Hamish Macbeth

Welcome to the Wild West of Scotland

In 1995, BBC One's Hamish Macbeth broke all the rules of Sunday night TV. Set in the picture-postcard Highlands of Scotland, this genre-defying drama brought cannibalism and ceilidhs, marijuana and murder, love triangles and lobster tanks to millions of viewers each week.

With Robert Carlyle starring as the laid-back lawman who preferred poaching to paperwork, producers transformed the tiny village of Plockton into the fictional Lochdubh. While they attempted to evade BBC bureaucracy, they couldn't escape the tourists who soon flocked to see Hamish's home.

Drawing on dozens of new interviews with cast, crew and local residents, this book reveals how they crafted a vision of Highland life that was part Western, part modern fable and wholly original. Discover the battle over Wee Jock's fate, the mystery of the 'lost' musical episode and how the real-world return of the Stone of Destiny forced last-minute rewrites of the epic series finale.

Jonathan Melville, author of A Kind of Magic: Making the Original Highlander and Local Hero: Making a Scottish Classic, blends oral history and archive material into the definitive account of how this subversive series became a timeless classic.