I was young when I watched Alive and Kicking, and still remember the dissonance of seeing light entertainment maestro Lenny Henry as a “baddie.” Looking after Jo Jo aired in February 1998, and I have the vaguest of memories of seeing it first time round.
Looking After Jo Jo is set in early 1980s Edinburgh, and was filmed in mid/late 1990s Edinburgh. Unlike Trainspotting, it is filmed in the city the story was set in. Tory decline and neglect is evident in many of the scenes. The housing “schemes” are utterly desperate. David Scott Graham’s incredible documentary Little Criminals vividly captured the Glaswegian heroin dystopia of the 1990s. The copy of Looking After Jo Jo that I managed to find is ripped from a VHS copy, and the graininess of the picture adds to the sense of time and gritty place. For those wanting to see some vintage footage of 1980s Edinburgh with and through the eyes of heroin using artists, Opus Morphia is a hallucinogenic and rather haunting 20 minute film.
It’s hard to imagine now, but Edinburgh in the 1980s was in the midst of an unprecedented heroin and AIDs epidemic. Addiction and drug related crime added to a social malaise exacerbated by deindustrialisation. Trainspotting (the book) captured a moment in time, and whilst the film was good, it did not (and to be fair, probably could not have) capture the numerous evocate themes of the novel. This is not wealthy, cosmopolitan contemporary Edinburgh, rich in culture, finance jobs, and a tourist magnet. The “jigsaw flats” – immortalised in Trainspotting’s chapter “Winter in West Granton” are now a thing of the past, along with other chronically bad housing developments. But during the Looking After Jo Jo era, terrible housing was the unfortunate vista to the public health emergency, and social catastrophe, of heroin addiction and AIDs.
Central to the plot of Looking after Jo Jo is the acquisition by criminals of pharmaceutical heroin from a factory in Edinburgh. This is based in fact, and also appears in Irvine Welsh’s Skagboys (to my mind, the second best book that he read – and there’s a considerable drop in quality after this novel and Trainspotting). In 1987, £1m worth of pharmaceutical heroin was stolen from Edinburgh Airport.
The RUC appear, fleetingly, in Looking After Jo Jo – one of their officers stays at the then North British (now Balmoral) luxury hotel, and has his Smith & Wesson revolver stolen. A story was related to me about two PSNI officers investigating Danny McColgan’s murder meeting with a journalist in Edinburgh, during breakfast at the hotel. The officers, one can guess they were former RUC, decided to have some Guinness with their breakfast.
The soundtrack is superb, and one might never hear Ultravox’s Vienna the same again. Some of the plot is muddled – family dynamics and mystery added to a social realism drama made for a clumsy timeline, but this is a mild criticism. Kevin McKidd’s character, Basil, seems out of place and rather annoying to begin with. Later, McKidd appears far more adept and skilled an actor when he takes off his sunglasses and is allowed to cease playing an overt moron. At times the wardrobe department appear to have been inspired by Miami Vice, but perhaps it was like that in the 1980s.
The heroin/AIDs era of the 1980s has its myths and mythology. A mysterious American man, influential and charismatic, and possibly the first to be afflicted with HIV, who demonstrated how to cook up and shoot up heroin. Dealers from Muirhouse and Leith who went onto make fortunes, some of them plying their trade in Aberdeen, where a duo of Muirhouse dealers would end up convicted of the manslaughter of two Aberdonians in one night, in separate incidents. The Edinburgh men seemingly having forgotten just how powerful their wares could be.
The closing titles of Looking After Jo Jo features a billboard of Thatcher, promoting the Tory cause, with two youths jumping up and down on a burnt out car, in slow motion. The people behind the production had their politics, but also the skill to keep them in the background of a credible and enjoyable drama.
If you can get a copy, watch it.
⏩ Brandon Sullivan is a middle aged, middle management, centre-left Belfast man. Would prefer people focused on the actual bad guys.
Catching Jo Jo
ReplyDeleteLAJJ is very good, for me better than the film version of Trainspotting. Irvine Welsh has always seemed the perfect example of the idea that everyone has a book in them (just one book), although Winter In West Granton is brilliant.
ReplyDeleteI used to watch LAJJ with my mates every week. We loved it! After that we always refered to heroin as "brun"!
ReplyDelete@ Ramon the Wolf
ReplyDeleteTrainspotting was always going to be a hard work to follow. It's an absolute masterpiece though. Skagboys was very good though, I thought. Begbie's trajectory in the Blade Merchant, whilst a bit contrived, was worth a read.
There's footage of a council estate in Edinburgh in 1984 within this article: https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/history/resurfaced-edinburgh-footage-shows-bleak-23919159
It really was a terrible time.
The problem with Trainspotting the movie is that it was made in a time of optimism and hedonism. The Tories were on their way out, prosperity (and New Labour) were on their way in. The post heroin drug using ecstasy generation thought/think that drugs were/are cool, and probably sort-of included heroin in that, despite it being so clearly problematic and not something most of them would do.
Or, as rave outfit Praga Khan put it: "Injected with a poison: we don't need that any more" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2U1SJorwK4
Whilst researching this piece, I found articles in the Belfast Telegraph about a ring of Turkish heroin dealers living in Newry, with associates off the Antrim Road. Baffling story. They imported it into Heathrow, smuggled it into the North, and then smuggled it across to Edinburgh. This was from 1979 to 1981. The RUC found cocaine, heroin, LSD and cannabis when they raided properties in Newry and Belfast.
I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I couldn't help wondering if somebody somewhere was pulling somebody's chains, or whether chronically hapless drug dealers thought the heavily militarised North of Ireland during the hunger strikes was a clandestine place to deal smack.