Just Another Saturday

29/06/2026

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“With a fresh glass of white wine in hand, McDougall admits he is in the doghouse with his long-time partner, Morag Fullarton, the film, TV and theatre director. “Mo isn’t speaking to me,” he says. “She hasn’t spoken to me for three days. I’ve only got the cat to speak to.” So says Peter MacDougall, the screenwriter of Just Another Saturday, speaking to Kenny Farquharson, as we see that life imitates art and Scottish culture in the flesh and in literary, cinematic and televisual form is often about the bevvy. In the film (produced in 1975 as a Play for Today), the wife isn’t really talking to her husband either, but this is only because she is haranguing him for his boozy ways and general uselessness. He spent fourteen years at sea and never once sent money or letters home.
This wonderful scene takes place near the end of the film, and while the wife may have a point, it is contained by a bigger one that might make the wife’s remarks invalid, even if the father may have too often proved himself a waste of space.  All those years in the navy have at least given Dan a sense of perspective missing from many in Glasgow, a city that suggests the most important thing is knowing who you are, and who you are is religious: you are a Protestant or a Catholic. MacDougall makes this question all the more pronounced and dramatically valid by containing events within the one day, the annual Orange parade, where various bands from various lodges gather to celebrate the Battle of the Boyne. This was a battle fought on the east coast of Ireland on July 12th, 1690, and was seen as a decisive victory for the Protestants over the Catholics, with the deposed and Catholic King James II unable to defeat William III’s troops.
Central character John (Jon Morrison) is a mace swinger, and when he wakes on the day of the march, he looks out the window and says, “It’s going to be a good day. God is definitely a Protestant.” McDougall and the director John (The Long Good Friday) Mackenzie manage to balance respect for the sociology of people’s lives while questioning the nature of religious allegiances. John’s mum may be right to attack her husband for his useless ways, but the husband is right to tell his son there is more to life in Glasgow than sectarian division, a divide made manifest in the city’s two big teams, Celtic and Rangers, the former deemed Catholic; the latter Protestant. After all, if the film proposes that clear binaries are a problem, then why create them on the level of characterisation? McDougall suggests people are sometimes right and sometimes wrong, depending on the claim, depending on the situation, and a sense of perspective is useful. This is exemplified in a joke someone tells in the pub. A protestant watching The Robe in the cinema started crying when he saw the Christians were being fed to the lions. The usherette, seeing his Rangers scarf, says he needn’t worry – they’re Catholics, the lions are eating. She goes away and comes back shortly afterwards. Big Tam is now bawling his head off, and she asks what is wrong as she confirms they are Catholics the lions are feasting on. Tam says, “I know, but there is one lion over there that is doing nothing.” It is a good gag on the blindness of allegiances and that the enemy can never suffer too much, but its purpose in the film isn’t that we only find it funny, and there is even a sense that the Protestant character telling it can see it is a decent joke, chiefly because it is half at the expense of Big Tam.
It allows for a sense of perspective that one feels is often missing from a city with a sense of humour that could unite, and a religious rift that constantly divides. In the 1980s, Glasgow offered an ad campaign to convince people of the glories of the city, called Glasgow’s Miles Better, which then became Glasgow Smiles Better. But such a claim carries a horrible ambivalence, with a Glasgow Smile, a scar that runs from the mouth to the ear on both sides. (Familiarised, of course, by the Joker, but also the Scottish actor Tommy Flannigan.) It was a ‘smile’ that came out of the ‘20s and 30s’, and out of poverty, gang culture and sectarian violence. “Gangs were split based on both territorial claims and religious beliefs, creating a complex tapestry of hatred. The city was divided into areas that were either Protestant or Catholic. Residents knew where they could and couldn’t safely go. Even children internalized sectarianism and identified each other based on their religion.” (History Defined) A city famous for its sense of humour is also notorious for its capacity for violence, perversely brought together in a term like the Glasgow Smile, but also the Glasgow Kiss, a colloquial term for a headbutt. Humour indeed.
Whether humour or violence will win out depends on the angles adopted, and McDougall’s play suggests that neither a Catholic nor a Protestant can quite remove the mote in their eye and present themselves as the goodies. In a key scene that turns the film from happy to menacing, the marchers walk through a Catholic area. This is a provocation, if not quite an act of violence, but the Catholics roll out their flags and start throwing bottles and stones. A fellow marcher reckons this is the Catholics’ fault: the Orange marchers can go where they like; it is a Protestant country, and if the Catholics don’t like it, they can go back to Rome. John tells him not to be so daft; they’re all Scottish. The scene registers the stupidity of prejudice, or the need for belonging, according to taste. But while in the Scottish context this division was generally contained in the rivalry between Celtic and Rangers, an overspill of anger that would often be aggressive but rarely destabilising, when the play was proposed, few wanted anything to do with it. It was initially rejected by the BBC as too risky, and when it was eventually made in the mid-1970s, Glasgow police tried to stop it from broadcasting on TV, fearing that there would be blood on the streets. This was a time when, across the Irish sea, Northern Ireland had become a war zone, with the peak number of deaths between 1970 and 1976. The idea of a play about the sectarian divide in Scotland couldn’t have been more apposite or ill-timed, again, according to taste, and depending on whether one’s priority resided in showing the reality of people’s lives, or masking elements of that reality all the better to keep the peace. But, in the 70s, there was an emphasis on reality in television over reality TV, which might seem like a pedantic distinction on the page, but registers as enormously different on the screen. Watching Just Another Saturday, one may see more reality in fiction than in ostensible reality shows like Love Island and Made in Chelsea. Much of the film’s first half feels like a fly-on-the-wall, a term used to describe TV series like The Family made around the same time as Just Another Saturday, and both would have been influenced by 1960s documentary movements, cinema verité and Direct Cinema, which emphasised observing human behaviour over narrational voice-over.
Mackenzie and McDougall may have wished to explore sectarian violence, but the location shooting gives to the work ambivalences that needn’t be ignored for the purposes of a throughline. As Mackenzie noted, “when you look at the beautiful banners, hear the liberated sound of the bands, you feel that the parade is a festival, a sort of Mardi Gras.” (Financial Times) It balances the need to address the sectarian problem without  feeling obliged to acknowledge a position on it, except from one’s individual perspective. Johnny Murray, who quotes Mackenzie, says “Just Another Saturday tries to resolve such tensions by privileging the idea of an existential, not ideological, route to adult self-actualisation for John.” (‘Scotch Missed: Play for Today and Scotland’)
While Murray notes that Dan gets the opportunity to express a discourse that isn’t too far from Marx’s ideas of religion being the opium of the people, while also suggesting the Scottish division is a very useful divide and rule, we might see in Dan an escape from false consciousness, through sliding into bad faith. He can see that religion creates more problems than it solves. But maybe he isn’t the best person to express such a notion, since his resistance to the masses’ ‘opium’ leaves him escaping into its literal alternative as he gets boozed up. He admits that a lot of what he says has been under the influence of alcohol, “That’s the drink talking. We all mouth when we’ve had a drink.” John sees him as pathetic, ‘‘hiding behind your wee philosophy’’. But this depends on whether the ideological or the existential is deemed more important. When Dan says you can’t escape yourself by crossing borders, this might be an example of bad faith, as he claims you can’t change certain characteristics of your personality, and sees how beholden one is to one’s background. But from another perspective, it reveals how difficult it is, if even a man who has travelled around the world finds himself back in Glasgow, defeated and compromised. It is perhaps not so much that the play sides with the existential over the ideological; more that the difficulties involved in the former cannot ignore the latter, though the latter oughtn’t to be used as an excuse to deny the former.
McDougall’s work might be seen as not simply the flipside of Scotland's other major playwright of the era – John McGrath – but as a useful companion,  with McDougall emphasising a stubborn working-class ethos a little at odds with McGrath’s more theoretical and optimistic bent, though not contrary to it. Michael Billington stated, on McGrath’s death, “McGrath was always a passionate socialist: he believed strongly that the function of art was to reach as many people as possible, to heighten individual awareness and to help change society for the better.”(Guardian) McGrath (The Cheviot the Stage and the Black, Black Oil, Blood Red Roses) leaned towards the ideological, believing in and a product of education, graduating from Oxford. McDougall left school at fourteen, initially working in the shipyards, and then became a house painter in London. Like another great Scottish writer, Alan Sharp, who also left school at fourteen to work in the yards, and would go on to write for Hollywood, McDougall seemed finally more interested in the struggle of self over the struggles of society, and this might be why Murray sees an existential conclusion to the play more than an ideological one, even if we can see how closely the two are intertwined. In the interview with Farquharson, the interviewee says ‘‘When I spoke to him the day before, on the phone, to confirm our appointment, he confessed then that he was drunk. The call was made at 10.30am.” (Medium) This wasn’t a young man still on an all-night bender, but a 79-year-old still acknowledging the personal demons. The play’s title can be taken as ironic or accurate, depending on perspective. From John’s, this is a special day, if not once in a lifetime, at the very most once in a year. Yet as the father says, he gets leathered every Saturday, which makes it a very ordinary day indeed. Will it become so for John as well, or will he manage to prove an exception to the rule and find existential purpose in an environment that ideologically defines him?

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Just Another Saturday

“With a fresh glass of white wine in hand, McDougall admits he is in the doghouse with his long-time partner, Morag Fullarton, the film, TV and theatre director. “Mo isn’t speaking to me,” he says. “She hasn’t spoken to me for three days. I’ve only got the cat to speak to.” So says Peter MacDougall, the screenwriter of Just Another Saturday, speaking to Kenny Farquharson, as we see that life imitates art and Scottish culture in the flesh and in literary, cinematic and televisual form is often about the bevvy. In the film (produced in 1975 as a Play for Today), the wife isn’t really talking to her husband either, but this is only because she is haranguing him for his boozy ways and general uselessness. He spent fourteen years at sea and never once sent money or letters home.
This wonderful scene takes place near the end of the film, and while the wife may have a point, it is contained by a bigger one that might make the wife’s remarks invalid, even if the father may have too often proved himself a waste of space.  All those years in the navy have at least given Dan a sense of perspective missing from many in Glasgow, a city that suggests the most important thing is knowing who you are, and who you are is religious: you are a Protestant or a Catholic. MacDougall makes this question all the more pronounced and dramatically valid by containing events within the one day, the annual Orange parade, where various bands from various lodges gather to celebrate the Battle of the Boyne. This was a battle fought on the east coast of Ireland on July 12th, 1690, and was seen as a decisive victory for the Protestants over the Catholics, with the deposed and Catholic King James II unable to defeat William III’s troops.
Central character John (Jon Morrison) is a mace swinger, and when he wakes on the day of the march, he looks out the window and says, “It’s going to be a good day. God is definitely a Protestant.” McDougall and the director John (The Long Good Friday) Mackenzie manage to balance respect for the sociology of people’s lives while questioning the nature of religious allegiances. John’s mum may be right to attack her husband for his useless ways, but the husband is right to tell his son there is more to life in Glasgow than sectarian division, a divide made manifest in the city’s two big teams, Celtic and Rangers, the former deemed Catholic; the latter Protestant. After all, if the film proposes that clear binaries are a problem, then why create them on the level of characterisation? McDougall suggests people are sometimes right and sometimes wrong, depending on the claim, depending on the situation, and a sense of perspective is useful. This is exemplified in a joke someone tells in the pub. A protestant watching The Robe in the cinema started crying when he saw the Christians were being fed to the lions. The usherette, seeing his Rangers scarf, says he needn’t worry – they’re Catholics, the lions are eating. She goes away and comes back shortly afterwards. Big Tam is now bawling his head off, and she asks what is wrong as she confirms they are Catholics the lions are feasting on. Tam says, “I know, but there is one lion over there that is doing nothing.” It is a good gag on the blindness of allegiances and that the enemy can never suffer too much, but its purpose in the film isn’t that we only find it funny, and there is even a sense that the Protestant character telling it can see it is a decent joke, chiefly because it is half at the expense of Big Tam.
It allows for a sense of perspective that one feels is often missing from a city with a sense of humour that could unite, and a religious rift that constantly divides. In the 1980s, Glasgow offered an ad campaign to convince people of the glories of the city, called Glasgow’s Miles Better, which then became Glasgow Smiles Better. But such a claim carries a horrible ambivalence, with a Glasgow Smile, a scar that runs from the mouth to the ear on both sides. (Familiarised, of course, by the Joker, but also the Scottish actor Tommy Flannigan.) It was a ‘smile’ that came out of the ‘20s and 30s’, and out of poverty, gang culture and sectarian violence. “Gangs were split based on both territorial claims and religious beliefs, creating a complex tapestry of hatred. The city was divided into areas that were either Protestant or Catholic. Residents knew where they could and couldn’t safely go. Even children internalized sectarianism and identified each other based on their religion.” (History Defined) A city famous for its sense of humour is also notorious for its capacity for violence, perversely brought together in a term like the Glasgow Smile, but also the Glasgow Kiss, a colloquial term for a headbutt. Humour indeed.
Whether humour or violence will win out depends on the angles adopted, and McDougall’s play suggests that neither a Catholic nor a Protestant can quite remove the mote in their eye and present themselves as the goodies. In a key scene that turns the film from happy to menacing, the marchers walk through a Catholic area. This is a provocation, if not quite an act of violence, but the Catholics roll out their flags and start throwing bottles and stones. A fellow marcher reckons this is the Catholics’ fault: the Orange marchers can go where they like; it is a Protestant country, and if the Catholics don’t like it, they can go back to Rome. John tells him not to be so daft; they’re all Scottish. The scene registers the stupidity of prejudice, or the need for belonging, according to taste. But while in the Scottish context this division was generally contained in the rivalry between Celtic and Rangers, an overspill of anger that would often be aggressive but rarely destabilising, when the play was proposed, few wanted anything to do with it. It was initially rejected by the BBC as too risky, and when it was eventually made in the mid-1970s, Glasgow police tried to stop it from broadcasting on TV, fearing that there would be blood on the streets. This was a time when, across the Irish sea, Northern Ireland had become a war zone, with the peak number of deaths between 1970 and 1976. The idea of a play about the sectarian divide in Scotland couldn’t have been more apposite or ill-timed, again, according to taste, and depending on whether one’s priority resided in showing the reality of people’s lives, or masking elements of that reality all the better to keep the peace. But, in the 70s, there was an emphasis on reality in television over reality TV, which might seem like a pedantic distinction on the page, but registers as enormously different on the screen. Watching Just Another Saturday, one may see more reality in fiction than in ostensible reality shows like Love Island and Made in Chelsea. Much of the film’s first half feels like a fly-on-the-wall, a term used to describe TV series like The Family made around the same time as Just Another Saturday, and both would have been influenced by 1960s documentary movements, cinema verité and Direct Cinema, which emphasised observing human behaviour over narrational voice-over.
Mackenzie and McDougall may have wished to explore sectarian violence, but the location shooting gives to the work ambivalences that needn’t be ignored for the purposes of a throughline. As Mackenzie noted, “when you look at the beautiful banners, hear the liberated sound of the bands, you feel that the parade is a festival, a sort of Mardi Gras.” (Financial Times) It balances the need to address the sectarian problem without  feeling obliged to acknowledge a position on it, except from one’s individual perspective. Johnny Murray, who quotes Mackenzie, says “Just Another Saturday tries to resolve such tensions by privileging the idea of an existential, not ideological, route to adult self-actualisation for John.” (‘Scotch Missed: Play for Today and Scotland’)
While Murray notes that Dan gets the opportunity to express a discourse that isn’t too far from Marx’s ideas of religion being the opium of the people, while also suggesting the Scottish division is a very useful divide and rule, we might see in Dan an escape from false consciousness, through sliding into bad faith. He can see that religion creates more problems than it solves. But maybe he isn’t the best person to express such a notion, since his resistance to the masses’ ‘opium’ leaves him escaping into its literal alternative as he gets boozed up. He admits that a lot of what he says has been under the influence of alcohol, “That’s the drink talking. We all mouth when we’ve had a drink.” John sees him as pathetic, ‘‘hiding behind your wee philosophy’’. But this depends on whether the ideological or the existential is deemed more important. When Dan says you can’t escape yourself by crossing borders, this might be an example of bad faith, as he claims you can’t change certain characteristics of your personality, and sees how beholden one is to one’s background. But from another perspective, it reveals how difficult it is, if even a man who has travelled around the world finds himself back in Glasgow, defeated and compromised. It is perhaps not so much that the play sides with the existential over the ideological; more that the difficulties involved in the former cannot ignore the latter, though the latter oughtn’t to be used as an excuse to deny the former.
McDougall’s work might be seen as not simply the flipside of Scotland's other major playwright of the era – John McGrath – but as a useful companion,  with McDougall emphasising a stubborn working-class ethos a little at odds with McGrath’s more theoretical and optimistic bent, though not contrary to it. Michael Billington stated, on McGrath’s death, “McGrath was always a passionate socialist: he believed strongly that the function of art was to reach as many people as possible, to heighten individual awareness and to help change society for the better.”(Guardian) McGrath (The Cheviot the Stage and the Black, Black Oil, Blood Red Roses) leaned towards the ideological, believing in and a product of education, graduating from Oxford. McDougall left school at fourteen, initially working in the shipyards, and then became a house painter in London. Like another great Scottish writer, Alan Sharp, who also left school at fourteen to work in the yards, and would go on to write for Hollywood, McDougall seemed finally more interested in the struggle of self over the struggles of society, and this might be why Murray sees an existential conclusion to the play more than an ideological one, even if we can see how closely the two are intertwined. In the interview with Farquharson, the interviewee says ‘‘When I spoke to him the day before, on the phone, to confirm our appointment, he confessed then that he was drunk. The call was made at 10.30am.” (Medium) This wasn’t a young man still on an all-night bender, but a 79-year-old still acknowledging the personal demons. The play’s title can be taken as ironic or accurate, depending on perspective. From John’s, this is a special day, if not once in a lifetime, at the very most once in a year. Yet as the father says, he gets leathered every Saturday, which makes it a very ordinary day indeed. Will it become so for John as well, or will he manage to prove an exception to the rule and find existential purpose in an environment that ideologically defines him?

© Tony McKibbin