Dunoon Film Festival: John Byrne on Your Cheatin’ Heart

Scotland isn’t great at recognising its considerable cultural achievements. When it comes to some of our brightest artistic lights, we seem to hide them under a bushel the size of Ben Nevis. As evidence for the prosecution I give you exhibit A: the brochure for the inaugural Dunoon Film Festival, which reads like a who’s who of Scottish talent who’ve been under-appreciated in one way or another.

Take Alan Sharp, a Greenock-raised screenwriter whose surname is also the perfect adjective to apply to his dialogue. Dunoon grants Sharp, who died in February this year, aged 79, a mini-retrospective, and in the programme he’s described as ‘the finest screenwriter Scotland ever produced.' Looking at his CV, it’s hard to disagree. His 1970s films alone – The Hired Hand, Ulzana's Raid and Night Moves – validate the billing. Yet few will be familiar with his name – although, to be fair, it’s not just in Scotland that screenwriters are undervalued.

Also in the festival is a rare screening of 1929 documentary Drifter, from pioneering filmmaker and father of the documentary form John Grierson, another Scot who should be a household name but is barely known outside cinephile circles.

But at least, with some searching, Sharp and Grierson’s fantastic films can be sought out. The same can’t be said for festival opener Your Cheatin’ Heart, a six-part television drama centred on the country music scene in Glasgow that’s so hard to find even the festival’s programmers haven’t been able to see it yet. Fondly remembered by those who caught its broadcast in 1990, a significant year in Glasgow’s cultural heritage, John Byrne’s series has been gathering dust on a BBC archive shelf ever since. When I speak to Byrne, he’s at a loss to explain why the series has remained buried. “You’d need to ask the BBC,” he says by phone in a rich, nicotine-stained west coast brogue. “They paid for a repeat when they commissioned it and never showed it again.”

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"The darker it is, the funnier it is – that’s my rule" – John Byrne

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Byrne is something of a cultural polymath. Raised in Paisley and educated at Glasgow School of Art, he first made a name for himself as a painter in the 60s, a playwright in the 70s, and then, in 1987, as a television writer, with the seminal Tutti Frutti, a blackly comic story of a fading rock‘n’roll band. Byrne’s art currently hangs in the National Portrait Gallery and he’s continually been in demand as a playwright, but he hasn’t worked in television since Your Cheatin’ Heart. When I ask why he hasn’t been tempted back to the small screen, the 73-year-old doesn’t mince his words. “I’ll tell you,” he says, with more than a hint of resentment and hurt in his voice. “I’ve never, ever been asked again, not by STV, by the BBC, anyone, and that was what, 23 years ago? You’d have thought I’d have committed such a terrible hodgepodge – what sin did I commit?”

TV execs may have removed Byrne’s number from their Rolodexes, but they took note of his soon-to-be famous cast, which included Ken Stott, Peter Mullan, and Tilda Swinton. “I got all the people I ever wanted,” says Byrne of his talented ensemble, which also included John Gordon Sinclair and Tutti Fritti alumnus Katy Murphy. There’s one performance, however, that Byrne’s keen to single out: that of singer/songwriter Eddi Reader, who played quiffed country star Jolene Jowett. “Eddi was a real find,” says the playwright. “I didn’t know, but I’d always presumed she could act because she was such a great singer – you believe her when she sings and you believe her in Your Cheatin’ Heart. She was word perfect, a wonderful, natural actress.”

Great female roles are something of a John Byrne forte (see Emma Thompson’s spunky lead in Tutti Fruti). “That isn’t a Scottish trait,” he notes. “Scottish drama and literature is very macho. It’s almost always about tough, mean guys unless it’s a woman who’s writing. I write for a woman the same way I would write for a guy. They’re every bit as strong and brainy and physically powerful and sensitive.”

He neglects to mention funny. Can we expect the same coal black humour that makes Tutti Fruti such a twisted delight to return to on DVD? “The darker it is, the funnier it is – that’s my rule. Your Cheatin' Heart is as black as can be. It’s not that I’m making it dark, it’s my take on life, and that’s why it’s so funny, because it has to mean something. You can’t just do gags for six hours.”