Annie Griffin interview: Talk of the Town

Published on Friday 6 February 2009 16:29

ANNIE Griffin, one of the country's leading independent filmmakers, is calling on broadcasters to give more support to the production of drama set and made in Scotland. Winner of the 2005 Best Director award at the Scottish Baftas for her debut feature film Festival, American-born Griffin has said it is "outrageous" that there is not more Scottish drama on screen.

"There is nothing being made in Scotland at the moment and the stuff that they are planning to make is imported from London," says the Edinburgh-based writer and director. "As a non-Scot, I'm surprised that people accept the situation where you never see yourself on TV and continue to pay the licence fee. I'm not from Scotland but I am amazed that there is nothing of Scotland on TV beyond Taggart."

A keen visitor to the country for the past 30 years, Griffin has lived in Glasgow and then Edinburgh since 1997. A performer on the Fringe when she was younger, she was well placed to research and then skewer the more ludicrous aspects of August's annual crop of hopeful stand-ups in her film Festival. While the feature got her noticed internationally, the two earlier series of The Book Group, which were shown on Channel 4, won her UK-wide acclaim.

Taking a shrewd but funny look at the dynamics of a Glasgow reading club, the programmes won Griffin a Best Comedy Scottish Bafta but also saw her nominated for two British Comedy Awards. Just the sort of recognition to strengthen her belief that the UK-wide audience for Scottish productions is not limited to expats.

"There is an appetite around Britain to see things set in Scotland," she says. "We are starved of it. I think it is outrageous that we don't have more Scottish drama on our screens."

It is a particularly sensitive subject for Griffin, as next Saturday BBC4 will broadcast New Town, the pilot for a proposed six-part Edinburgh-based drama which Griffin's company Pirate Productions shot in the city last year.

The broadcast of the pilot should be welcome news for Griffin, but the progress of the New Town series has not been smooth. Originally commissioned for BBC1 with the pilot pencilled in for broadcast last autumn, its initial transmission has been delayed until now and a decision on green-lighting the making of the rest of the series is on hold.

It is frustrating for Griffin, who says that the pilot was warmly received when it was delivered to the BBC, but she suspects that it has been caught up in changes to the corporation's channel controllers and is a potential victim of recent budget cuts. She remains optimistic that BBC Scotland wants to give the series the go-ahead but despairs at what she sees as the more general lack of television made in Scotland about Scotland.

Griffin describes New Town as "a drama of anxiety" and it will certainly provoke a worried shudder of recognition in anyone with a mortgage in what is often seen as the capital's most desirable location. Everyone else can permit themselves a little schadenfreude as a cast of already uptight characters stretch themselves further as they fight for their rung on the coveted Georgian property ladder.

Filming for New Town started before the credit crunch had really begun to hit Edinburgh's housing market, and, between now and then, Griffin has had to make some changes. Lines about there being "plenty of banks dying to give you money" have been understandably cut, but while the exuberance of the real-life housing market has gone distinctly flat, Griffin reckons that the economic crisis has actually highlighted her points about the relationship which people have with their homes.

"I was really interested in the anxiety that people have around housing which I think has become worse since the credit crunch. Housing, especially in this country, seems to call up people's most anxious desires and you can never get it right. Trying to have your perfect living space is traumatic."

In New Town it would seem that it can be fatal. At heart a murder mystery, the series was originally called Purves And Pekkala after the two architects at the crux of the plot. Played by Mark Gatiss of The League Of Gentlemen and Finnish actor Max Bremer, they are a cold, bloodless pair; wannabe starchitects whose emotions are stirred only by the thought of the radical and profitable changes they can inflict on a Playfair church. Portrayed as high priests of the property boom, they are steadfast believers in the almost miraculous, transformative powers of a stainless-steel splashback.

Purves and Pekkala are in cahoots with Edinburgh estate agent Meredith McIlvanney. Played with icy relish by Daniela Nardini, McIlvanney is the sort of horror show who comes out with utterances such as "The New Town lifestyle doesn't come cheap. If it did, anyone could live here, and they can't." She delivers these and similar lines with a face that suggests she has just trodden on a pauper.

Interwoven are the stories of the aspirational Glennie couple who are desperate to buy into New Town status; Rhian, a mysterious girl from Vatersay; and Archie Linklater, head of Scottish Heritage and a man as keen to preserve the architectural integrity of 18th-century Edinburgh as he is to keep those whose faces don't fit out of the city's residents-only parks and gardens. Snobbery, envy and social insecurity appear to be the major motivators for most of the characters, although Griffin says the traits they display in the pilot episode are layers waiting to be peeled back as the plot develops.

An Edinburgh resident since 2004, Griffin offers a quick "Yes. No. No comment" when asked if she lives in the New Town. However, she is perfectly happy to recognise that the less flattering aspects of her portrait of the area won't endear her to many of the city's social powerbrokers. Invites to new dinner party circles, especially those hosted within roughly a mile's radius of Heriot Row, won't be crammed into her letterbox following the show's broadcast, but then she is used to her work ruffling feathers.

"Nobody invites me to dinner parties anyway," she says with a laugh. "I hear that a lot. I heard it with The Book Group as well. People would ask what I thought I was saying about Glaswegian book groups. Before that I did Coming Soon, a short series about avant garde theatre companies, and people said I would never be able to walk into a theatre again. It was the same with Festival."

Griffin points out that when it comes to writing drama, obviously sympathetic characters are seldom the most interesting and that, for her, it is the social power structures governing her characters that are the most fascinating levers to play with.

"I like that cities have their own pecking orders. In many ways, Edinburgh is a closed community with a very strict social hierarchy and that is great to write about. Where you live says something about you, and one of the questions facing some of the characters is whether or not they can dare to say that they are the sort of people who can live in the poshest part of a city."

Originally from Buffalo, New York, Griffin has long been intrigued by what she saw as the curious tenement life of the capital. In the US, people with money buy space for themselves and distance from other people even if that distance is only the length of a lawn.

Griffin was fascinated by the fact that the New Town is an expensive area with expensive properties where affluent people live on top of one another. The shared stairs and proximity of other flats is at odds with the desire for privacy and makes fertile ground for writing mystery dramas. "When I moved to Edinburgh, I had a feeling that there was a lot of secretiveness about it," she says. "When you walk around the city there is a sense of things happening behind the windows which you sometimes glimpse. There is a strangeness and an oddness to Edinburgh."

Griffin is passionate about both her adopted hometown and its appeal to an audience that she is convinced goes far beyond the border into England.

"I make the things that I want to see on TV," she says. "I want to see dark mysteries with an edge and I want to see more of Edinburgh on film."

If she has her way, the UK's television viewers will be seeing a lot more of the city and Griffin will have plenty more opportunities to combine her passions.

• New Town, BBC Four, Saturday, 9pm