'It was radical' - How The Holy City brought the Easter story to Glasgow

It's the sort of TV drama that could only have been made at the height of Margaret Thatcher's time as prime minister.

The Holy City re-imagines the Easter story in a Glasgow of post-industrial decline, where the disciples drink in run-down pubs and the messiah is a shabby, long-haired former shipyard worker in a grubby overcoat.

Broadcast across the UK on Good Friday 1986, it mixes street violence, religion and politics in an attack on what was happening in Scotland at a key moment in the nation's history.

And 40 years later its star, David Hayman, believes we still have something to learn from it.

"We're a much more secular people than we were back in '85," he says.

"I think the message is pretty powerful. The political and moral message of it, let alone the Christian message, is still very powerful."

The Holy City was created by Bill Bryden, one of the most significant figures in post-war Scottish theatre and television.

Born in Greenock in 1942, he'd trained with STV before directing plays in Scotland, London and New York.

In 1984, he took over as head of drama at BBC Scotland. His nine-year tenure transformed the department, its output, and Scottish broadcasting.

His biggest and most acclaimed production came in 1987, with the multi-Bafta-winning Tutti Frutti, a series still celebrated for its ambition and quality.

"When he took over as the head of drama at BBC Scotland, he said: 'I'm going to create a studio here in Scotland where I'm going to bring the best talents to bear'," says Hayman.

"And he did. He was a man with a very exciting vision."

A year into the role, Bryden's vision was The Holy City.

He wrote and directed the film, an ambitious and potentially controversial take on the Easter story, describing the final days, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

It was the sort of idea which makes BBC executives very, very nervous.

Norman McCandlish was handed the job of producing. He admits struggling at first to understand what it was meant to be.

"When he told me the bare bones, I said I couldn't get my head around it at all," he says now.

And 40 years later, it's still an unusual and unusually powerful programme - a snapshot of its time, but one whose ideas are relevant today.

Hayman - best known at the time for his portrayal of Glasgow gangster turned artist Jimmy Boyle in the drama A Sense of Freedom - plays "The Man".

He preaches the need for social and economic change to crowds at the city's football grounds, attracting the attention of sinister police officers and state agents.

The plot largely follows the gospels, but Hayman's Christ figure is explicitly political, speaking out against the "theft and assault of our nation" with its "empty factories, the unmined coal, the deserted shipyards".

Filming took place half way through the second Thatcher government. The previous five years had seen 613 manufacturing sites close in Scotland, with a loss of 164,000 jobs.

The effects of this and decades of decline in Glasgow are on the screen and power the drama.

"Shipbuilding was on its last legs. The big railway works, all the big industries had gone, and that landscape was easy to find," McCandlish says.

The Holy City arrived amid a series of popular political dramas broadcast by the BBC between late 1985 and the end of 1986.

Edge of Darkness, Dead Head and The Monocled Mutineer were provocative series, the first two built on conspiracies suggesting the British state and establishment were not to be trusted.

The programmes brought the corporation acclaim and awards as well as criticism from conservative commentators and politicians.

Even in that company, The Holy City still surprises with its explicit political messages.

It draws parallels between Scotland and Northern Ireland. One character delivers a straight-to camera monologue about the evils of colonialism.

The English agents who plot The Man's downfall are portrayed as bigoted and boorish, referring to "Jocks" while complaining about being stuck north of the border.

The film owes more to Peter McDougall's hard-hitting 1970s dramas Just Another Saturday and Just A Boy's Game than the Hollywood religious epics which dominated Easter weekend viewing at the time.

But the cast, which included Fulton Mackay, Richard Wilson, Rikki Fulton, Iain McColl and Gerard Kelly, were perhaps best known as comic actors.

McCandlish puts this down to the way the acting profession had developed in Scotland after the war.

"At that time, Scotland was coming out of a period where we had a strong comedy sequence of actors and a strong scene of comedy, but not so strong in straight acting," he says.

"A lot of these guys were very good actors who were forced, in a way, to do comedy. And they did it extremely well."

This makes for an unusual mix of the sacred and profane, the comic and the serious. There are political speeches and humorous Glasgow pub patter.

Perhaps the strangest scene shows The Man parading through the city centre on a donkey. It was shot documentary-style, with the actors marching down Sauchiehall Street on a Saturday afternoon, capturing the genuine reactions of shoppers.

For Hayman, that mix of Glasgow street talk and serious issues is a big part of the film's success.

"I'm walking through the dereliction of, you know, the shipbuilding industry in Glasgow, because Thatcher had decimated it all. So it's like walking through a ghost town.

"That great sequence when I'm riding a donkey down Sauchiehall Street, and the camera for most of the time is on the bystanders and the onlookers, the ordinary people of Glasgow, who are just aghast at what they're seeing.

"I think Glasgow and its people are as much the stars of the film as we actors are."

Looking back four decades on, The Holy City is a curious relic of a very different time in television, politics, and Scotland.

Reviewing it for The Times, the novelist Peter Ackroyd said it lacked a clear message and complained that "since Jesus was resurrected as some kind of nationalist hero or populist demagogue the precepts of religion were displaced by the concepts of conventional left-wing politics".

But he labelled the production "extraordinary" and praised Bill Bryden's writing and directing.

Bryden's career went from strength to strength. He died in 2022 aged 79.

Most of the cast are long gone but David Hayman, now 78, remains one of Scotland's busiest and most acclaimed actors and directors.

For him, The Holy City is a fond memory from the middle period of his now six-decade long career.

"It was my father's favourite piece of work of mine. He loved it, and my family loved it," he says.

"I think the reaction was very warm-hearted, and very appreciative. It was different, it was radical, it was innovative."

You can hear more about the history of The Holy City on The Sunday Show on BBC Radio Scotland from 10:00 on Easter Sunday.