Firebrand writer Peter McDougall on friends, foes and falling apart

“Naw,” says the celebrated screen writer in emphatic voice. “I don’t need to write my life story. Every time I write a play or a film my life is in there. What would I need to write a book for?”

The 71 year-old makes a point sharper than an apprentice draftsman’s pencil. His film successes over the years such as Just Another Saturday (which drew from his own flute band experiences) have been filled with memories to the point of overflowing, like the tin bath he was washed in growing up in Greenock.

Today, he reveals, his life has spilled onto the typewriter page once again with The Vampire Clinic, his new play running at Glasgow’s Oran Mor. “The idea for the play came about after I contracted Legionnaires Disease [a form of pneumonia.] Just as I got over that I had a stroke.

“And at that point I attended Sandy Road clinic in Partick where I was given Warfarin (to thin the blood.) I remembered Warfarin from working in the shipyards because it was used as poison to kill off the rats.”

He pauses and grins: “Anyway, I was telling my pal Willie McIlvanney about these clinic trips one day and he told me he’d been there too.”

McDougall says McIlvanney dubbed it The Vampire Clinic as his smile widens into a grin, prefacing the funny line to come. “Willie told me he’d been struck down with an infestation of Biblical proportions, boils, the lot. I said to him that’s because as a novelist, he gets the full expanse of side effects. Me, as a screenwriter, I only got a wee rash.”

McDougall, who’s writing career began after a chance meeting with screenwriter Colin Welland, after he met him while painting his house, has other forms of illness to contend with.

He suffers from labyrinthitis, leaving him prone to spells of acute dizziness. But that doesn’t stop him writing.

McIlvanney’s line about the Vampire Clinic had stayed with him and he thought it would make a great title for a play. However, the anti-coagulant clinic is a backdrop for a love story where we meet Sadie and Finlay, (Barbara Rafferty and Billy McBain) who have both had a stroke.

After a “ceremonial blood sucking”, they go for a drink and they chat and become close. “Sadie is a patient, but she’s also a seat-shifter,” the writer explains. “She goes into the clinic and moves about all day, talking to the different people who come in. She makes friends. The clinic is like a club. She wants to reassure people.”

He adds, in serious voice: “You know, loneliness is a disease people can’t see.

“The plays also offers a chance to let these people articulate their lives and their condition. As we know, in real life people don’t often really explain how they are feeling to doctors. They usually just say ‘I’m fine.’ But this story is about truth. My character Finlay is dizzy coming up the road and he says he’s scared to fall down ‘because somebody will go through your pockets before you hit the pavement.’

“This sense of being about to fall down actually happened to me, and rather than collapse on the pavement I somehow got myself into a shop, to feel safer, to try and get my head together. It turned out to be a charity shop run by a nice pair of sisters in twin sets.”

He adds, grinning: “But my body was all wired up at the time with monitors, and one of the monitor wires had dropped loose. So as I walked through the door of the shop the wire got caught and suddenly I was all lights and noise and I went off like a f***** disco. The two sisters thought they were being robbed or something.” He adds, laughing: “But then who’s going to steal a granny’s old tights?”

The love story is powerful. The pair talk of their dysfunctional lives. Their marriages. “Finlay says he’s sorry to hear her husband is dead. She replies ‘Well, he is to me, although he looked OK this morning when I passed the kitchen and he was taking down a recipe for Mary Berry cinnamon buns’.”

McDougall, whose partner is theatre and television director Morag Fullerton, loves to explore the human condition, loves to question the nature of relationships. His character, Finlay, talks about remoteness from his wife. (This aspect of the play isn’t autobiographical.) “She’s so unfamiliar to me I couldn’t pick her a*** out in a polis line-up,” he says to Sadie. And she comes back with ‘If you’re ever thinking about a reconciliation you could always put a poster of her a*** on Crimewatch.’”

The play certainly reflects the writer’s manoeuvres around his own health problems since the Legionnaires episode and the stroke.

“When I had Legionnaires Disease I was in the bathroom with Morag, and she was crying because she was so worried about me. But I reassured her. I said ‘Don’t worry, they’ll need a Hilty gun to put me down.’ And when the ambulance came for me I demanded Morag come with us to the hospital. But the thing was, Morag was away filming Scott and Bailey at the time. It had been my pal [actress] Juliet Cadzow who had found me and called the ambulance.”

He adds: “I have aphasia.” That’s a condition which affects stroke sufferers, including their speech and ability to read and write – which could be especially problematic given McDougall’s job. “Aye, and to add to that I’ve always been dyslexic. But things are more exaggerated now.”

He grins mischievously. “I get angry. I want to batter cyclists who come on to the pavement. I’m a traffic shouter. And I get a wee bit schizoid at times [as a result of the medication]. I was watching a dance programme on the television one night and so I got up and began dancing. Except I wasn’t. I was still in the chair.”

His blue eyes still sparkle. He can smile about his lost moments. He realises the hallucinations he

suffered during the Legionnaires illness have dark comic value. He speaks of talking to doctors and having brain scans to determine his state of mind.

“I was seeing a psychiatrist at one point and telling him about Billy Connolly being around and the psychiatrist was thinking I was making it up when a bloke came over and asked for my autograph.”

There’s little doubt McDougall’s latest work has helped him frame that life threatening period. It’s also about mortality. “I’m so privileged to have come from my background and be so successful. But unless you are Shakespeare nobody gives a f***.”

McDougall’s innate toughness has pulled him through. He’s a man who has enjoyed one too many drinks and a few fights, all the time battering directors and commissioning editors about the ears. Incredibly, he still hasn’t had a film or television writing commission from the country which created him. He’s still angry about “the clueless” in Scotland who can’t articulate what they want in a drama.

He’s angry about the behaviour of film and television people. “They think they have to be ruthless, not return phone calls and all that s****. They think it’s all about networking. I have to stop myself saying ‘Hey you ****, stop it.’ This isn’t my world.”

He rewinds on a conversation with a TV commissioner, trying to work out what the man wanted. “He thought for a moment and said ‘Quality’. And I was angry. I said to him ‘I should knock you out for f******’ saying that to me.’”

Given McDougall has had a point. A Prix Italia Award and a clutch of Baftas, perhaps a knockout would have been justified.

But Peter McDougall won’t give up. He once said writing is a disease, and it’s incurable. “I’m still writing. I did Whisky Galore last year but I don’t need to write a new movie. I can write when I like, what I like. And I love writing for Oran Mor.

“You see, when you write films you need the discipline of a poet. You need to get everything you need to say into one line. The camera speaks for you to such an extent.

“For example, when I wrote Just A Boy’s Game there’s a scene on top of a crane with Frankie Miller and Ken Hutchison. Ken says to Frankie ‘Whit’s the matter wi’ you?’ And Frankie says ‘My grandfather’s dying.’ What of? ‘Everything.’

“But what I’d originally written was two pages, describing what it was like when I was sitting beside my grandfather, watching his life go out the window. However, in a play, I can say what I like. I can open up. As a result, everybody has monologues in which they can open their hearts.”

The meeting between Sadie and Finlay is touching. They realise they’ve made a real connection.

Finlay asks ‘Is this a stroke of good luck?’

McDougall’s stroke hasn’t been good luck at all. But it’s provided him with yet another bout of powerful experience. Pure medicine for theatre goers.

The Vampire Clinic, Oran Mor, Glasgow, until Saturday.