Well, Shauny‘s knocked it out of the park.
There aren’t many laughs in Nicola Ferguson Sturgeon: The Tartan Messiah, because it’s not that kind of satire.
There’s none of Shaun dressing up as Patrick Harvie or Auntie Sandra or any of his familiar cast of characters. This is the pitch-dark kind of satire, the sort that bitterly shows you how you’ve been cheated out of a better nation.
(Think more of the energy of Dead Set or Four Lions, although when we saw the latter at the cinema we were surrounded by idiots hooting like it was Mr sodding Bean, so maybe you’ll be chuckling the whole way through.)
Its triumph, and its horror, is that it plays out an all-too-plausible alternative timeline of the last decade, in merciless detail, which will leave you not basking in the comfortable glow of laughter but burning with rage, as illustrated in the coda performed by Shaun as himself (as opposed to the fantasy narrator) between the movie and the credits.
To be honest we could have done without that bit – or more precisely, would rather have seen it as a separate video – because it slightly undermines the deft subtlety of the main film and ironically demands action of the viewer without specifying what that action would be, making it a harangue without a discernible point just at the moment where you’d be pondering the message for yourself.
(Always a more powerful method than having it shouted accusingly in your face.)
But hey, that’s the artist’s prerogative. NFS:TTM is a terrific piece of work, and if the nation wasn’t such a satirical desert it’d be getting broadcast on BBC Scotland rather than YouTube, as part of a wide-ranging culture of political commentary/entertainment that the country utterly and shamefully lacks, which is as damning an indictment of Creative Scotland as the direct one in the movie.
Most tellies nowadays can show YouTube by one means or another, though, so while we’ve linked it above, Wings recommends that you do what we did and watch it on the big screen as IF you lived in that better Scotland. It’ll be a start, and it deserves it.
