If you ever want to see Alan Yentob uncomfortable, bung him in a sweet shop. This was the takeaway message, although not the one intended, of the latest episode of Imagine. Douglas Stuart: Love, Hope and Grit (BBC One) was meant to be a profile of Stuart; an extraordinary man who spent a decade distilling his childhood into an 1,800-page manuscript called Shuggie Bain. After trimming it down, the novel – his debut – sold 1.5m copies, won the Booker prize and is being adapted (by Stuart himself) into a TV series. Not bad for a man who didn’t read a book until he was 16.
Shuggie Bain has already been absorbed into the fabric of Glasgow, to the extent that a building in the centre of town bears a giant mural of some of its text. Standing in front of it at the start of the film, Stuart tells Yentob about the time he was passing nearby and caught two men relieving themselves on the mural. “I shan’t be peeing there,” Yentob replies with impressive solemnity.
