We’ve just watched the BBC’s new documentary, and we’re confused.
You can see both episodes on iPlayer now, or on TV tonight and tomorrow, but there’s no mistaking what’s being advertised – a personal drama between the two biggest players in Scottish politics in the last 300 years.
But that’s not what you get.
Nor, interestingly, is that what the BBC pitched to participants.
The company who produced the film described it as a history of the rise of the modern SNP. That it was then instead presented as a two-person “psycho drama” [sic] has angered Salmond greatly, as revealed in a Twitter thread this morning.
Most of those complaints are valid, but the truth is that the actual show being aired is rather closer to the pitch than to the presentation. The problem is that its own apparent confusion about what it’s meant to be means it serves neither purpose very well.
Most of Episode 1 is indeed just a history of the SNP. There’s some funny old footage (most amusingly a young Nicola Sturgeon awkwardly shuffling around at a party disco) but it’s not really very interesting, and when you’ve been led to expect a show about the breakdown of the Salmond-Sturgeon relationship it feels like a lot of padding.
The only notable bit is the presence of Liz Lloyd – someone who played absolutely no significant role in the SNP until Sturgeon made her her chief of staff at the end of 2014. Despite everything that’s subsequently happened, in Episode 1 you get what seems a genuine sense of regret from Sturgeon, Robertson et al, who when forced to recall the good old days of the party’s rise cannot entirely mask the warm memories of Salmond’s transformative influence.
Lloyd’s presence, though, is one of sheer poisonous malice from beginning to end, smirking and smearing and knifing Salmond in every moment she’s onscreen. She’s a grotesque figure, almost a pantomime villain, whose malignity is never mentioned but is conveyed solely through her face.
It’s a good harbinger, though, for the start of Episode 2. In a very abrupt change of tone, everyone’s got their conspirator hats on and is staying firmly on-message. If the first episode shows us something of the human side of politicians, Episode 2 offers a glimpse of everything dishonest and venal and ugly about them.
But it’s quite a brief one. The whole documentary leaps around in an unhelpful and disengaging manner – the second episode has barely gotten into the meat of the story when it jumps back a decade and becomes a slow-moving history lesson again.
That isn’t without its own merits. Much of A Troubled Union is an enlightening, albeit depressing, microcosm of modern times, particularly the triumph of what it’s hard to avoid calling “snowflakery” over grownups doing a tough and serious job and being able to handle a few bumps and bruises along the way.
The whole furore over Salmond doing a show on RT is a great demonstration of that – a media and political bubble having a shrieking fit over something no ordinary voter cared in the slightest about. Yet in some ways it seems to have been the genesis of the entire scandal.
The RT show appears to be what sowed the seed of paranoia in Sturgeon’s mind that Salmond had to be restrained and controlled in some way, and that he posed some sort of threat to her that had to be extinguished. Instead of robustly deflecting media criticism (eg by saying “Why is such a figure in Scottish politics having to do this on RT, rather than the BBC or STV?”), the party threw Salmond under the bus in a panic. It was a hugely telling response.
But the programme mentions the disagreement in passing for about 60 seconds and never returns to it. Indeed, it’s just about the only specific mention of conflict between the two in the entire 120 minutes.
What really comes across in the documentary is the simply enormous gulf in political ability and character between Salmond and Sturgeon. He’s someone who plans and strategises and executes and achieves, where she passively reacts to events.
(It leaves you with a profound sense of regret that Sturgeon was in charge of the indy campaign while Salmond was running the country. It’d have been better the other way round. Managerialism, not revolution, is Sturgeon’s nature and – relatively speaking, at least – forte. For a self-portrayed radical, she’s a timid small-c conservative to her boots, too enamoured of being a player on the world stage to ever risk all her hard-won personal status in pursuit of independence.)
By the time the documentary gets back to the matter of the conspiracy against Salmond which destroyed the pair’s relationship – its advertised subject, remember – there are just 12 minutes left of the 120, and those 12 minutes are basically a short one-sided reprise of the “He was guilty really” hatchet job of the infamous 2020 Kirsty Wark assassination.
As an analysis of how the relationship between Salmond and Sturgeon broke down – the thing it professes to be about – “A Troubled Union” is a complete failure. How and why that happened is barely even examined, never mind revealed. The structure and pacing of the programme is a mess and no new light is shed on anything.
As a broad-brush history of the rise and fall of the last 30 years of the SNP, on the other hand, it’s okay, notwithstanding all the criticisms made by Salmond on social media today about the choice of participants and focus.
(What, for example, is Humza Yousaf doing in there, given that it was supposed to end with Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation? George Osborne’s brief appearance made a tantalising but unfulfilled suggestion of a much more intriguing perspective. The BBC’s focus today on Yousaf’s comments is on one level bewildering given what a bit-part player he was, but also indicative of the absence of new material in the show.)
It’s nowhere near the disgraceful depths of “The Trial Of Alex Salmond”. To the casual viewer it’s largely unobjectionable, although to anyone reasonably in the know about Scottish politics over the last seven or eight years there are extremely concerning issues with it that we’re unable to talk about for reasons we also can’t talk about.
With a different billing it would have been a dry but worthy piece of work with a few snippets of interest. But the way the BBC have chosen to characterise it makes it a big disappointment and a missed opportunity. If you’ve only got enough time to watch one documentary about Scottish politics this week, we’d probably go with this one instead.
