THE Ancient Greeks had Tartarus, EastEnders has Scotland. Tartarus, you may recall, was a land beneath Hades, a place in which the punishment fitted the crime.
Poor old Sisyphus - later to become a poster boy for French existentialists - was required to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a hill. When it got to the top, the rock rolled back and he had to push it back up again. Ixion, who fell out with his f
ather-in-law, spent eternity on a burning wheel. Tantalus, who wined and dined the gods and then shared their secrets with his mortal chums, was submerged to his chin in water which he was unable to drink, while bunches of lovely grapes dangled above his head, just out of reach.
Obviously, much of the above sounds like daily life in the Scottish Executive. But that does not excuse the scriptwriters of EastEnders their peculiar portrayal of Scotland and Scottish affairs. There are many examples of this, but the worst was the episode a few years ago in which the younger residents of Albert Square found themselves lost without a mobile phone signal on a storm-tossed Highland moor. Not since Gene Kelly and Van Johnson stumbled upon the eejits of Brigadoon had there been such a devastatingly inaccurate picture of our fair land.
And they are at it again. Last week, for reasons that remain obscure, Phil Mitchell, the human billiard ball and Resident Hardman, wore a kilt, and spent much of an episode attempting to persuade his son Ben to do the same. "It's a skirt," young Ben observed, his trauma increasing when he was told by Resident Hardwoman Pat Butcher: "You'll look ever so sweet in it, you know." (Being told you look sweet by Pat is akin to being offered a Curly Wurly by the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang).
And what, you probably aren't wondering, did Phil, the outraged gonk, wear under his kilt? Well, the answer to this terrifying question was revealed in a subsequent episode. Happily, after an extensive course of aversion therapy, I have erased all thought of it from my memory.
In its place is substituted the recollection that the fragrant and lovely Jane Birkin (as first revealed in these pages) has renounced the Hermes bag which bears her name, and now keeps her essentials in a sporran. Miss Birkin - forever famous for her breathy performance on the hit record 'Je T'Aime' - has tendonitis and can no longer carry a heavy bag.
"It looks attractive hanging at the front of shorts or on the hip with trousers," she has said of her leathery pouch. She also gave Vogue.com specific instructions as to how the sporran should be worn: "With 15-year-old Converse boots with the laces open so I can show off my ankles - at my age, those and my collar bones are the only bits I can show off - with five-year-old men's cargo trousers and an ancient Prada jersey that I wash myself." Jings.
'Potato liqueur' will never cut the mustard in best small nation's quest for the hard stuff
IT IS always dangerous to mix nationalism with alcohol, as was proved at Wembley stadium in 1977, but Scotland's entry into the European vodka war is surprising, as it comes at a time when Scotch whisky producers are lobbying to protect themselves from non-Scotch imitations of the uisge beatha.
It is a complicated story, but thanks to the European Vodka Alliance I now understand that vodka is made by mashing "any stark/sugar-rich plant" in a tun, filtering off the alcohol, adding water, tasteless ethyl alcohol, and - if you feel the need - a few "organoleptic properties" such as flavour, aroma and "mouthfeel". These last items are illustrated on EVA's website by drawings of two lemons and a lime.
The dispute is about the definition of vodka. The Nordic, Polish and Baltic countries want to define vodka as a drink made from potatoes or cereals, while everyone else prefers the current EU recipe - and how delicious it sounds - "ethyl alcohol of agricultural origin".
As it happens, in my teetotal years, I encountered at first hand these differing attitudes to vodka. On a jaunt to Moscow to admire the architecture of Stalin's grand canal, a colleague from Liverpool, having already drained his complimentary bottle of Russian champagne, requested a pit-stop to buy a bottle of vodka. This was not easy to arrange, but our host - call him Boris, though his name was Valery - coaxed the bus driver over several lanes of traffic to a supermarket. Once inside, Larry, the Liverpudlian, conversed in broad Scouse with the manager, while Boris translated. As each bottle of fine Russian spirit was produced, Larry examined the label and made the international noise for revulsion.
It was hard to fathom, but eventually it transpired that Larry was scanning the label for the alcohol content, and rejecting every bottle on the basis that it was only 40% proof. Larry was after the hard stuff, and this wasn't hard enough.
The Third World War almost broke out there and then. "But vodka is 40% proof," Boris reasoned. "If it isn't 40% proof, it isn't vodka." By now, Larry was dismantling the shelves. Eventually, he found what he wanted: a liqueur made of courgettes, with enough firepower to launch the Sputnik.
No mean accent for a Sassenach, but why on earth did he bother?
ONE of the joys of watching Taggart - in the days when watching Taggart could reasonably be associated with joy - occurred whenever the investigation of a ritual murder involving a crossbow, a poisoned black bun, and a crazed sect of devil-worshipping Sydney Devine fans (I may have paraphrased a little) took the polis to Edinburgh.
Taggart, as played by Mark McManus, was essentially a comic character whose role was to look fierce, and to occasionally spit out a pithy epithet. Edinburgh, to Jim Taggart, was a city of effete ponces in wine bars - a view which had its merits, but also suggested that he hadn't being paying attention in Glasgow.
That was then. Since Trainspotting, and despite the increasing Glasgowfication of Edinburgh (or at least George Street), the image of the Capital has changed. The town of Jean Brodie has become a city of thugs, whether they are the Clockwork Orange-style bootboys of Richard Jobson's Sixteen Years of Alcohol, or the snivelling neds of Ian Rankin. Only Alexander McCall Smith holds the torch for the tradition of the effete ponce.
Now comes Low Winter Sun, a cop drama written by Simon Donald, and starring Mark Strong, whose fine performances as a gay gangster in The Long Firm, and as Tosker in Our Friends In The North, were achieved without the benefit of a Scottish accent. The Channel 4 film does a good job of exploiting the drama of Edinburgh's architecture, but it will be of little comfort to anyone who regrets how, after Welsh, coarseness is being celebrated for its own sake. Of course, there is a small patriotic pleasure to be had from a script which involves the phrases "skanky baws" and "a load of fanny", but I do wonder whether Donald has overdone the swearing and the grim local colour. Do people really fish for seagulls in the Forth estuary?
And then there are the accents. Strong aims for Edinburgh, and almost makes it. In fact, he probably gets as close as Robert Carlyle did in Looking After Jojo, with only the occasional nod towards Whisky Galore! But why did he bother? If an English star was needed to sell this drama, why make him pretend? Sean Connery never did accents, and it didn't do him any harm.
Green catastrophe awaits - but end may not be nigh
THE end, quite obviously, is nigh. Those mad fellas with sandwich boards have been saying it for years, and now Al Gore is at it, predicting catastrophe in his new film An Inconvenient Truth. Of course, in 2004, Roland Emmerich's film The Day After Tomorrow, showed a righteous storm sweeping across the Atlantic to devastate New York - Scotland was the first country to be obliterated. An early scene showed two scientists in a weather station looking on helplessly as Caledonia crumbled. On their portable television, Manchester United were beating Celtic 3-1 in the Champions' League.
Obviously, Emmerich's film was an exaggeration. The end may be nigh, but not quite that nigh. Manchester United play Celtic in the Champions' League the day after the day after tomorrow.
