There were echoes of Trainspotting yet again in the first episode of the third and final season of Guilt (BBC Two, BBC Scotland), which returned to our screens this week.
Or online on iPlayer, if you want to get ahead of yourself and binge the four-episode conclusion in one.
At the first episode’s beginning, Danny (Anders Hayward) and his squad of sportswear-decked, hash-dealing street lads were as perplexed as the viewers when a woman wearing a giant cat head jumped out of the shadows and attempted to gun him down with an elderly pistol which didn’t fire.
Street chase
Cue an on-foot chase through the streets of Edinburgh at night, which echoed Renton and Spud’s evasion of the Princes Street branch of John Menzies’ (RIP) particularly determined security guards to the sound of Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life early on in Trainspotting.
This chase was also similar, in fact, in that the city’s geography was all over the place.
Young Skye (Amelia Isaac Jones) and her pursuers should probably get entering marathons if they can cover so much ground so swiftly and still keep pounding away.
Anyway, the city looked beautiful amid it all – even the sodium-streaked tower block (in Dumbiedykes, perhaps?) where Skye’s mother’s boyfriend Big Al McKee (Jonathan Watson) encounters the gang and comes crashing down to earth.
Parallel plot
While promising university student Skye has to approach her shady uncle Kenny (Emun Elliott) to get her off the hook for Al’s theft from the gang, brothers Max (desperate, duplicitous, played by Mark Bonnar) and Jake (guileless, hap-free, played by Jamie Sives) are being reported to US immigration and sent back to Edinburgh on the first available flight.
Back home, Max’s nemesis, gangster overlord Maggie (Phyllis Logan… yes, that’s right!) is waiting for them, to extract her brutal revenge on a farm in the Borders.
In Guilt, playing against type is a speciality, and just like Watson and Logan, comedian Greg McHugh’s Teddy is a convincingly dead-eyed enforcer.
Created by Neil Forsyth, Dundee’s champion Tweeter, creator of Bob Servant and emerging major voice in British TV drama following this year’s hit The Gold, Guilt continues to offer an electric hour’s viewing.
The characters are sharply offbeat, the situations are dramatically unexpected but fulfilling, and the dark humour bubbles away nicely throughout.
For old-school terrestrial watchers, we’ve gone no further than outlining the first episode, which involved an unexpected and very precisely-handled death, and Max and Jake literally crawling through crap to save their own skins – a metaphor for the pair’s existence so far.
A really good series
Like Succession, with which it shares a finely-balanced sense of drama and comedy, it’s good that the series is a finite trilogy, that Forsyth tells his story and jots a full stop on the page, rather than draining a spent well, Line of Duty-style.
In the meantime, let’s marvel that Scottish television can produce something so good.
A a rich and complex crime thriller, not unlike The Wire, with the wild, offbeat humour of the Coen Brothers at their best, all set in one of the world’s great cities.
After this and The Gold, even bigger things must surely beckon for Forsyth.
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