00:00 Hello, my name is Colin McCready and I played the part of DC Stuart Fraser in Taggart.
00:18 It's very strange, it's the first time I've been down to the archives so I'm really looking
00:22 forward to getting in for a nosy.
00:24 It's weird to think that you yourself are part of an archive.
00:28 I was just at primary school in P7 when Taggart and the first episode Killer aired, I remember
00:33 watching it.
00:34 It was totally weird maybe 10, 12 years later playing a part in Taggart and now even more
00:39 weird 40 years later we're celebrating the 40th anniversary.
00:43 But I think it's great for the show and it's great for Glasgow and it's great for all the
00:47 fans of the show that they can come and share their memories and stories.
00:50 It's quite a funny story actually, when I was 14 I was in a Taggart as a child which
00:55 no one really knows, which is the episode Death Call and I smashed up a Mercedes.
01:00 Then I was also in two episodes, one as a car thief and one as a fat farmer and then
01:05 I joined the show as DC Fraser.
01:07 We started filming that in 94 and I think it went on screen in 95.
01:12 So yeah nearly 30 years ago I would have been 21, 22.
01:15 Well the infamous story which we all claim that we were there but in fact I was there,
01:19 we were filming outside Central Station and we were doing scene after scene, getting out
01:23 of the car running in, getting out of the car running in and there was this wee old
01:26 lady watching and she watched for ages and ages and she eventually came up to us and
01:30 said "Are you, is this Taggart?
01:33 Are you filming Taggart?"
01:34 And we went "Yeah, yeah, that's what we're doing, we've got to do it lots of times."
01:36 She goes "Oh brilliant."
01:37 She said "Is it a new one or is it a repeat?"
01:41 Which was quite a weird thing to think.
01:46 I was in it for 15 years, which you get less for murder around here so yeah it was a bit
01:51 of a life sentence but yeah it was great fun.
01:53 Yeah it was one of my main jobs, maybe a year, just over a year out of drama school and then
01:57 doing it for 15 years.
01:58 What was brilliant about the show was that for maybe 6, 7 months of the year you turned
02:03 up and you were on screen filming in front of a camera and it was great experience doing
02:07 it every day and learning about your craft and learning how things work.
02:11 So you know the best way that you learn anything, certainly acting on film or TV, is doing it.
02:16 And often you can go a couple of years or do one days filming and then wait five months
02:20 for another day so it was great to do it every day.
02:22 It really trained you up and got you quite good at your craft I think.
02:27 The city itself was a character wasn't it?
02:29 Yeah I think there's so many places that we filmed in that are not there.
02:33 You know you think about places like the big granary on South Street, that's gone, that
02:37 was in loads of episodes.
02:38 You've got lots of buildings being built, whether it's the Armadillo or the SEC.
02:44 It was just great seeing the changes in Glasgow and even seeing the buildings getting cleaned
02:47 up from 1983 onwards.
02:49 Yeah and it is, it's a social documentation of all the shops and pubs and buildings that
02:55 are maybe not there anymore.
02:56 And even better, they were all captured on film and you can still watch them all and
03:02 reminisce back to those days.
03:04 Glasgow was pretty gallus back then wasn't it?
03:06 Yeah Glasgow's always been pretty gallus.
03:09 Having grown up in Perth, I always feel as if I'm a kind of ornery Glaswegian so it's
03:15 so great to be part of a show that's so linked to Glasgow and Glasgow people and Glasgow
03:20 murders.
03:21 So I'm Carol McCallum, the University Archivist at Glasgow Caledonian University.
03:25 Blythe gave us all her papers in 2018 but Blythe had always felt that Glasgow and Scotland
03:31 had a part to play in the whole Taggart story.
03:33 So over the years we kept on discussing it and the 40th anniversary came up and we thought
03:37 Taggart, the people's archive, brilliant, let's get the public telling their story,
03:43 let's get the public coming into our university, seeing an archive, being part of an archive,
03:47 saving their story so that they're part of the whole legacy of Taggart, they're part
03:52 of the heritage going forward.
03:54 Come up to the archive centre at the university today until four o'clock, tomorrow between
03:58 11 and seven and Friday between 11 and three and there's retired detectives that will take
04:04 your witness statement and they will be preserved in the archive centre.
04:08 However, if you can't come because you're physically not able or you're somewhere else
04:12 in the world, please do go onto our website, there's an online forum, your statement will
04:17 be there, we will not let the world not be involved in this story.
04:21 Many actors have gone through Taggart and many of them go on to do great things but
04:25 we cannot forget the people and places that have made Taggart so wonderful and that's
04:29 why we all feel connected to it because we see a street or a shop or we see somebody
04:33 we know that's been in Taggart.
04:35 It's an incredible thing that a television drama can be so close to so many people's
04:39 hearts.
04:40 Hello, I'm Dr Blythe Duff and I'm going to give you my full title because I'm at the
04:44 GCU.
04:45 Well it's been a long time coming actually, since 2018 Carol and I have been wondering
04:50 what else can happen with my archive up here and it just felt all of a sudden that in 40
04:56 years anniversary of Taggart being shown tonight on the 6th of September, it felt like as if
05:00 this was the right time to actually launch Taggart the People's Archive because they've
05:04 had such an extraordinary part in the series over the years.
05:07 The city has played an extraordinary part as the people have and we've been all over
05:12 Scotland so it's actually Scotland wide rather than it being Glasgow centric.
05:16 When I was asked to bring my archive up here it felt like as if it was a natural home for
05:22 it to go to and then, you know, and it has been here and people have come up to see my
05:26 scripts and that's all been lovely but it feels like as if this is a nice way to just
05:29 bring the public into a building that they might not have been in before but also to
05:33 an archive centre which is really, you know, maybe most folk would be a wee bit worried
05:37 about coming in but today they've just shown up which is just lovely.
05:40 I think since we launched this which was two weeks ago with the idea that people could
05:45 come up and give their witness statement, they've already wanted to tell me and I'm
05:48 saying no, no, no, hold out, come to the archive and tell me up there but actually there's
05:53 a lot of beautiful stories, a lot of stories that have made me quite emotional and I think
05:58 that's important to families who maybe don't have their loved ones anymore but had some
06:03 kind of link to Taggart so it's just, that's really quite important to me and I'm sure
06:07 I'm going to find an awful lot more of those.
06:09 In streets of San Francisco they used to thank the people of San Francisco for their input
06:14 and I always wanted Taggart to do that at the end, thank you to the people of Glasgow
06:19 because actually, you know, they took us to their heart and it seemed to be, you know,
06:24 they want to be part of it still so that's nice.
06:27 We filmed the city when it was going through change in the 1990s when we had the City of
06:33 Culture in '88 when they had the Garden Festival and we documented all those moments that were
06:37 important to Glasgow when it looked European, when it had cafe culture, when it had a bit
06:42 of money injected into it and that was really important and we caught all of that and when
06:46 we got up to the rooftops and see extraordinary buildings from the top and domes, it was amazing.
06:52 So I'm Louise Brownlee, I retired as a Chief Inspector, I served from 2000 until 2023.
06:59 Did the police kind of talk about Taggart, did they watch it?
07:01 All the time, all the time, so I joined in 2000 so it was the latter stages of Taggart,
07:08 you know, the kind of old school had already passed and it was coming into that new millennium
07:13 but yeah we talked about Taggart all the time, you know, young officers, not that we would
07:18 base many of our cases on the episodes of Taggart but you would certainly in your downtime
07:22 draw on the episodes that had gone and you know there's not many quotes more iconic than
07:28 there's been a murder so you know certainly if we turned up at something that was relatively
07:31 serious somebody would coin the phrase and it would get us all thinking so yeah, iconic,
07:36 yes, you get into the storylines, you know, it was almost a documentary and some of the
07:43 gritty storylines were so real it was a true reflection of Glasgow.
07:47 Do you think the Glaswegian public sometimes got the two mixed up?
07:50 I imagine that they absolutely did get them mixed up, you know, life does blend into art
07:55 and the other way around so yes it was very popular with the public as well and you know
08:00 I dare say the public would be watching an ongoing incident in the street and you know
08:04 perhaps wondering if it was part of a sequence from Taggart rather than actual life.
08:08 [laughter]
08:09 [silence]
08:09 [silence]
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