Ae fond curse!

BBC issues warning over Burns programme that focuses on the bawdier side of the Bard

HE IS Scotland’s national poet, famed for writing some of the world’s greatest love songs such as Ae Fond Kiss and My Love is Like a Red Red Rose.

But a new BBC Scotland documentary featuring less well-known works by Robert Burns will come with a warning to viewers – because of the shockingly vulgar language they contain.

Inside the Mind of Robert Burns, which will be shown on the BBC Scotland channel at 10pm on Tuesday, is described by the broadcaster as a ‘detailed look at the man, rather than the legend’ who is celebrated across the world on Burns Night.

Presented by Scottish novelist and playwright Alan Bissett, it includes renditions of songs and poems Burns performed in ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ to a raucous response.

A popular version of Burns’ song Green Grow the Rashes is performed on the programme by award-winning folk singer Robyn Stapleton – but Bisset reveals the former BBC Radio Scotland’s Young Traditional Musician of the Year refused to sing Burns’ bawdy version ‘because of certain words’.

The less well-known version of the song is also performed – complete with the C-word twice – by Mary, Queen of Scots actor Andrew Rothney. Such verses were collected by Burns in the book The

Merry Muses of Caledonia. First published in 1799, three years after Burns’ death, it was labelled in the 19th century as ‘not for maids, ministers or striplings’.

BBC Scotland confirmed that viewers will be pre-warned about the language on the programme, which will be repeated on BBC Scotland at 9.40pm on Burns Night, Saturday, January 25, and also made available to viewers everywhere on BBC iPlayer. A BBC Scotland spokesperson said: ‘Many

Burns aficionados are aware of these songs, which were performed in gentlemen’s clubs at the time.

‘It is not a great secret they exist, but the actual content is not widely known and to have a proper conversation about what they say about Burns means letting people have a clearer understanding of exactly what these songs say.

‘The programme is looking at Burns “in the round” – his genius but also his failings. It is therefore appropriate to include performances of these songs, and present the context in which they would have been heard in his times, reflecting that while Robert Burns is heralded across the world for love songs such as Ae Fond Kiss, there is other material that shows his attitude to women in a different, possibly disturbing, light.

‘As is normal with such content, the audience for this programme will be warned in advance for both transmission and BBC iPlayer.’

Burns, born in Alloway, Ayrshire, on January 25, 1759, travelled to Edinburgh after the success of his work, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, in 1787.

A published and admired poet, he befriended printer William Smellie, who was editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a founder of the Crochallan Fensibles, a drinking club that met in Douglas’s Tavern in Anchor Close, just off the Royal Mile. It was for the club that Burns collected the songs known as The Merry Muses of Caledonia.

Burns biographer Professor Robert Crawford, of the University of St Andrews, said: ‘The Merry Muses are the kind of thing that if you were a Victorian lady you would be expected to swoon as soon as you read one of them.’

Dr Pauline Mackay, of the University of Glasgow, described The Merry Muses as ‘an interesting cultural document as much as it is really very sexually explicit.’

While professor Gerard Carruthers, co-director of the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Robert Burns Studies, said: ‘The reality is that there is some good filth in there and that good filth is the filth of social commentary.’

‘There is some good filth in there’