Scottish moving image culture has produced three masterpieces of ludic modernism: John McGrath (1935–2002) and John Mackenzie (1928– 2011)'s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1974), Ian Pattison and Colin Gilbert's BBC Television series Rab C. Nesbitt (1988–2014) and Murray Grigor's Scotch Myths (1982), funded by Channel 4. Having celebrated the two former, I now wish to remedy the scandalous lack of critical attention accorded to the latter. That lack is itself symptomatic of the effective suppression of Scotch Myths and of modernism (ludic or otherwise) within Scottish film culture. Indeed, to address Scotch Myths is to wade knee-deep into the debates which traversed Scottish film culture in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet until now a film constituting one of the key reference points in these debates has had no adequate description, far less analysis, of its subject matter and style. But first, what is meant by ‘ludic modernism’? The phrase recalls, and perhaps lies silently within, the increasingly prevalent concept of ludic postmodernism. The assertion underlying the latter is that once there was this monolithic phenomenon, modernism, which was austere, all-embracing, elitist, lacking the common touch and, above all, humourless. Ludic postmodernism, the argument runs, has swept all this away. Unable to say anything useful about the real world – if indeed, as postmodernism has it, the latter even exists at all – postmodern discourse has recourse only to the complex glissandi of its own operations. The only appropriate stance is one of ludic irony. We may be going to hell in a handcart, but let's have fun on the way! (Ludic) postmodernism, unaware of the structuralist binarism of its own position, sets itself in opposition to its self-projected grim-faced predecessor, modernism, and in the process travesties the latter. Justus Nieland, in his editorial introduction (appropriately entitled ‘Modernism's Laughter’) to a 2006 issue of Modernist Cultures, writes: