''Tutti Frutti'' is a
BBC Scotland six-part drama series, transmitted in 1987 and written by
John Byrne. It starred
Robbie Coltrane
Anthony Robert McMillan (30 March 195014 October 2022), known professionally as Robbie Coltrane, was a Scottish actor and comedian. He gained worldwide recognition in the 2000s for playing Rubeus Hagrid in the ''Harry Potter'' film series. H ...
,
Emma Thompson,
Maurice Roëves
John Maurice Roëves (; 19 March 1937 – 14 July 2020) was a British actor. He appeared in over 120 film and television roles, in both the United Kingdom and the United States. His breakthrough performance was as Stephen Dedalus in the 1967 ...
,
Richard Wilson and
Katy Murphy
Katy Murphy (born 8 December 1962) is a Scottish actress and teacher who has appeared in many television programs, most of them for the BBC and ITV. While most associated with television drama, she has worked across a variety of genres, includin ...
. It won six
BAFTAs and brought many of the cast to national prominence.
Plot
The Majestics, a legendary Scots
rock 'n' roll
Rock and roll (often written as rock & roll, rock 'n' roll, or rock 'n roll) is a genre of popular music that evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It originated from African-American music such as jazz, rhythm an ...
band, are on the eve of their 1986 "Silver Jubilee" tour, and find themselves in trouble when their lead singer, Big Jazza McGlone (Coltrane), is killed in a car crash.
The group's devious and exploitative manager Eddie Clockerty (Wilson) talks Big Jazza's younger brother, Danny (also Coltrane), home from New York for the funeral, into joining the band as their new lead singer. Suzi Kettles (Thompson), a sharp cookie and old classmate of Danny, picks up the guitar and also joins the band. From that moment, the ill-fated tour and the band's fortunes appear to take a turn for the better.
The Majestics' final dispiriting tour of Scotland's less salubrious clubs and pubs is punctuated by childish backstage squabbling and a series of personal disasters. Ageing heart-throb Vincent Diver (Roëves), 'the iron man of Scottish Rock', is cheating on his wife Noreen (a community nurse and sister of drummer Bomba) with girlfriend Glenna (played by Fiona Chalmers as simultaneously pathetic, manipulative and glutinously cloying), who has an apparent pregnancy and when the unborn child dies (or maybe never existed from the start), she commits suicide by jumping from a bridge into the Clyde.
Vincent is also knifed in
Buckie
Buckie ( gd, Bucaidh) is a burgh town (defined as such in 1888) on the Moray Firth coast of Scotland. Historically in Banffshire, Buckie was the largest town in the county until the administrative area was abolished in 1975. The town is the t ...
by a girl who believes she is his illegitimate daughter from a one-night stand on a tour of long ago. Suzi Kettles proves to have an abusive estranged husband, a dentist, in whose teeth Danny drills holes with the dentist's drill for his battering of Suzi. The fractious on-off relationship between rotund Danny McGlone and Suzi adds a further comic dimension, along with the 'double-act' of the dour Mr Clockerty and his lippy secretary Janice Toner (Murphy). In the final sequence, during the Majestics' grand final concert at
Glasgow Pavilion, Vincent douses himself in Polish vodka and sets himself alight.
Re-release
Although it attained 'cult' status, it was only repeated once on
BBC Two, albeit only 10 months after its first transmission on
BBC One
BBC One is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network owned and operated by the BBC. It is the corporation's flagship network and is known for broadcasting mainstream programming, which includes BBC News television bulletins, ...
, and was not available on video or DVD. Various rumours circulated for many years as to why, but the BBC never confirmed the reasons. However, in March 2007
John Byrne explained that the problem had been due to a performance of
the song "Tutti Frutti" in one episode (not the title sequence) where Danny McGlone changes the lyrics to "here's the rub, she makes me sleep in a tub". This is a reference to an earlier scene where Kettles is coerced into letting McGlone stay at her flat, but insists he sleeps in the bathtub. As a result of this change the
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
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...
requested a prohibitively high fee.
In 2006 a BBC spokesperson stated that these issues were 'resolvable', allowing for a DVD release or
transmission. John Byrne said he thought the original film stock (including out-takes) may have been destroyed, and that only the broadcast masters may survive.
The BBC released a two-disc Region 2 DVD package of the series on 3 August 2009 in the UK.
In March 2019, the new BBC Scotland digital channel re-broadcast the six original episodes - directly after a documentary about the making of both the series and the stage play, called ''Tutti Frutti: The Return of The Majestics''.
In 2006 Byrne reworked the series into a stage play, produced as a co-production between the
, where it opened on 22 September 2006.
.
s in 1988.
* Best Actress – Emma Thompson
* Best Drama Series – Andy Park, Tony Smith
* Best Graphics – Sandi Anderson, John Byrne
* Best Make Up – Lorna Blair
* Best Sound Supervisor – Brian Dewar
* Best VTR Editor – Peter Hayes