I watched this eagerly when broadcast in 1987 and remember being hooked by it, so have wanted to see it again for a long time. Finally found a source this year, but revisiting was a huge disappointment. The plot does not make any sense - something about Irish terrorism in Glasgow being linked with a Scottish independence army and overseen by Brond (a ruthless shadowy spook played by Stratford Johns) with John Hannah as the innocent university student who accidentally becomes involved after seeing Brond push a child off a bridge (recognisable as the Gibson St road bridge over the River Kelvin in Glasgow's West End).
But the way the story unfolds is ludicrous - Brond must be clinically mad to do some of the things he does so there is no plot progression or rational explanation for the various incidents - nasty things happen without making any sense. Primo (played by James Cosmo) as Brond's side-kick and protective man-mountain keeps cropping up in John Hannah's life for no reason or purpose, and both Brond and Cosmo keep involving him in processes which would have been much simpler to resolve by themselves. Various minor characters surface within the main plot for no obvious reason, do something confusing, and then disappear. And the major scene near the end when Brond takes Hannah to a posh brothel is supposedly pivotal but crams too many plot threads together into a contrived resolution which becomes a nonsensical mess.
Filmed In Glasgow's West End (in and around the University campus) and South Side, plus a brief sequence in episode 3 at Harthill services on the M8 between Glagow and Edinburgh. The Bill Nelson/La Scala theme music is excellent (main theme easily found now on youtube).
So my recommendation is that it's not worth the effort of trying to find a copy now - it deserves its current forgotten obscurity.
But the way the story unfolds is ludicrous - Brond must be clinically mad to do some of the things he does so there is no plot progression or rational explanation for the various incidents - nasty things happen without making any sense. Primo (played by James Cosmo) as Brond's side-kick and protective man-mountain keeps cropping up in John Hannah's life for no reason or purpose, and both Brond and Cosmo keep involving him in processes which would have been much simpler to resolve by themselves. Various minor characters surface within the main plot for no obvious reason, do something confusing, and then disappear. And the major scene near the end when Brond takes Hannah to a posh brothel is supposedly pivotal but crams too many plot threads together into a contrived resolution which becomes a nonsensical mess.
Filmed In Glasgow's West End (in and around the University campus) and South Side, plus a brief sequence in episode 3 at Harthill services on the M8 between Glagow and Edinburgh. The Bill Nelson/La Scala theme music is excellent (main theme easily found now on youtube).
So my recommendation is that it's not worth the effort of trying to find a copy now - it deserves its current forgotten obscurity.
