Wedding Belles,a new Channel 4 drama, begins as it can’t possibly mean
to go on (but does!). A red van bursts in reverse through the locked gates
of a cemetery. Out of it step four young women in flowing bridal taffeta and
silk. Wielding shovels and picks, they head for a grave and start
purposefully to dig. Cut to a body-shaped bag being lobbed into the back of
the van. They head out into the night to round up three more men — all very
much alive — and force them into the back at gunpoint. Cut to a canal, where
the three are shot in turn after a brief speech for each bride and pushed
into the water, followed by the body bag.
If this set-up wasn’t enough to tell you this is the work of the
controversialist Irvine Welsh, in his first major TV drama, then the
jaggedly accented dialogue and the location give it away. Welcome back to
Leith, the Edinburgh fringe where Ewan McGregor chose life in Trainspotting,
and where the novel’s sequel, Porno, would be filmed if only
the original cast could approve a script and the agents sort out the money.
And yet this is not Welsh’s work alone. When he’s not writing fiction,
Scotland’s most hard-boiled novelist has chosen for the past few years to
collaborate with a writer called Dean Cavanagh. They make for an odd couple.
Welsh is trim and bald. Cavanagh is a burly man-mountain from Bradford. But
they agree on a lot, including the state of British television. “I’m pissed
off with it,” says Cavanagh, who gorges himself on HBO box sets of The
Wire, The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. Welsh used to be a TV
repairman. Is this a way of repairing television by other means? “I hope it
is,” he says. “There is so much s*** on TV.”
Surprisingly, Welsh seems to think it’s Cavanagh who toughens up his writing,
rather than vice versa. “Dean sent me his stuff and I really liked it,” says
Welsh. “When Miramax bought my book Filth, I didn’t really
want to adapt it myself. So the first person I thought of was him. Dean’s
stuff had a lot of heart and soul, it was very uncompromising. Dean never
craps out. He always takes it to where the characters should be going. So
that appealed.”
“I’d read Trainspotting,” says Cavanagh, “but Filth
just blew my mind. And then to get offered it was a dream come true.”
However, Cavanagh’s script disappeared into development hell, from which it
has yet to emerge. Their next idea came from Antonia Bird, the director who
set up the company 4 Ways Films with Robert Carlyle and former Moviedrome
presenter Mark Cousins: a film about two British backpackers who escaped on
bail from Thailand after being charged with drug offences. Hotel
California was duly announced in 2002, but has yet to see the light of
day. “There’s still a lot of open wounds on that one,” says Cavanagh.
They are hopeful that two other films will finally be shot this summer: an
adaptation of Alan Warner’s trippy Highlands road novel The Man
Who Walks, starring Carlyle and Colin Firth, and The Meat Trade,
described by Welsh as “a gothic Scottish horror thing”. But film is an
unforgiving medium. “We’re learning, rather than to have loads of half-arsed
wish-list stuff, to really try and push stuff and get behind it,” says
Welsh. “We’ve been a bit more picky with producers we work with. We can get
50 grand for a script but if it doesn’t get made, it’s still a waste of time
for us.”
Which is where television comes in. Their only joint script to see the light
of day before Wedding Belles was a half-hour black comedy called Dose,
which earned a Bafta nomination. It was Cousins who noted, half in jest,
that anything with the word “wedding” in the title is a copper-bot-tomed
hit. Trust Welsh to come up with something more like Four Funerals and a
Wedding.
Unlike much of Welsh’s fictional output, Wedding Belles is
about lassies, a quartet of firm friends in their twenties leading lives in
various states of disrepair. Rhona (played by Shauna MacDonald) is a newly
widowed drug addict. Kelly (Shirley Henderson) is perpetually on probation.
At least Shaz (Kathleen McDermott), who deals in contraband Viagra as a
nurse in an old people’s home, has a thriving relationship, albeit with a
priest. Only Amanda (played by Michelle Gomez) has reasons to be cheerful:
her hair salon is thriving, and she’s marrying a handsome Welsh airline
pilot in five days’ time.
There is darkness galore alongside all the girl-gang comedy — child abuse,
suicide, addiction, priest-spanking and a plot twist involving dog rape — as
in dog rapes man. Gratuitous? “That’s a God’s honest true story,” protests
Cavanagh, “straight out of the paper. It happened to a guy in Huddersfield.”
If Wedding Bellesis a success, the pair hope to turn it into a
series. In the meantime, while waiting for various green lights, their
partnership has also yielded a play. Babylon Heights,a fictional
comedy about the rumoured suicide of one of the dwarf actors playing the
Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz, was premiered in San Francisco last
year, was also produced in Dublin and they are attempting to mount it in
Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. Not London? “It’s very harsh over here,”
says Welsh. “Because it’s critic-led more than any other art form, rather
than audience or market-led, I think it’s important that it has legs before
it comes over here.”
Welsh should know, having taken a few brickbats in his time. He was the
principal target of a complaint famously made in the Scottish press that
fiction set in needle-strewn tenement stairwells was not a fair
representation of Scotland. As a self-referential joke, the words are put
into the mouth of a character in Wedding Belles. In fact it was
Cavanagh who got this past the script editor. “He’d have never done it,” he
says of his writing partner. Welsh agrees. “I thought, ‘For of f***’s sake,
we can’t have this in. We’ll get absolutely slaughtered.’ ”
Wedding Belles, Thur, C4, 10pm
