Sorry, Mel, Braveheart was more tosh than totemic
Every so often BBC Scotland likes to throw out a half-hour of archive reminiscences about some pawky icon of jockanalia. This week it’s the turn of the Bay City rollers, who don’t so much represent a stroll down memory lane, as a stumble down a darkened alley with God-knows-what in the shadows.
Their former manager, Tam Paton, was jailed for sex offences; a fan was shot with an air rifle – and then there’s the petty decades spent squabbling over probably nonexistent royalties.
Sometimes exercises in Scottish cultural nostalgia are like being confronted with a photo album full of your most unsuitable adolescent crushes. There’s the time we voted endlessly for the MacDonald Brothers on X Factor, the year we lavished affection on Monarch of the Glen, and the time we gave Andy Cameron the glad eye by sending Ally’s Tartan Army to number one.
What were we thinking? And do these celebs ever think of us?
I’m not sure Mel Gibson gives us a thought. It’s the 20th anniversary of the release of Braveheart this month, and a sobering reminder that a couple of decades ago we got caught up in the cresting popularity of Mad Mac and an American movie where the oppressed people of Scotland were led to freedom by a short man with carefully lit blue eyes, a dreadlock wig, magnificent biceps, and an accent that suggested Sir William owned an awful lot of land in Govan.
To pre- devolution Scotland, Braveheart seemed exotic, blockbuster stuff. True, Gibson spent more time filming in Ireland than in Scotland, but when I interviewed him for the BBC he assured me that Scotland had made an impression on him just the same.
The sun shone for only three days of the 20week shoot, the midges drove him daft and an extra threw a cabbage at him with such force it nearly took Gibson’s head off. Then at the end of each day he had to retreat to his hotel to soothe hollywood executives unnerved by ‘Mel in a skirt’ dying a graphically violent death – thus making Braveheart a one-shot project with no sequel potential.
At the premiere and after-party in Stirling Castle, Gibson attacked Scottish country dancing with all HAUD on: is Holyrood really considering trilingual corporate signage written in English, Gaelic and now Scots? By the time we’ve scrolled through a road sign listing Bruach Tatha/ Broughty Ferry/ Brochtie, most of us will have arrived at Arbroath. the enthusiasm of his spear-waving Bravehearts rushing i nto the historically- dubious Battle of Stirling’s Big Field, while throughout the night he was as genial and accessible as a hollywood star with an enormous bodyguard hovering in the background could be.
To complete a topsy-turvy event, Tory Scottish Secretary Michael Forsyth also turned up at the premiere in tartan, got horribly booed – and yet had no security at all.
Despite going on to win five Oscars, Braveheart’s assaultive combination of bravura battle scenes, mangled history and homophobic paw-swipes hasn’t aged well – and neither has Gibson’s reputation after a pile-up of anti-Semitic, racist and misogynistic outbursts.
yet he still has a fanbase here. As recently as 2008, sentimentalists voted Braveheart’s bagpipe mythmaking ‘ the greatest Scottish movie ever’. how odd that a t ormented alcoholic r emains visit Scotland’s greatest ally.
Odder yet, we never get the chance to chew on this irony with Gibson himself. Despite the anniversaries, DVD reissues, buffed up new prints and that hideous statue in his image that was placed at the foot of Stirling Castle for a while, he never writes, never phones and never visits.