The Cult of... - Sunday Night - Hamish Macbeth

Series which unearths the history and anecdotes behind cult British Sunday night drama looks at Scottish cop series Hamish Macbeth. The Sunday night schedules had never seen anything like it, and a dope-smoking cop living in a Scottish village with palm trees was only the beginning of the oddness. Developed from a series of novels that weren't even published in the UK, the Hamish of the books was a strapping six-footer with ginger hair and a mongrel dog. So how did he become Robert Carlyle? If Hamish was a renegade cop, then Hamish Macbeth was a suitably subversive production. There were fraught discussions with BBC management about the drug-taking of the policeman and the doctor. There were concerns about the writers killing off the fluffy white dog. And the idea of putting the dead dog in the freezer provided a particularly strong reaction. But the production team generally got their own way. And they were proved to be right when the viewing figures regularly topped 10 million. Interviewees include Duncan Duff, Ralph Riach, Valerie Gogan, Brian Pettifer, executive producers Scott Meek and Andrea Calderwood, producer Deirdre Keir, writer Danny Boyle and script editor Dominic Minghe.