Evening Telegraph (First Edition)
Jute, Jam and Jim: The art of United in the 1980s
TWO wonderful pieces of art – enjoyed a year apart – have enriched the memory of Jim McLean.
One was a performance and the other visual but both opened a creative window on the legendary Dundee United manager, whose death was announced on Boxing Day, two months ago today.
The first experience was the gala opening night at Dundee Rep on February 19 last year to see the masterpiece that is the play Smile.
Written by Phil Differ and directed by Sally Reid, it boasted a tour-de-force depiction of McLean by Barrie Hunter as the actor took you back to the days when the great tactician was king of Tannadice.
Every hand gesture and every nuance of speech was captured so brilliantly by Hunter that McLean’s players, who postshow held a question and answer session organised by the Dundee United Supporters’ Foundation, seemed genuinely stunned by the accuracy.
When news broke of McLean’s passing, your mind went back to how Hunter had portrayed him with both real affection and brutal honesty.
There was another trip in the tangerine time machine more recently with a fabulous bit of film posted on YouTube by “Tanaferry.”
It is named Jute, Jam and Jim McLean and formed part of STV’s Scottish Report series.
First broadcast on February 27 1987, the documentary centres on the upcoming “corner shop against supermarket” match, as it gets labelled by contributing journalist Gerry McNee.
The Tangerines are just five days away from their Uefa Cup quarter-final home first leg against the mighty Barcelona.
As well as capturing the build-up to what was and still is a remarkable football story, the cameras focus on the city of Dundee and its socio-economic struggles in the midst of Margaret Thatcher’s reign.
A year or so later and United’s fans would be joining Celtic supporters in showing Maggie the red card before the 1988 Scottish Cup final she attended at Hampden.
The hook is how the club struggles to get more than six or seven thousand spectators at games, despite their achievements on both the domestic and European stages.
Any United fan will tell you that they had already beaten Barca in 1966, when their club record crowd of 28,000 packed into the stadium. What they won’t recall is that the unemployment rate in Tayside at that time was only 3.6%.
In 1986, just a few months before the second meeting with the Spanish aristocrats, the jobless figure measured 16.5% in the region and Dundee bore the brunt of it, with 6,000 people categorised as “long-term unemployed”.
With times tough, United weren’t alone in struggling to persuade people to spend precious pounds and pence to watch them rather than use them to buy food or pay bills.
The Barcelona tickets were on sale at £20, which would be the equivalent of £56 in today’s prices.
It then cuts to McLean in full, furious flow on the phone to the dugout from the executive box above the players’ tunnel. Not surprisingly for those who were around at the time, the gaffer is on Eamonn Bannon’s case.
Prominence is given to the central role played by Taypools which, even in a city hard hit by