FORTY years after it first aired, Taggart creator Glenn Chandler is ready to visit Musselburgh to share a wealth of tales from behind the scenes of the world’s longest-running crime drama for this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Twenty-seven series and 110 episodes on, Edinburgh-born Glenn is now a theatre director, playwright and true crime author but in ‘There’s Been A Murder: An Evening with Taggart Creator Glenn Chandler’, he reveals the origins of Glasgow’s most famous cop and recalls the many Hitchcock-like cameos he himself played in episodes along the way.
With producers of a number of Nordic noir TV dramas revealing Taggart was their inspiration, Glenn is now set to reflect on the impact his character, played by the late Mark McManus, has had on the crime genre.
The two events – the first at 2pm followed by a second at 7.30pm, both on August 20 – will be chaired by award-winning writer and broadcaster Liam Rudden, and will see Glenn returning to Loretto School, where the Taggart episode ‘Out of Bounds’ was filmed and in which he made one of a number of Hitchcock-like cameos.
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On that occasion he played the school chaplain.
Glenn recalled: “I’m looking forward greatly to returning to Loretto School.
“Loretto School became Borderdown Academy in the Taggart episode ‘Out of Bounds’. It was one of my personal favourites.
“I was cast as the school chaplain and I spent all day swanning around in robes with a dog collar. Talk about power dressing.
“When I took my own photographs of the day to Boots to be processed, the sales assistant addressed me politely as Reverend.”
It was a hard-hitting episode, the show’s creator recalled.
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He said: “It was the episode in which a sadistic PT master was drowned in the school swimming pool handcuffed to a wheelchair.
“The episode tackled the subject of bullying in a top public school, and we used the whole of John Lennon’s Imagine to underscore the entire sequence.
“Yoko Ono let us use that free of any royalties because she was passionate about the subject.
“We received a letter of criticism, incidentally, from some government official to do with the running of Scottish schools to say that bullying had been stamped out and no longer occurred.
“We did not believe it and the producer sent a sharp reply to the contrary.”
‘Out of Bounds’ is just one of the many Taggart investigations Glenn fondly recalled, and he admitted he couldn’t quite believe the series started some 40 years ago this year.
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He said: “I had to pinch himself to really believe this was the 40th anniversary of the birth of Taggart.
“Though a pilot called ‘Killer’, the first story, went out in 1983, the idea had been discussed between Robert Love, the producer, and myself over a year earlier.
“I look back on it with great affection, and surprise that it lasted so long.
“I have seen it described as ‘tartan noir’. The stories were dark, yes, but always shot with humour.
“It was never, as some people think, a gritty detective series. Taggart was always an old-fashioned whodunit that kept us guessing until the last few minutes.
“Perhaps that was the reason for its abiding success.”
‘There’s Been A Murder’ will also find Glenn talking about his new book, Sidney Fox’s Crime: The True Story of Sidney Fox and the Margate Hotel Murder, which will be available at each performance, as well as taking part in an audience Q&A session.
For tickets for the show at Loretto School Theatre, book via The Brunton website at tinyurl.com/y2z4wxy9
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