 Starring: Joe McFadden, Dougray Scott, Bill Paterson, Peter Capaldi, Valerie Edmond
Director: Gavin Millar
Year Of Release: 1996
Plot: This four-part mini-series documents the complex family life of Prentice McHoan and his family. Several years before, Prentice’s uncle Rory went missing, and now the young man feels it’s his duty to find out what happened, after his grandmother asked him to discover Rory’s fate shortly before she died. As Prentice looks into his family’s history (which we see through a series of flashbacks), he uncovers dark secrets, as well as trying to deal with the complications of the present. |
I suppose it had to happen one day, but I’m really not sure what to write about The Crow Road. It’s a very good mini-series that’s both family drama and murder mystery, but unfortunately it’s failing to inspire me to write anything brilliant about it.
However, I would like to point out that Ian Banks’ book, which the series is based on (and in my opinion is much better than the series), may have the best first line of any novel ever written. Forget ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’, as The Crow Road’s ‘It was the day my grandmother exploded’ beats that hands down. How can you not love a book that opens with a line like that, no matter what comes next? Sadly the mini-series opens slightly differently, although it does have that line in the first couple of minutes.
(Incidentally in case you’re wondering, the grandmother explodes because they didn’t remove her pacemaker before she was cremated – which does make you wonder what exactly it is heart patients have implanted in their chests if they can explode).
The mini-series also kind of confirms what I was saying yesterday about chance playing a big part in the entertainment biz, as you can see the vagaries of fate in what happened to the cast of The Crow Road after the series aired. It seemed the 1996 series was going to be the big breakthrough for young Joseph McFadden, who plays Prentice McHoan. He was a relative unknown before The Crow Road, but a major part in a BBC mini-series looked like it was going to break him into the mainstream. However for some reason it did very little for the actor. He appeared in the John Thaw series The Glass in 2001, but other than that he only got roles in a couple of forgettable television movies, as well as few TV guest spots.
Then in 2007 he certainly became more famous, but only because he was appearing in the show where careers go to die – ITV’s Heartbeat. And now he’s got a recurring role in the only British series that’s more certain to ensure you’ll never be cast in anything else, Casualty. However with both of those shows under his belt, it probably means that to pensioners he must seem like one of the most famous in the world.
However, Dougray Scott, who plays Joseph McFadden’s brother in The Crow Road, did the opposite. His career went through the roof after the mini-series. Over the next couple of years he secured roles in the films Twin Town and Regeneration, which led to Hollywood and parts in Deep Impact, Ever After, and Mission: Impossible II. By 2001, they were even trying him out as a leading man, playing the main character opposite Kate Winslet in Enigma.
Scott couldn’t sustain his upward trajectory though and every movie he appeared in for the next few years flopped, such as The Truth About Love and Dark Water. Then he decided to try out American TV, appearing in a television version of The Ten Commandments (which I’d imagine is the first time Moses has been Scottish), briefly got his own series called Heist, and then took a recurring role in Desperate Housewives, as well as nabbing the lead role in a TV movie version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
He really does seem to be in the middle of a slide from the heights of Hollywood back to his roots, as in the last couple of years he’s been back on British TV in Father & Son, and most recently with the BBC’s dreadful two-part remake of The Day Of The Triffids.
So why does Joseph McFadden get sent to the graveyard of Heartbeat, while Dougray Scott ends up in Hollywood? Looking at them it’s not like one is more talented or better looking than the other, but from their early roles in The Crow Road, their careers have gone in very different directions. As I said yesterday, so much of people’s career in film and TV seems to be down to luck. I’m sure there’s more to it than that, but from the outside it really does seem rather random.
TIM ISAAC
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