Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgements of Original Publishers
- Personal Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Dedication
- Editor’s Introduction
- 1 Ashes and Diamonds
- 2 The Roots of the Western
- 3 Pickup on South Street
- 4 Extract from Underworld U.S.A.
- 5 Politicising Scottish Film Culture
- 6 Crossfire and the Anglo-American Critical Tradition
- 7 Breaking the Signs: Scotch Myths as Cultural Struggle
- 8 Scotland and Cinema: The Iniquity of the Fathers
- 9 The Maggie
- 10 National Identities
- 11 TV Commercials: Moving Statues and Old Movies
- 12 Tele-history: The Dragon Has Two Tongues
- 13 Scotland’s Story
- 14 The Dialectic of National Identity: The Glasgow Empire Exhibition of 1938
- 15 The New Scottish Cinema?
- 16 The Rises and Falls of the Edinburgh International Film Festival
- 17 A Dram for All Seasons: The Diverse Identities of Scotch
- 18 Scottish Culture: A Reply to David McCrone
- 19 In Praise of a Poor Cinema
- 20 Wake for a Glasgow Culture Hero
- 21 The Cultural Necessity of a Poor Celtic Cinema
- 22 Culloden: A Pre-emptive Strike
- 23 Casablanca: Where Have All the Fascists Gone?
- 24 The Scottish Discursive Unconscious
- 25 Chinese Boxes and Russian Dolls: Tracking the Elusive Cinematic City
- 26 Artists and Philistines: The Irish and Scottish Film Milieux
- 27 Braveheart and the Scottish Aesthetic Dementia
- 28 The Exquisite Corpse of Rab(elais) C(opernicus) Nesbitt
- 29 Mise-en-scène Degree Zero: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï
- 30 The Critics Who Knew Too Little: Hitchcock and the Absent Class Paradigm
- 31 Caledonianising Macbeth, or, How Scottish is ‘The Scottish Play’?
- 32 Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Cultural Struggle in the British Film Institute
- 33 Transatlantic Scots, Their Interlocutors and the Scottish Discursive Unconscious
- 34 Scotch Myths, Scottish Film Culture and the Suppression of Ludic Modernism
- 35 Bring Furrit the Tartan-Necks! Nationalist Intellectuals and Scottish Popular Culture
- 36 Vanished or Banished? Murray Grigor as Absent Scots Auteur
- Author’s Afterword
- Select Bibliography
- Indexes
28 - The Exquisite Corpse of Rab(elais) C(opernicus) Nesbitt
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2025
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgements of Original Publishers
- Personal Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Dedication
- Editor’s Introduction
- 1 Ashes and Diamonds
- 2 The Roots of the Western
- 3 Pickup on South Street
- 4 Extract from Underworld U.S.A.
- 5 Politicising Scottish Film Culture
- 6 Crossfire and the Anglo-American Critical Tradition
- 7 Breaking the Signs: Scotch Myths as Cultural Struggle
- 8 Scotland and Cinema: The Iniquity of the Fathers
- 9 The Maggie
- 10 National Identities
- 11 TV Commercials: Moving Statues and Old Movies
- 12 Tele-history: The Dragon Has Two Tongues
- 13 Scotland’s Story
- 14 The Dialectic of National Identity: The Glasgow Empire Exhibition of 1938
- 15 The New Scottish Cinema?
- 16 The Rises and Falls of the Edinburgh International Film Festival
- 17 A Dram for All Seasons: The Diverse Identities of Scotch
- 18 Scottish Culture: A Reply to David McCrone
- 19 In Praise of a Poor Cinema
- 20 Wake for a Glasgow Culture Hero
- 21 The Cultural Necessity of a Poor Celtic Cinema
- 22 Culloden: A Pre-emptive Strike
- 23 Casablanca: Where Have All the Fascists Gone?
- 24 The Scottish Discursive Unconscious
- 25 Chinese Boxes and Russian Dolls: Tracking the Elusive Cinematic City
- 26 Artists and Philistines: The Irish and Scottish Film Milieux
- 27 Braveheart and the Scottish Aesthetic Dementia
- 28 The Exquisite Corpse of Rab(elais) C(opernicus) Nesbitt
- 29 Mise-en-scène Degree Zero: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï
- 30 The Critics Who Knew Too Little: Hitchcock and the Absent Class Paradigm
- 31 Caledonianising Macbeth, or, How Scottish is ‘The Scottish Play’?
- 32 Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Cultural Struggle in the British Film Institute
- 33 Transatlantic Scots, Their Interlocutors and the Scottish Discursive Unconscious
- 34 Scotch Myths, Scottish Film Culture and the Suppression of Ludic Modernism
- 35 Bring Furrit the Tartan-Necks! Nationalist Intellectuals and Scottish Popular Culture
- 36 Vanished or Banished? Murray Grigor as Absent Scots Auteur
- Author’s Afterword
- Select Bibliography
- Indexes
Summary
In the Beginning was the Word
The following discussion of BBC Scotland's networked television sitcom Rab C. Nesbitt (1988–2014) demonstrates the acuity of the literary theorist and historian Cairns Craig's ambitious synthesising perception that:
What happened in Scotland in the 1960s and the 1970s and what laid the foundation for the enormous creative achievements of the 1980s was the liberation of the voice. The Scottish voice declared its independence […] The liberation of the voice was at first an acceptance of and an assertion of the vernacular […] But the real liberation of the voice came not from the assertion of the rights of the vernacular itself, but from the assertion of the right to move without boundaries between the vernacular and standard English, between the demotic and the literary.
For exactly the far-reaching reasons Craig outlines, Rab C. Nesbitt, despite eliciting praise from most English television reviewers and achieving some sort of cult status, also provoked a strong sense of Otherness from the same sources. Their collective response emphasises the series's linguistic difficulty for non-Scots. Thus:
Apart from the impenetrability of the Govan Glasgow accents, given the operatic level of violence and caricature on which Rab C. Nesbitt is pitched, subtitles would be helpful to English speakers.
Many viewers still complain that they can't understand a word of the broad dialect and need subtitles.
Virtually incomprehensible to anyone born south of Berwick-upon-Tweed.
There are problems with the show for Southerners […] Heaven knows what the Ceefax subtitler manages to make of lines which often seem to have the phonetic structure ‘Ochty baster nachty blooin’.
[S]urely the filthiest and most disgusting character on television, I am convinced that [Rab] is broadcast in England only because the censors cannot understand his Gorbals accent.
One reviewer even provided a glossary of ‘Rabspeak’: ‘Stoating: most agreeable; To rip the pish oot o’: to take a rise out of; A ran dan night: a hugely enjoyable evening’.
In general, metropolitan press observations about the linguistic difficulty of Rab C. Nesbitt are good-humoured enough. But, as in jokes about ‘wogs’, ‘niggers’ and ‘paddies’, the underlying discourse of power may be revealed in all its imperial arrogance and viciousness in other linguistic situations relating to Scotland.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Cinema, Culture, ScotlandSelected Essays, pp. 349 - 370Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2024