Tormod: if you never watch television again…

… make sure you see this first: 24th September at 9.00pm on BBC ALBA. Why should you? If life matters.

And how do we know you’ll want to see it? Here’s some proof.

This reviewer started to watch the advance DVD of the programme just after midnight at the end of a long day. Others were on the way to bed. There had been no discussion of the DVD at all, this was a private matter.

A few minutes in, the room went quiet. Everyone had sat down again – in obvious ‘just-for-a-minute’ transit positions on the edges of chairs. They were still there an hour later when the film finished, spoken half in Gaelic, which none of us know. Nobody asked ‘What’s this?’ No need. ‘This’ is Tormod.

Norman – and Tormod – MacLean has lived almost all of his 72 years ‘sailing’, as he puts is, ‘between two cultures’, the Gaelic and the Govan. Permanently inhabiting the space between, he belongs nowhere and everywhere. At heart this makes him an observer more than a participant – an observer of himself as much as anything. In fact, if there is a space between himself and himself – and he talks metaphorically of a schizophrenic existence, Norman MacLean lives  – has always lived – in that space.

The superficial facts are that he is a one-man sub-culture, renowned piper, singer, entertainer, drunk and now writer – of his autobiography, The Leper’s Bell, to be published this month by Birlinn-Polygon.

For good reason he is known as the Gaelic Billy Connolly, imbued with the same largeness of spirit and with the same life force. This is not to say that there is anything imitative in Norman MacLean, He is no one but himself.

At the time when it mattered, when he was a child, he was rejected by default – his father, a seaman, was not a present figure and when he was, took a forceful role. His Mother, tired with endlessly coping alone and bitter about his father’s womanising, seems to have been spiritually thin and essentially uncaring.

On her death bed she managed to hurt her adult child one more time, insisting on telling him that he was ugly, a changeling who had never belonged to her – and unclean, that he should have a leper’s bell around his neck.

And now indeed he has the bell around his neck – his book. But this Leper’s Bell and this programme summon atttention rather than command retreat.

Anyone less ‘ugly’ would be hard to imagine. Norman/Tormod MacLean has a voice that conjures shades of meaning like few others. His face is mesmerically engaged with life, unmasked. Nothing is hidden but nothing is contrived or indulgent. He lives in the moment, now as ever and he lives with his eyes open.

In talking about his drinking (and he sanctioned the scenes showing it), which is as much a part of his soul as anything else and in many ways released that soul to soar, he never plays the ‘naughty me’ card which essentially avoids responsibility. Nor does he take the other route of self-flagellation. He reports on himself and he reports factually, from the best informed position on his subject.

His immersion in two languages has bred a way of saying that matches his way of seeing. Writing his autobiography has explained himself to himself. He describes it as the best experience of his life and talks of opening his computer as ‘going into a cave’ where all the stories are hiding. It’s rare to find a writer for whom this experience has been so overtly joyous and so positively revelatory.

Much of his life and of his telling of it is full of fun, from the surreal to the witty. An early moment of the surreal was when his teacher at the little rural school of Strathan, at Loch Arkaig in Lochaber, went mad. Her daily routine was to feed her pupils dishes of dry creamola pudding, then get them to put their heads on their desks and go to sleep. This only came to light when one father asked his daughter what she’d done at school that day and she said: ‘Oh, the usual, Creamola and sleep’. The pupils had learned absolutely nothing.

In telling an audience at one of his standup comedy gigs that his Mother had told him he’d go straight to Hell, MacLean complains of  discrimination. ‘Other people get to go via McColl’s Hotel’.

He says of his time as an entertainer: ‘I wanted to have a bond between me and the human race’. Performing for him, as it does for others, provides an approximation for the birthright he and so many are denied – love and connection. An audience’s embrace is temporary. It’s of the moment. It doesn’t replace but it assuages. It demonstrates what might have been, had circumstances been different and, in that sense, it redeems.

This is a man whose life graces life itself, whose probity is patent.

Drink has been at the heart of his life and is popularly said to have destroyed it, to have stopped him becoming what his many profound talents might have made him – ‘a star’.

Sorry. We take a different line. Without the drink he might have been nothing we ever knew about because he might not have found the confidence to release what was in him and to believe in it. Its expression may have been sporadic and unreliable but it is truthful, blazing with a vital spirit and illuminating more and more powerfully than any ‘star’ could do.

If drink gave us Norman/Tormod, ceaselessly and knowingly living between two lives of many kinds, it was our indisputable gain and he pays the price for it.

With nine months of filming completed only in June, the programme itself is wonderfully well judged. Nothing intrudes on MacLean. His face fills the screen. His persona fills the mind. His voice will echo down the years. No ‘interviewer’ is seen or heard. The production majors on straightforwardness and good editing which lets all of the story be told without clutter.

There is a recurring visual motif – of the man at a small table with his computer, banging away at the keys in a variety of outdoor locations – as on a white beach at his Benbecula of old, where he now permanently lives. This becomes a metaphor for Tormod/Norman’s life – lived in public and essentially a portable dialogue between the man and himself, with the keyboard as facilitator and translator.

In writing this review the challenge has been not to trade on the matter of the programme. We must leave MacLean to tell the story he knows better than anyone, accounts for with an unmatchable objectivity and for which any act of translation would be as insulting as it is unnecessary. Just see it.

• BBC ALBA is available on Sky channel 168 and on Freesat channel 110. Further information is on the BBC ALBA website.
• NOTE: BBC ALBA programmes are now available on BBC iPlayer so if you are not going to see this programme live, you can see it within 7 days of transmission on iPlayer.