Tom Weir - the reluctant television rtar

“TELEVISION can be very difficult,” Tom Weir once told me. “It’s a very shallow medium.”

I knew exactly what he meant. Television is very much the medium of the ‘soundbite’, a concept that was completely foreign to an erudite man of words like Tommy Weir!

“It is my belief that television which can be so wholesome in portraying the diversity of our wonderful world, its wildlife and scenery and its educational value,” he wrote, “undoes much of its good by showing so much sex and violence, resulting in copycat behavior, even among children.”

The words may be familiar, nowadays in the context of the Internet, but it didn’t take Tom very long to master that “shallow medium,” so much so that in 1976 he was voted Scottish Television Personality of the Year. Much of Tom’s television success was down to his talent as an archivist, collecting and collating information about the Scotland of the seventies and eighties, a glimpse in time of a nation that was rapidly changing.

In an early interview Tom once said: “for me it was never what I did, but what I saw that was important.”

And he saw a country that was changing fast. A land that had come through the war; a country that enjoyed the fruits of a socialist union that had created a welfare system and a national health service that were the envy of the world; a country in which people were leaving the glens to live and work in towns and cities; a nation where people had more time to spend on leisure pursuits and where the hills, once silent, now echoed to the voices of burgeoning numbers of hillwalkers, climbers and tourists.

In a moment of quiet reflection Tom once suggested to me that his generation had enjoyed the best of Scotland’s hills and mountains. “I treasure memories of spending time with families like the Macraes of Carnmore in Letterewe or the Scotts at Luibeg in the Cairngorms. The glens are emptier now that they have gone. The hills weren’t so busy then and people weren’t rushing to climb Munros and Corbetts.”

Tom never did climb all the Munros, despite being an excellent all-round mountaineer. He said he had been to the top of most Munros, but preferred to climb only those he liked best, enjoying the whole experience of the sky, the lochs, trees, birds, flowers, animals – the spiritual as well as the physical!

Indeed, one of his favourite hills was a mere 142 metres in height. Duncryne, close to his home in Gartocharn, is known fondly as ‘The Dumpling’.

“I used to climb Duncryne every day,” he once said in an interview, “sometimes even at midnight.” He was asked if this was his favourite place in Scotland. “No”, he replied, “That honour goes to Glen Lyon. It is a beautiful place. I call it ‘the three L’s’ - the loveliest, the longest and the loneliest. I like to walk there because of the loneliness.”

I was a young outdoor writer at the time when Tom and Rhona unexpectedly called at my house in Kincraig. He was highly enthusiastic about my writing and we became firm friends – indeed, in many ways Tom became a much-valued mentor, especially when, years later, I found myself following in his footsteps when I took my own faltering route into television.

Tom was never very enthusiastic about television. “Make sure you have a good film crew,” he once advised me after complaining that the crew he had been filming with stopped work at 5pm on the dot, no matter where they were. “And make sure they’re fit enough to keep up with you on the hill,” he added with a grin.

His own television career began after a conversation with Russell Galbraith of Scottish Television. Galbraith knew of Tom as an outdoor man and he wanted some short fill-in pieces to run at the end of the station’s main news and current affairs programme, Scotland Today. “With all this bad news about, give them something to cheer them up,” he told Tom.

It didn’t take Russell Galbraith long to realise that in Tom Weir he had discovered a gem of a broadcaster. The short slots soon became 30-minute programmes and Weir’s Way was born.

But Tom was apprehensive. He had only the vaguest idea of what he should do but that difficulty was apparently resolved for him. He had a phone call from a rather brusque director who told Tom exactly what he wanted. “We’ll begin with you working at your typewriter, show your house and where you live, then you’ll tell us what these programmes are going to be about. We only have a few hours to shoot each story, so we’ve got to work fast.”

Tommy described it as “very good fun, slap happy stuff.”

“There was no forward planning,” he later wrote. “A telephone call one day would tell me the camera team was available the next, so I always had to have a story up my sleeve, and would read it to the director as we motored to the location. Over a few months we shot about a dozen films, much of it in the cold grey of a normal Scottish winter. Uncomfortable yes, but it didn’t worry me unduly, the truth being that I didn’t think the film would ever be shown. I regarded the experience as an apprenticeship, which might be useful to this old dog if I could learn a few new tricks.”

But the films were shown and when Tom was given the broadcast dates he wanted to run away and hide. He described them as “home-spun,” and in a sense they were. They were certainly very simple – Tom either talking directly to the camera or chatting to a variety of country folk, two television skills in which he excelled.

From the comfort of this digital video age it’s very easy to be critical of the broadcast quality of the programmes, but it’s important to remember that the film cameras used in the mid-seventies were extremely bulky and heavy in comparison with the small video cameras that are used today. I frequently go off to film a television walk with only one other person, a camera operator who also records sound. In Tom’s day there would have been a whole team of people – a camera operator, possibly a focus puller, a sound recordist, a director and probably a secretary and runner too. And not only was the equipment heavy and complicated but it required large batteries to keep it all working, batteries that required charging every night.

Tom’s Weir’s personality made up for any misgivings about broadcast quality, and even after a thirty-odd gap between the last of his shows and today he still sounds enthusiastic and knowledgeable, friendly and interesting.

Tom Weir’s television programmes were broadcast between 1976 and 1987, starting with compilations of the short initial films he had made for Russell Galbraith. They were followed by rather more ambitious half-hour Weir’s Way films “which had their own continuity, made on the very best filmstock.”

No scriptwriters were employed – Tom wrote the storylines himself - tales of Rannoch Moor and Glen Coe, historical events and the opening of the West Highland Way!

Weir’s Way were hugely popular and the series was followed by more programmes, but this time with a nautical flavour. Weir’s Aweigh saw Tom visiti Scotland’s remoter islands, beginning at Tayvallich on Loch Sween as gateway to the Sound of Jura, then west to Barra, Mingulay, Eriskay, Vatersay and back east by the Garvellachs and the whirpool of the Corryvrecken. The whole series was filmed in just two weeks!

Finally Tom went off to trace the footsteps of Charles Edward Stuart, the Prince in hiding. This was a massive journey that began on Culloden Moor and visited Knoydart, Glen Shiel, Glen Moriston, Glen Affric and Ben Alder, before setting off to the Hebrides once again, tracing the complicated route through the Hebrides before returning to the mainland and Loch an Uamh, from where the beleaguered Prince eventually returned to France.

Weir’s Way, in particular, (he was never completely happy in a boat) showed that Tom was a natural broadcaster. I always reckoned Tommy’s greatest skill was his ability as a storyteller. He could captivate an audience, and loved to tell his tales.

On of the highlights of Weir’s Way for me was when Tom interviewed the outdoors pioneer and shipyard worker Jock Nimlin and Sir Robert (Bob) Grieve, who at the time was chair of the Highlands and Islands Development Board. The three men sat on a bank by Loch Lomond and chatted away naturally about their love of wild places, about outdoor politics and their own very different careers. It was magical television, and it was an extremely simple format.

There was little doubt that Tom was immensely proud of Scotland and believed it should be an independent nation. In his final book, Weir’s World – An Autobiography of Sorts, he wrote: “I am in the position I think, to make comparisons with other countries. The only thing I am disappointed in is that we don’t run our own affairs as does Norway. We have the resources, and history shows we have the people. England has its own problems for its fifty million or so to contend with. With only five million Scots we can manage ours, and I think the same goes for Wales. I hope I shall live long enough to see it happen, and another age of enlightenment dawn.”

This month we celebrate Tom’s centenary. He was born in the same year as John Muir died and the two men were so similar in many ways, in their passion for wild land and in their belief that we should look after and nurture the natural world as much as we possibly could. Just as John Muir is remembered in his birth town of Dunbar with a statue in the Main Street so Tom will be remembered too with a statue, so that future generations will remember him and what he did for this little country of ours.

In an article I wrote some time ago for the Scots Magazine about raising money for that statue, I spoke to Tom’s widow Rhona about what she thought Tom would say about a statue erected in his memory? It’s worth recalling her words…

“I think he would have been delighted,” she told me. “He would have been thrilled that people had remembered him because he loved people and I think his legacy was this - he was good at inspiring people. He had a great rapport with people. And I think he left behind something rather special. He always believed that anyone, from any background could achieve anything if they had vision.”

And Tom had that vision in plenty. From humble beginnings in tenement life in Springburn he went on to travel far afield. In 1950 he took part in the first post-war Himalayan expedition. In 1952, he was one of the first to explore the mountains of Nepal and northern India. He also climbed in Greenland above the Arctic Circle, in Norway, Morocco, Iran, Syria and Kurdistan, but his heart was always in the Scottish hills and glens. And that’s how he’ll always be remembered. As Scottish as the heather beneath his boots.

We'll be unveiling the statue of Tom in Balmaha at mid-day on the 29th December. Please come along and join in the fun. I'm to be joined by folk singing legends Jimmie Macgregor and Alistair Macdonald and there will be many of Tom's old friends there too. It'll be a great day. The unveiling of the statue will be followed by coffee and tea and drinks and craic in the Beech Tree Inn just across the road. And if you can come along - try and wear a red bobble cap, just like Tommy's!

This article, in a slightly different form, first appeared in the Scots Magazine.