A NYC schoolteacher now working in Amsterdam, an Australian-born Parisian hotel bartender residing in Edinburgh (who the schoolteacher met at her hotel the night before), and a vibrant chaplain semi-retired from conducting “Trainspotting Tours,” walk into a bar. But this isn’t a setup for a Sick Boy joke – nor is it just any bar. The three met up in a dank corner of the very same pub near Princes Street that was used in the opening scene of Boyle’s cult flick. (And the schoolteacher is my sister – who found plenty of local color off-screen while I was busy covering the Edinburgh International Film Festival for Filmmaker magazine. Setting the scene in his thick Scottish brogue, guide Tim Bell pulled a worn copy of Irvine Welsh’s infamous novel from his rucksack and proceeded to take his guests on an absurd, spontaneous, and magical, Speed Levitch-worthy journey where literature, film and reality meshed and sometimes collided (as in the case of the glossary at the back of Welsh’s book – which Bell assured his listeners is pure “shite,” especially when it comes to the definition of the word “tidy”). And my sister – who afterwards pronounced herself truly “spawny” – assured me that neither Welsh nor Boyle could have scripted a better scene. Quoting E.M. Forster she was reminded that, “One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.”
All of which got me keen to learn more about Bell and his unusual labor of love. So I spoke with the gregarious cultural historian a week after the Edinburgh International Film Festival.
Lauren Wissot: Other than the fact that you’re a longtime Edinburgh resident what caused you to connect so deeply with Welsh’s book?
Tim Bell: I read Trainspotting shortly after it came out. I liked it. It was fresh, cheeky, noisy, funny, moving, and had a ring of authenticity. As a work of polished literature there were (are) serious failings, but it packed a punch. “Nice try, Mr. Welsh,” I thought. “But it’s too topical and too local. It won’t last and it won’t travel.”
LW: In a city abundant with historical tours and ghost walks I’m curious to know what prompted you to start showing visitors around the Trainspotting landmarks?
TB: In 2004 I was trying to make out as a tour guide. I couldn’t bear to be a kilted wonder on the High Street, and although I was getting some work running people round Scotland I didn’t like the relationship with over-wealthy Indians and Americans. I received an email from journalists at “de Volkskrant,” a Dutch newspaper with a business name like mine (Leith Walks). Surely I did an Irvine Welsh tour? I didn’t, but I researched one and started, and there has been such an appreciative response ever since that I made it my niche in the marketplace. There is approximately a fifty-fifty British/non-British break in the clientele right now. It’s quite striking how Trainspotting is an object of study around the world.
By the way, the ghost tours are entertainment (nothing wrong with that), and some of the other literary tours are highly dubious. Standing on the High Street the guide says, “Robert Louis Stevenson may have had something like this in mind when he wrote that…” They are given by actors (nothing wrong with that either), but many don’t really know their stuff in any depth, they have only learned their lines. My tour is on location in a way that other tours can never be. It’s in the nature of my subject – Welsh is on location. And I do know my subject. It doesn’t really work for stag parties – they are better getting a ghost tour. My tour is for the genuinely curious and for hardcore aficionados and students.
LW: So why have you decided to stop conducting tours and to write a guidebook?
TB: I’m doing the tours for the time being, though not as a commercial enterprise (see my website). It keeps my relationship with the material fresh. I have read a lot of comment and criticism of Trainspotting, and I can see that although some of it is perceptive, none of it is written with any local knowledge at all, nor is it really putting it into its historical context. Trainspotting the book, the play and the film combine to make a single 1990s cultural phenomena. The remainder of Welsh’s output is sold on the Welsh brand. Nobody has put an introduction to all three (book, play, film) into one book. An overarching theme of what I am doing is captured in a quote from Howard Jacobson, “The greatest artists conjure an everywhere out of a highly specific somewhere.”
LW: Do Welsh and Danny Boyle know about your Trainspotting passion? If so, how do they feel about your capitalizing (though I use the term loosely since your pursuits aren’t exactly cash cows) on their work?
TB: Welsh certainly knows, though I have no direct communication with him. He isn’t my story – that’s Trainspotting. I can check certain biographical details from people who have known him, much of which explains the content of the book. Boyle? I have no idea. He has much bigger fish to fry these days. (I have had a question-and-answer correspondence with Harry Gibson, playwright of the play.) They should both appreciate that continuing comment and criticism of their work keeps the Trainspotting industry going. Welsh has certainly taken the view that his work has a life of its own, and any explanations of his work from him would kill further speculation and comment.
LW: Lastly, I heard that you have some problems with the authenticity of Boyle’s film. Could you discuss your issues with it?
TB: The film has nothing to do with Leith. Only twenty-four screen seconds are filmed in Edinburgh (not Leith), and seventy-percent of the film is shot in a disused cigarette factory in Glasgow, and the rest on various locations in Scotland and in London. Although Leith people are highly offended, as far as the filmmakers are concerned this is a Scottish-themed film. The scene in the highlands after the train pulls out, and the shot in Princes St., Edinburgh are the only distinctively Scottish shoots. The rest of the impression is made by accents and dialect, though they make the east coast wince. Robert Carlyle and Kelly MacDonald are broad Glasgow, Ewan McGregor sounds like what he is – the son of a middle-class family in comfortable rural Perthshire – and Jonny Lee Miller is a f’ing Englishman! The only one with an authentic street-level, Edinburgh accent is Ewan Bremner, and it is greatly modified. It doesn’t matter to the filmmakers, though. It’s Scottish.