed city, where drug dealing gangs stalked suburbs ravaged by poverty and violence. Despite that, locations featured in the series have become tourist destinations.
Locals have seemed split on the whether the series has been beneficial or harmful to the city’s reputation. Some, like James Scott senior, a resident of West Baltimore who watched the Wire when it was first aired, told reporters at the time: “It was the best thing that ever happened to this city. Because people could relate to the different characters: the tough guys, the weak guys, the down-low guys, all of that. I just had to see it every week, and I wasn’t really a TV man.”
Outlander’s portrayal of Scotland has none of the urban decay common in modern drama series set in inner city America. The landscapes are breathtakingly beautiful, the focus is on Highland mountains, glens and castles.
READ MORE: Outlander's Diana Gabaldon: BBC checked my Scottish independence views before interview
The characters are attractive and engaging – or at least the Scottish ones are; those from England, particularly those in the army, are less admirable.
Its male lead character is a handsome Highland chieftain with a remarkably modern attitude to woman, particularly to the English nurse who travels back in time to the 1700s and ends up marrying him, despite the inconvenient facts she already has a husband in the 1950s.
It has been a huge hit over the pond in America, where audiences have been bowled over by the combination of scenery and passionate romance.
According to figures published by VisitScotland, visitor numbers at Outlander-related attractions here peaked at 3.2 million in 2019 before the Covid pandemic. The organisation says the Outlander books – there have been nine so far – and the six seasons of the TV series have had a major impact on encouraging visitors to come to Scotland, particularly from the USA.
Before the first series of Outlander even aired on television, it was tipped to be a massive success based on the success of the books alone, yet it failed to find a platform which would screen it in Scotland. It was months after it was premiered on the Starz network in the US that it was finally shown to a Scottish audience in March 2015 via the streaming site Amazon Prime.
Why the delay? You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to pay attention to stories that then prime minister David Cameron met with Sony representatives ten weeks before the 2014 independence referendum to discuss the timing of the show’s television launch.
READ MORE: Diana Gabaldon on if 10th Outlander book will be last and what to expect from prequel
The meeting is referred to in a leaked email written by Keith E Weaver, executive vice-president at Sony Pictures Entertainment, which produced Outlander. It mentions the “importance” of the TV series to the political situation in 2014, and says it would probably be the focus of the upcoming meeting with Cameron.
An Outlander insider was wisely quoted at the time as saying that before the Cameron meeting, it had been “all systems go” in finding a UK broadcasting platform for the show – including have the BBC on the Scottish set - but there had been a “definite sense of trying to back pedal”.
The insider said: “It makes complete sense as to why Sony took their foot of the pedal with UK sales.”
Gabaldon’s revelations this week add credence to suggestions that, almost alone among possible themes for television drama, any mention of Scottish independence is enough to send TV producers – and particularly BBC TV producers – running screaming for the hills.
The BBC has carved itself a strong reputation for period dramas, most of which are set in England, from Pride And Prejudice, Bleak House to Poldark to Peaky Blinders. What is it about Scottish period dramas that seem to make them particularly problematic?
Film producers are obviously happy to show Scotland on the big screen, although generally they do so when it’s pretending to be somewhere else.
Glasgow has been Philadelphia in World War Z, San Francisco in Cloud Atlas, New York in The House of Mirth and Gotham in The Batman, The Flash and the now mothballed Batgirl.
Although it has doubled for Boston in Outlander, it mainly plays a starring role as itself in the time travel love story, and that seems to be the problem. Showing Scotland as itself in a story about our own history seems to be out of bounds. Anything which acknowledges a time when Scotland was an independent country, or fighting to reclaim its independence, is airbrushed out of existence if there is even a remote possibility it could increase support for a yes vote in a referendum.
Outlander is “guilty” because it portrays the Scots fighting the Battle of Culloden as heroic – doomed but heroic; because it subtly undermines the Scottish inferiority complex and possibly because some of its cast – including male lead Sam Heughan – had publicly supported Scottish independence.
There are plenty of signs that many supporters of the Union fear aspects of Scottish culture. The most recent, and probably the most ludicrous, came from the former Scottish Labour Party member Ian Smart, who accused the Scottish Government of using the Scots language as a racist mechanism to put off “refugees with black or brown skins” moving to Scotland.
Smart added that there “is no such a thing as a Scots language”, although the Scottish Government has recognised it as one of the country’s three official indigenous languages alongside Gaelic and English.
This is the tactic used by those who believe that the very existence of anything definably Scottish is dangerous because it might give ideas above what they consider to be out proper status as a “region of northern Britain”.
We see it when former Tory Brexit secretary Lord Frost says that Scotland is not a nation and that independence should be made impossible.
We saw it when the Tory Secretary of State for Scotland Alister Jack challenged Scotland’s right to decide how to spend (some of) its own money by claiming entirely fictitious figures in the GERS report show we are spending too much when the opposite is true.
And we see it when Unionists panic over our Scottish history having a role in popular culture which might –God forbid –start us thinking about our future.
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