Location, location, location

Bit late to this but I have just started watching Granite Harbour, first broadcast on BBC Scotland, I think, in 2022.

As the name suggests it’s based in Aberdeen where I was at university for four years from 1976 to 1980.

Aberdeen is known as the granite city for a reason, and I must say that the sight of all those silvery grey buildings when I approached the city for the first time via the old A92 didn’t fill me with excitement.

That said, it was a step up from the grim Victorian tenements of Dundee that were in the process of being demolished, so I couldn’t complain.

Anyway, while the plot of Granite Harbour isn’t great and the lead character is that stock figure, a fish-out-water (trainee) detective, it’s nevertheless quite fun spotting some familiar landmarks like Marischal College where my graduation ceremony took place.

Curiously, though (and its early doors as they say in Scotland), the harbour has played no part in the drama and has barely been seen.

The early scenes did however feature an actor I once shared a stage with when I was at school in St Andrews. By coincidence, I wrote about him only a few months ago. (See All the world’s a stage.)

Granite Harbour is one of several crime drama series that have been filmed in Scotland in recent years and although the quality varies it’s genuinely nice to see locations that I recognise and have actually visited.

A few years ago another TV channel, Alibi, brought us Traces, which was set in Dundee, a city I’m obviously familiar with.

First broadcast in 2019, series one and two were later shown on BBC One, but even with Martin Compston (Line of Duty) on board, I don’t think it was a huge ratings success and it rather fizzled out.

It was nice nevertheless to see Dundee on a mainstream channel (although the indoor scenes were filmed in Manchester), and even better to see St Andrews feature in Karen Pirie, a ‘British crime drama based on the Inspector Karen Pirie series of novels by Val McDermid’.

Broadcast on ITV in 2022, a second series is scheduled for broadcast later this year.

Meanwhile Nicola Walker (Unforgotten, Last Tango in Halifax) starred in Annika, another crime drama that premiered on Alibi before switching to BBC One.

Annika was set in Glasgow, Greenock, and the banks of Loch Lomond - all familiar territory albeit not quite as familiar to me as Aberdeen, Dundee, or St Andrews.

If you add a long-running series such as Shetland and, most recently, the re-booted Rebus, which is set in Edinburgh, that’s a pretty good picture of Scotland, right there.

A key location in Rebus is the Oxford Bar in Thistle Street which is a short walk from the Thistle Street flat we lived in for 18 months from December 1992.

(The reason the Oxford Bar features in both the books and the TV series is because the author, Ian Rankin, is a regular there.)

Other provincial towns, cities and regions that have been the location for recent UK crime dramas include Keeping Faith (Carmarthenshire), The Outlaws (Bristol), The Responder (Liverpool), Macdonald and Dodds (Bath), Vera (Newcastle and Northumberland), and Blue Lights (Belfast).

There’s even a series I haven’t watched yet called The Marlow Murder Club (broadcast on Drama and UKTV Play) that - spoiler alert - is presumably set in Marlow, another place I know quite well.

Those are the recent ones that come to mind. If you would like to recommend any more do let me know!