Iain Maciver writes …

I AM RESIGNED. Not from writing here every week, sorry, but to other people not resigning. How many politicians did not resign in the last while? And I am also becoming resigned to the prudishness that means Gaelic must keep its pants on at all times.

After Scotland Office minister David Cairns told Gordon Brown to shove it last week, I bated my breath and waited with it for the next huffy walkouts.

Meanwhile, over here at Western Isles Council, vice-convener and petrol baron Angus Campbell reacted badly to the latest fall in fuel prices by throwing a monumental strop and quitting as chairman of the new schools partnership over his colleagues’ wishy-washiness.

Even some of the gold-braid councillors are apparently prepared to threaten care services and road-mending just because half a dozen loud, tearful parents want to keep crumbling, draughty schools open because their grandparents went there.

Campbell was so miffed, said my man at the petrol pumps, he was likely to quit as vice-convener, too. The man on the Seaforth Road omnibus was heard to whisper he had always known that of all the councillors in the White House, the Baron of Newton was by far the most decent, although, of course, he had not actually voted for him.

None of these resignations actually happened. Gordon Brown got J.K. Rowling to hand over a £1million present to the Labour Party and promised to do better. No one who was not on a party conference platform this week was holding their breath for that one. And neither was the smartest guy there, David Miliband, the impatient foreign secretary.

And island councillors will have an urgent meeting tomorrow after a cosy informal get-together with deals to shut up the awkward squad and some will still demand urgent reports and everyone will go home happy that they have improved decision-making and all will be forgotten until next year and the financing question will run into the sand. Until next year.

One thing we should not all be resigned to is Gaelic TV drama being anything less than worthy of our suspension of disbelief. Which is why I salute the superb talents of Sean Macleod who, as Tony the melancholic punk playing opposite the guy from Still Game in Friday’s Gaelic channel launch special Eilbheas, was fantastic.

Greg Hemphill was rubbish, and I am not saying that just because he nicked the part from me.

Sadly, though, I have also heard many complaints. The language was too ripe for the many ladies of the Free Church (Continuing) who came over to watch it with me. And I was tackled in the Co-op by another battleaxe from Back who said she, too, was disgusted at “F” words like flick that should, according to her, stay in the Lewis Bar with Terry Pearse where they belong. As did quite a few others. That’s what the off button is for.

You see the wee problem we have here? Gaels are not used to flipping and blinding in their TV programmes. The productions have always been so terribly tame and twee. They are famous for it. Aw, there was no cussing on Tormod Air Telly, ventured the dewy-eyed Back woman. Nor on Watch With Mother, I countered, to no avail.

There have been few, if any, adult-orientated shows in which the day-to-day expletives of unreconstructed Gaels were used so matter-of-factly as in Eilbheas. Yet the biggest shocker about it was that it, too, was just too tame.

Take the scene where Tony got in the bath before Elvis suddenly materialised. It was silly, but not because the King of Rock’n’Roll must have been lurking under the wash-hand basin with the Brylcreem and the Lifebuoy.

Rather than use a creative device like, say, strategically-placed bubbles to hide his modesty, Tony got in the bath in his underwear. Dirty boy. Did Torcuil Crichton and Mairi Kidd’s fine script call for the pants prop? Doubt it. Or were the timorous producers ordered to dumb it down for the sensitive, strongly-presbyterian teuchters who would never want to see it anyway?

Back in 1979, Phil Daniels, the grumpy git who played Kevin Wicks in EastEnders until recently, did a similar bath scene in the mods and rockers megamovie Quadrophenia. He was in the tub in his birthday suit – and very few bubbles, as I remember – which prompted hardly a complaint.

Should we insist that Gaeldom’s creative output keep up with the times? I think so. Otherwise, we will all have to be resigned to Gaelic production values being so dumbed down that, almost 30 years after Quadrophenia, we must keep up some ghastly pretence that pious Hebrideans spare their own blushes by bathing in their drawers.

.

Published in the Press and Journal on September 24, 2008