My Old School, BBC Scotland, BBC iPlayer, Animation Director Rory Lowe, Director Jono McLeod.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001gf5s/my-old-school

‘The subject of this film does not want to show his face.’

But we’re shown it anyway, in animation, in media coverage of the aftermath of the event. Seventeen-year-old Brandon Lee enrolled in Bearsden Academy in 1993. He wanted to become a doctor. You get a lot of doctors in Bearsden and dentists and their middle-and-upper-middle class ilk. Brandon Lee’s father was apparently a doctor. He’d made the phone call to the headmaster to enrol his son at the school.  His mother an international opera singer.  If you live in Bearsden, on average, you live ten years, or more, longer than those that live in Drumchapel less than a mile away, but it is worlds apart.  There was nothing unusual about a Bearsden pupil studying medicine at University and becoming a doctor.

It was not as if Brandon was working class. It was not as if he had been a pupil at the same school over a decade earlier. But his name then was Brian McKinnon. His mum worked in a care-assistant in a care-home in Bearsden. His dad was a lollipop man. By those measures they were a working-class family. He lived in the district and went to a school whose children were middle-class and expected to become middle-class too. Nothing unusual about Brian McKinnon. He recounted how his IQ scores when he was tested at eight and nine years old were in the top percentile range. He was a genius that got as expected top grades at school. He went to study medicine at The University of Glasgow.

His career in medicine didn’t last beyond the first year, which he repeated. He was asked to leave, consider a career outside medicine. Nobody remembered Brian McKinnon. Everybody remembered Brandon Lee.

Animation brings Brandon and his time at Bearsden Academy back to life. Pupils that knew him at that time pop up seated at school desks. Their cartoon avatars playing out the stories they told. Such as the confusion of Brandon having a car and driving his school friends to Glasgow. But when it looked like they might get stopped by the police, Brandon admitting he might have to say he was somebody else. The confusion of his dad apparently dying. Then his mum. Then his granny, whom he was living with. Brandon was meant to be keeping his head down.

Alan Cummings pops up like his middle-aged classmates to play middle-aged Brandon and discuss how he was ‘hiding in plain sight’.

Much was made of Brandon’s esoteric knowledge of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. In particular, the motivation of the main character Willy Loman and his relationship with his son, Buff. How time ‘bends’ enough for Brandon to be older than some of the teachers at the school. How he wasn’t recognised by others who’d also taught Brian McKinnon. How he was convinced he hypnotised the assistant-head so not only did she not recognise him, but did not ask for a birth certificate, or passport. She did not ask for certification of who he said he was. The answer may be much simpler. She was busy. We see what we want. More importantly what we expect to see. Even a crap magician plays on that.

Brandon ‘hiding in plain sight’, for example, had the starring role in the school’s annual play, South Pacific. He warbled rather than sung, but most teachers and pupils remember him as having carried the production. But at the end he had to kiss his co-star. The consensus among former pupils and teachers was that Brandon refused to kiss her at rehearsals, but said he’d do it on the opening night. It would be no more than a peck on the lips.

The girl Brandon apparently refused to kiss remembered it the same way. The production team got a video of the play and played it back to them and us. But the middle-aged woman, who was the girl—and love interest in the play—didn’t remember being kissed like that. She had to take a few minutes to decide there was something creepy about it. A middle-aged man had kissed the girl she was.

Brian McKinnon still it seems lives in Bearsden, in his mum’s house. Thirty years ago,   she was playing a role as his granny. Bearsden Academy is gone, replaced by housing. Former classmates of Brandon/Brian and their former teachers think there’s something sad about him. They suspect he’s still applying for places, perhaps abroad, where he can study medicine. Evidence for this comes from having possibly seen him in Bearsden library, which has computers.

I think someone with an apparently genius IQ would see through that pretty quick. He’s in his sixties. Anyone with a phone has a computer. Nobody knew what Willy Loman was selling. What they’re selling here is closure that appeals to the middle-classes. It was an entertaining story in which nobody really got hurt apart from the protagonists. I feel sorry for the Brandon’s of this world.

 ‘Above all do no harm’ is a maxim in medicine. Who did he harm?