Toffs on the war path

Taggart creator Glenn Chandler has found light relief in his first Fringe play, writes THOMAS QUINN

OVER HIS LONG AND ILLUSTRIOUS career, Glenn Chandler murdered dozens, more likely hundreds.

He drowned them in bathtubs, chopped them to bits with chainsaws and shot them at point blank range. He executed people for money, jealousy and love. And he hasn't just got away with it, but been paid handsomely for his efforts.

Chandler is, of course, not a serial killer but the creator and, for a 15-year period, the chief writer on Taggart, STV's doughty whodunit which flourishes even today, 25 years after its conception.

The writer hasn't worked on the show for a decade, a period of time during which he has spread his wings elsewhere, with Yorkshire Television, on BBC1's Dalziel and Pascoe and by writing a couple of novels. But next month he will attempt something entirely new. Edinburgh-born and raised, and a passionate Fringe-goer for decades, Chandler is going back to his roots in the theatre to fulfil a long-held ambition to stage a play during the Edinburgh Festival.

DI Jim Taggart, who had no truck with such happenings at "the wrong end" of the M8, would not have been impressed.

"It began in an antique shop," Chandler begins when I meet with him during a break in auditions in London.

"I was looking through a box at the counter and it turned out to be full of these old Gem and Magnet comics.

"I bought a few and started reading them: it occurred to me it would be a lot of fun to write a comedy set in the world of these comics."

At first glance, Boys of the Empire sounds like a departure for a man who once wrote deadpan dialogue for Mark McManus's gravelly voice – as does the play's companion piece, What's Wrong with Angry?, by Patrick Wilde, a 1993 play about clause 28, which he is co-producing.

But Chandler, who was privately educated, knows more about public schools than he did about Glasgow CID. And as a gay man he is passionate too about law makers who are "anti-homosexual".

"These comics were about a time when boys didn't carry knives to school but tuck boxes, when everything was ripping, they were called Algernon and wore monocles.

"As I started work on it, I began to wonder if there could be a serious side to it too and it dawned on me that in the 1920s Britain was in possession of Iraq, much as Britain and America are now.

"Much as now we put our own puppet monarch on the throne and if you read the history of the time there are the same references to Basra and Fallujah as there are today. There was even a Shia uprising – and Winston Churchill, no less, suggested dropping poisoned mustard gas on the Arabs.

"I thought, why not write a comedy about how this bit of history has repeated itself?"

Chandler, who describes himself as "anti-war from the first", researched his subject as much as he could, reading books on the Middle East and talking to people who have worked there since the second Gulf War.

The result is a rather camp caper involving toffs, dodgy gamekeepers and dark mutterings of "beastliness".

"That was the word they had for being gay in those days," Chandler laughs. "So yes, there's a bit of a gay theme to it as well."

The writer points out that gay storylines frequently cropped up despite the macho milieu of Taggart and he introduced DC Fraser, still played by Colin McCredie, as mainstream TV's first gay cop.

Chandler and I meet over coffee at Patisserie Valerie in Soho, round the corner from where Robert Love, the head of drama at STV, talent-spotted him by watching a play of his at the Soho Poly Theatre.

Later they agreed the deal for him to write Taggart over drinks in Covent Garden, a few minutes' walk away, and over the next few years formed one of the most successful backroom partnerships in television history, making Taggart one of ITV's ratings bankers and turning "there's been a murrrdderr" into one of the country's most recognisable catchphrases.

Yet on the face of it, Chandler was an odd choice for the job of creating the archetypal Glasgow detective. He barely knew the city, angered a taxi driver on an early visit by asking to be taken to "Millngavvie", and had to teach himself the whodunit genre almost from scratch.

"I'd never written one before. My first attempt didn't work out and I had to start again, planning it scene by scene," he recalls.

For now, Chandler is happier in the theatre, where he has more control over what he is writing.

"Television has become very elaborate and committee-driven," he concedes. "You let someone have a script and half a dozen people tear it to bits and you re-write it, and another committee of half a dozen people suggest notes and you re-write it again.

"The wonderful thing about this project on the Fringe is that the producers have said to us 'we know you guys, you've done it before, let's go with it'."

Not that he rejects the idea of ever working in TV again – or indeed of returning to his old stomping ground.

"I think they are doing a great job with Taggart right now – I love what Alex Norton has brought to it," he says. "If they asked me, of course I'd do another one, for nostalgia's sake, but you have to keep trying new things."

He hasn't given up entirely on the whodunit genre. As we get up to leave he starts telling me with some enthusiasm about a new novel he is working on, featuring as the detective a Victorian actress and polygamist with a highly colourful private life. Jim Taggart wouldn't have approved, but Glenn isn't worried about that.

• Boys of the Empire by Glenn Chandler and What's Wrong With Angry? by Patrick Wilde are at C Venues, 30 July until 25 August.