Taggart: We bring stars back – after 40 years

The venue we’ve chosen for the reunion is classic Taggart really. We’re down by the docks on Clydebrae Street in Govan, which is exactly the sort of place where, for 27 years, DCI Taggart or later one of his colleagues would discover bashed and bruised bodies. Famously, one of the detectives would then utter the show’s catchphrase “there’s been a murder” (except they didn’t – it’s an urban myth) before exploring the streets and alleys and pubs (and suburbs) of Glasgow to find the killer. It was a formula that made Taggart one of the most successful and long-running detective series ever; it was beloved then and it still is.

Blythe Duff (Image: free)

Another car pulls up and it’s Blythe Duff – who joined the show as Jackie Reid in 1990 and stayed right to the end in 2010 – followed by John Michie, who was the ever-so-slightly dodgy DI Robbie Ross. Again, there’s hugs and jokes and teasing and flashes of memory from the time they all spent together on Taggart and then it's time for a photoshoot with the other star of the show: the city of Glasgow.

Also here for the cover shoot in front of the Squinty Bridge and some other Glasgow landmarks are Robert Love and Glenn Chandler, the creative partnership who came up with the idea for Taggart. One of the great facts I learn today is that Robert and Glenn fleshed out their concept in a location that could not have been more different from today’s: a genteel tea room in London's Covent Garden. Another delicious fact is that the poker-faced working-class copper fae Maryhill was created by a nice middle class boy from a private school in Edinburgh.

The legacy of the show they created is demonstrated a few minutes later while we’re in the middle of the photoshoot. A man approaches and asks us what we’re doing. He says, with just a tiny bit of warning in his voice, that he leases this part of the docks and for a minute it looks like it’s going to kick off. But then I tell him the photoshoot is for Taggart and suddenly his attitude changes. “Oh that’s all right then,” he says, beaming. “I love Taggart.” Blythe says it was always like this. Taggart is a brand but it’s also a password; in Glasgow, it could get you anywhere.

The photoshoot wrapped up, we move down the road a bit to The Old Toll Bar in Kinning Park for pictures with the pub’s mural of the original Taggart star Mark McManus and a chat about the origins and legacy of the show. On September 6th, it will be 40 years since the first episode of Taggart was shown in 1983 and Robert Love, who’d been working in London on shows such as Van Der Valk and Special Branch, says the idea came about shortly after he became head of drama at STV in 1980.

“It was all very political at the time,” says Robert. “STV wanted a bigger part of the national ITV network. They’d attempted it with light entertainment but it hadn’t worked because a lot of it was too parochial so we decided to concentrate on drama and I had to come up with a fool-proof idea.” The idea he had was for a detective/whodunnit show set in Glasgow (“Taggart was never a cop show,” he says, “It was a classic whodunnit.”)

It's at this point that Glenn Chandler, the former private school boy from Edinburgh, enters the story. Glenn was a young, relatively inexperienced writer at the time but having seen some of his work, Robert Love was convinced he had talent. And so the two men met at the tea room in Covent Garden and started to come up with the basics of the new show.

Colin McCredie (Image: free)

Glenn says that at first he felt pretty unqualified to write about Glasgow and spent days wandering round the city, soaking it up, chatting to people and listening to the conversations in pubs and on the street. As for the title itself – Taggart – that was a name he spotted on a gravestone in Sighthill cemetery. Bit by bit, it was coming together.

“I had never done anything like it before,” says Glenn. “But I knew there had to be humour so I came up with the first line in the first episode where Taggart’s sidekick Livingstone says ‘strangulation with a ligature’ and Taggart says ‘they don’t have ligatures in Maryhill’ and that kicked me off.” The two men also realised they wanted to bring in all sides of Glasgow: Maryhill and Bearsden, working class and middle class, old and new. “Robert’s advice to me was ‘stir the pot, dear boy!’”

And so, after one or two bumps in the road, the script for the first three-parter, Killer, was completed and the question then was who should play the lead. Robert says Mark McManus, the Bellshill-born actor who’d spent a large part of his career in Australia, was always the frontrunner although he did have one initial doubt.

“Mark was, in a sense, too small,” says Robert. “He was around 5ft 9in and in those days you had to be 6ft to be a cop in Glasgow – Glasgow was one of the last places to drop the height restriction. But Glenn and I talked about it and in the end we concluded there was nobody better. And nobody else was offered the part despite the claims actors will make.”

Written, cast, and then produced in the early months of ’83, the finished pilot, with McManus in the lead, was eventually broadcast over the September of that year with another two stories following in ’85. For the first couple of years, the two stars were Taggart, played by McManus, and his assistant Livingstone played by Neil Duncan, before James MacPherson joined as Jardine in 1987. By this point, the show was really starting to gather momentum.

Mark McManus (Image: free)

James has very happy memories of those early days but says it wasn’t always glamorous. He remembers eating his lunch with Mark off the bonnet of cars during breaks in filming and Mark McManus eschewed anything starry. James also remembers being told that Mark was “at the Queen’s Park Café” and taking a while to realise it wasn’t for a cup of tea (the Queen’s Park Café is a pub in Govanhill). It was an early sign of the lead actor’s problem with alcohol that became more serious as the show went on.

Despite his problems, James believes McManus’s portrayal was central to the early success of Taggart as well as helpful for James’s own performance. “I learned so much from Mark,” he says. “He was so good, especially at the humour. A lot of detective series fall into the trap of being so serious but not Taggart. Glenn wrote it but Mark delivered it and it was done with panache and subtlety.”

Blythe Duff also has strong memories of the series’ star when she joined the show in 1990 but recalls having to figure out the best way to work with him.

“He was quiet, very contained, and I did think I’m going to have to find my way – even off set, how would I be with him; he wouldn’t need some woman wittering on,” says Blythe. “I suppose that’s where James would help. He knew Mark and he could fill me in with bits – I would just let Mark come to me and not be too full-on.”

Getting the job on Taggart was also a big deal for Blythe – she’d worked in the theatre for a few years but had never done telly. “Taggart was a very strong identity by the time I arrived so I knew what I was getting into,” she says. “What I didn’t know was how I would best fit in. I thought ‘I need to find that niche’.” It didn’t help that her first week of filming was cancelled.

“Mark was in a precarious point in his life where his health was struggling so that was always hanging over us. I thought ‘I’ve been given this huge job and I might not ever get to do it’ so I never took it for granted and every year became a bonus.”

Sadly, a few years later, in 1994, Mark McManus died and it was a big deal for Glasgow and the show. Blythe says the outpouring of grief from the viewers and the public was extraordinary – Strathclyde Police sent outriders to his funeral cortège – but it also raised the big question for producer Robert Love about whether the show could continue.

“The last series we filmed with Mark was called Hellfire,” says Robert. “He’d gone through a very bad patch because his wife Marion, his sister and his mother had died, all within months of each other. But when we filmed Hellfire, we thought he was rallying a bit. And then within days of finishing the shoot, he was in hospital and he didn’t recover.”

The network then asked Robert what he was going to do. “They said ‘are you going to rename it or find a substitute for Mark?’ but James and Blythe had done so well I thought: no, what I propose is they become the joint leads and we keep the name Taggart because it was a brand to some extent. The network agreed but said if the ratings slide, that’s it.”

Robert Love and Glenn Chandler (Image: free)

By this point, Colin McCredie had also joined as DC Fraser and, understandably, was worried his big break would be over before it had begun. “When Mark died a week before filming, it was really strange – I was part of something but I didn’t really know Mark. All the actors and crew were devastated and from that moment on, you were always one year at a time.”

The other thing that was slightly different for Colin was that he was the first of its stars who’d actually grown up with the show, remembering it from his childhood in the early 80s. There was also something significant about his character that at first he didn’t know: DC Fraser was gay.

“The first year I did it, there was no mention of him being gay,” says Colin. “And it transpired other people knew but not me. At first I was a bit annoyed by that – I’d rather have been informed. But in retrospect if I had been informed, would I have played it in a different way? In some ways, maybe it was a good idea.”

The fact Fraser was gay – and the way he was portrayed – was also pretty groundbreaking for TV of the time, although some parts of society still had some catching up to do (Colin emails me a news cutting from The Sun of the time with the extraordinary headline “Inspector Faggart”).

“There had been a gay character in EastEnders,” says Colin, “which was very much about putting issues into the storylines, whereas what was interesting about Taggart was Fraser was a policeman who happened to be gay – he wasn’t defined by being it. It could go three four episodes and there would be no mention of it and in that way it was a really positive portrayal – he was a normal likeable character who happened to be gay.”

For Colin, being cast as Fraser was also the start of 15 happy years on the show and asked why it lasted so long, he credits Mark McManus in particular for establishing the brand. John Michie, who joined the show four years after Mark’s death, also emphasises the importance of the city of Glasgow itself.

“One thing people forget is the audience was pretty much in England,” says John. “There’s something about the city of Glasgow that people find fascinating; the stories of gangs and so on, and the myth of Glasgow being this violent city, which we know isn’t true. I grew up in Edinburgh and as a teenager I found it a lot more violent. I used to come over to go the Barrowlands and what I found was that if you weren’t looking to get battered, you’d get it in Edinburgh but you wouldn’t in Glasgow even if you were looking for a fight.”

Robert Love agrees about the importance of Glasgow and says from the start it was always planned to show the different sides of the city from the nice suburbs to the hard housing estates, and the vision of Glasgow helped contribute to the show’s international success. Blythe remembers the show being particularly popular in France, which is confirmed by the night Robert was having dinner with Mark in The Ubiquitous Chip and a female fan sidled up to Mark, revealed she was French and referred to her favourite detective as Monsieur Sexy!

The rest of the cast and crew have their own various theories about the success of Taggart and the fact that it lasted for 27 years (which was, and still is, extraordinary for modern television). Robert credits the close working relationship he had with Glenn and the writer’s grand guignol imagination and exotic ideas such as death by snake venom or crossbow. John thinks it’s because the show adapted and changed (in 2002 the cast changed again with Alex Norton joining the line-up). Blythe emphasises the humour and Colin reckons it’s because the producers were left to get on with it. “There wasn’t a lot of politics about the show,” he says. “We were very much left to do what we did. They gave STV the money and they delivered the viewing figures. We never got notes from the network – now in every drama, you do.”

The truth is it was probably all of those things. It was a formula but it was a formula that worked, which is why there are persistent rumours about a comeback. One of the rumours is the new star would be Taggart’s daughter or granddaughter.

I ask Glenn, the man who wrote so many of the original Taggarts, what he thinks about the idea of a comeback and he gently rolls his eyes. “I’ve had so many people say to me ‘I’m dealing with Scottish Television’. I was talking to a writer the other day, who said ‘I’m in discussions with Scottish TV about the granddaughter of Taggart’ and I said whatever happened to the daughter of Taggart, have we jumped a generation? I know no more than anybody else.”

Blythe also has her doubts about reviving the show. “The format will always work – we proved that. But I don’t know – I’d have to see. It’s so different now - policing is so different it would be hard to keep it with the energy that the old ones had. I also think there are an awful lot of good cop shows at the moment and you tamper with it at your peril. Taggart has left a lasting legacy in our memory, and maybe that’s what it needs to be.”

Certainly, the legacy of the programme is still out there for everyone to see: every single episode is on the STV Player to watch at any time. Why not watch one tonight and judge for yourself? The opening sequence with the police cars racing through Partick. The closing titles with the famous song: “I know the city like a lover, good or bad, it’s hard to love another.” Mark McManus’s granite face scanning another body, another murder. We love it because it’s dark and disturbing and funny. We love it because it’s Glasgow, and Scotland. We love it because it’s us.

Taggart is available to stream for free on STV Player.