Secrets of the Bay City Rollers, STV 9pm, STV Player, directed by Chris Boudim.

https://player.stv.tv/summary/secrets-of-the-bay-city-rollers

I grew up with the Bay City Rollers. My older brother, Sev, was meant to look a bit like Les McKeon, the lead singer. The latter died in 2021, aged 65. My brother about thirty years before that.  My sister Phyllis had Bay City Roller pictures on her wall. All the girls did. Wee Emily, my brother’s girlfriend, had the cut-off tartan trouser and scarves and even a kiss-me-quick hat with a tartan band.  Rollermania was a normal part of life. My mate Jim McLaren sometimes murders Shang-a-lang in karaoke. It’s an instant take-back, a madeleine moment, to a time when we were kids. Nicky Campell takes us back to the seventies when, hard to believe, but the Rollers were one of the biggest bands in the world. It was all over by 1978, when the band split, and had a million comebacks, with copyright disputes over the right to use the name, Bay City Roller. Tales of lost millions pointed towards their manager, Svengali, and serial paedophile, Tam Paton.

Underneath the tartan scarves and the daft, but catchy numbers, Nicky Campell sets out on a personal quest to link the physical and sexual abuse of young working-class Edinburgh boys, many of them in the local-authority-care system, to sexual abuse by staff members of Edinburgh Academy, the upper middle-class establishment which he attended.  I wasn’t sure if he’d been sexually abused, because he danced around that, but he knew somebody that had. He acts coy in front of his daughter, while saying nothing very much. Cut to images of trees in the twilight.

Staying on the safe side. 1975, the Bay City Roller had their first UK number 1.Campbell reveals that the first chat hit had been promoted by a BBC insider, Chris Denning. The price of fame to get fucked by an old guy. Nobby Clark, the frontman for the band, before Les McKeown wasn’t for naming which band members—if any—answered the call from Paton to step forward. He refused, with the implication, that’s why he was booted out.

He interviews the one that got away, Gurt Magnis, a Danish kid that played in a support band with the Bay City Rollers. He told the viewer in fractured English how Tam Paton worked. His modus operandi. Promise the pretty boy, he’ll be promoted and put in the front line of the Rollers. Paton ordered Gurt to come to his room. He didn’t go. Other thirteen or fourteen-year-old boys like Pat McGlynn joined the band as a replacement for another fresh-faced teenager, Ian Mitchell, who’d burnt out. McGlynn told how Paton had raped him before he joined the band and raped him afterwards when touring. Plying him with drugs first.

An anonymous source face wasn’t show. He’d attended parties at Paton’s Place. He was thirteen when he was raped by Paton and other celebrities that were attending his parties. His job then became to recruit other youngsters living in care homes nearby. To bring them to Paton’s Place to be raped. He’d be left alone—but sometimes not.

Careful editing shows Campbell asking who else was at these paedophile rape parties. No surprise, Jimmy Saville gets mentioned.  Celebrities, well-known faces, but none other named.

Les McKeown fills the gap. The big reveal, with Campbell simpering over the former Roller’s wife, Peko and their son, Picko, was Tam Paton raped him too.

The programme finished on a high note. Woody has got the band touring again. Another version of the million previous versions of the Bay City Rollers, Shang-a-langing along, and singing their greatest hits. Even an elderly man has got to make a living. I’m left with a lingering regret that those child rapists that haven’t died like Tam Paton are still out there. Nicky Campbell does a travelogue into the tartan past with his daughter, and I’m not sure what she brings to the show—there’s stacks of them on telly—but with no real sense of closure.