Brian Beacom

PETER McDougall has been chatting for 10 minutes, sharing stories, referencing friends such as Frankie Miller and Bob Hoskins and Billy Connolly (whom he’d met up with the day before).

And soon he’s offering a list of names which runs like a celebrity who’s who.

Wouldn’t it makes sense, you suggest, to write an autobiography in which he could recount his massively colourful life and times? Connery, Coltrane and Keitel?

“Naw,” says the celebrated screen writer in emphatic voice.

“I don’t need to write my life story. Every time I write a play or a film my life is in there. What would I need to write a book for?”

The 71 year-old makes a point sharper than an apprentice draftsman’s pencil.

His film successes over the years such as Just Another Saturday (which drew from his own flute band experiences) have been filled with memories to the point of overflowing, like the tin bath he was washed in growing up in Greenock.

Today, he reveals, his life has spilled onto the typewriter page once again with The Vampire Clinic.

His new play is running at Glasgow’s Oran Mor.

“The idea for the play came about after I contracted Legionnaires Disease (a form of pneumonia.),” he explains.

“Just as I got over that (two years ago) I had a stroke. And at that point I attended Sandy Road clinic in Partick where I was given Warfarin (to thin the blood.)”

He grins; “I remembered Warfarin from working in the shipyards because it was used as poison to kill off the rates.

“Anyway, I was telling my pal Willie McIlvanney (the novelist) about these clinic trips one day and he told me he’d been there too.”

Peter McDougall’s smile widens into a mad grin, prefacing the funny line to come.

“Willie told me he’d been struck down with an infestation of Biblical proportions, boils, the lot.

“I said to him that’s because as a novelist, he gets the full expanse of side effects. Me, as a screenwriter, I only got a wee rash.”

Peter, who’s writing career began after a chance meeting with screenwriter Colin Welland, who he met while painting his house, has other forms of illness to contend with.

He suffers from labyrinthitis, leaving him prone to spells of acute dizziness.

But that didn’t stop him writing. His chum’s line about the Vampire Clinic had stayed with him and he thought it would make a great title for a play.

However, the anti-coagulant clinic is a backdrop for a love story where we meet Sadie and Finlay,(Barbara Rafferty and Billy McBain) who have both had a stroke.

After a “ceremonial blood sucking”, they go for a drink and they chat and become close.

“Sadie is a patient, but she’s also a seat-shifter,” the writer explains. “She goes into the clinic and moves about all day, talking to the different people who come in.

“She makes friends. The clinic is like a club. She wants to reassure people. “

He adds, in serious voice; “You know, loneliness is a disease people can’t see.” Peter wrote in detail about his own experience.

“My character, Finlay, is dizzy coming up the road and he says he’s scared to fall down ‘because somebody will go through your pockets before you hit the pavement.’

“This sense of being about to fall down actually happened to me, and rather than collapse on the pavement I somehow got myself into a shop, to feel safer, to try and get my head together. It turned out to be a charity shop run by a nice pair of sisters in twin sets.”

He adds, grinning; But my body was all wired up at the time with monitors, and one of the monitor wires had dropped loose.

“So as I walked through the door of the shop the wire got caught and suddenly I was all lights and noise and I went off like a f***** disco. “The two sisters thought they were being robbed or something.”

He adds, laughing; “But then who’s going to steal a granny’s old tights?”

His Oran Mor love story is powerful. The pair talk of their dysfunctional lives. Their marriages. Finlay, talks about remoteness from his wife. (This aspect of the play isn’t autobiographical.) “he says ‘She’s so unfamiliar to me I couldn’t pick her a*** out in a polis line-up,’ to Sadie. And she comes back with ‘If you’re ever thinking about a reconciliation you could always put a poster of her a*** on Crime Watch.’”

Peter McDougall’s mind may become a bit more dizzy these days but the blue eyes still sparkle.

He once said writing is a disease, and it’s incurable.

“I’m still writing. “I did Whisky Galore last year but I don’t need to write a new movie. I can write when I like, what I like. And I love writing for Oran Mor.

“You see, when you write films you need the discipline of a poet. You need to get everything you need to say into one line. The camera speaks for you to such an extent.

“But with a play it can all flow out.”

The meeting between Sadie and Finlay is touching. They realise they’ve made a real connection. Finlay asks ‘Is this a stroke of good luck?’

McDougall’s stroke hasn’t been good luck at all.

But it’s provided him with yet another bout of powerful experience.

Pure medicine for theatre goers.

The Vampire Clinic, Oran Mor, Glasgow, until Saturday.