Oh Jackie

This is a music video, but Creative Scotland don't finance music videos, so this is a short film that's exactly as long as a song and features characters performing, lip synching, the lyrics. Oh Jackie is a song by a band featuring director Louise Quinn, going by the name of A Band called Quinn, there's apparently an EP to go with it, this involves Kid Loco too, and it's not bad. I mean, the song - I'm not that musical a type, this isn't quite 6music enough for me, but I do computer stuff and get grumpy about distinctions between 'real ale' and 'craft beer' and am rarely without a Uniball Eye UB-150 'Micro' so, you know, it's got a chorus and some sort of tap-footery foot-tappery. I couldn't hum it for you, but that doesn't mean it wasn't good - I keep getting John Williams' themes mixed up.

Film-wise, I'm more up to speed - it's not bad. The programme notes suggest it takes place in the 'Faustian Music Hall' which the thanks would suggest is in Cumbernauld. The name's a bit on the nose, but the location's dead on. The music hall note is a bit too woolly - it's got the air of that flat-cap poly-past, the same kind of accuracy in dating one would get from treating the run of The Broons as a single sedimentary layer. Cycling through the walk from dressing room to stage, it's got something to say about stages, fright, stage-fright - each iteration a little more hellish, escalating or descending through backstage banter to torn-faces to corpse-like makeup to red-whirled smoke. We've got a straw-boatered ventriloquist instead of Virgil, sequin-clad singers in place of ice-encased traitors, more of a meander than an inferno, but with all the slap and grease-paint it's between pan-cake and pandaemonium.

There's nit-picking to be had at a technical level, but music-video budgets aren't what they used to be - what's that line about MTV? Complaints about it not showing videos are old enough to drink. We're a long way past Money For Nothing. It doesn't matter, this is a film - not a bad one, saved, genuinely redeemed, by a last shot - a stark little sequence of silence, or at least just background noise - no tune, just people in corridors, a small black and white photograph beside a Health & Safety in the workplace poster. A genuine, affecting, stunning little moment, a monochrome memento mori.