Away and raffle Yourself! Still Game, Craiglang, Glasgow and identity

Irwin, Mary (2015) Away and raffle Yourself! Still Game, Craiglang, Glasgow and identity. In: Regional Aesthetics: Mapping UK Media Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 90-104. ISBN 9781137532824

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Abstract

The award-winning Glasgow-set television comedy series Still Game (BBC Scotland 2002-7) depicted with wry humour the exploits of a group of workingclass pensioners living on the Craiglang housing estate. (Comedic value was added by the fact that all the cast were in fact in their thirties and forties.) This chapter will consider Still Game’s representation of daily life for its seventysomething protagonists in the series’ fictionalised recreation of the working class district of Maryhill, on the outskirts of Glasgow. The emotional resonance of Craiglang’s initially unprepossessing physical landscape; its tower blocks; rundown shopping precinct; shabby pub and surrounding urban wasteland articulate with the significance of these spaces and places in the personal and shared life histories of its inhabitants. The characters’ sense of belonging to Craiglang and the particular sense of Glaswegian identity which it represents are evident. Congruent with charting the contemporary life experiences of this group, Still Game is shot through with a seam of tangible nostalgia for the 1950s and 60s Glasgow of its characters’ youth, recalled fondly as a reimagined golden age of abundant employment, opportunity and civic pride. The chapter will also explore the oscillation between the contrasting past and present Glasgows which the series and the characters mobilise.

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