Beyond The Line Of Duty

The Greenock-born actor is shaping the future of Scottish storytelling – on and off screen

- by PAUL ENGLISH

ON the train line between Glasgow and Martin Compston’s hometown of Greenock sat a dilapidated convenience store – a ramshackle outpost on a sorry stretch of wasteland on what was once a row of tenements in Port Glasgow.

As he passed back and forth between the city and the lower Clyde, a career as an actor was no more on this schoolboy’s horizon as a flight to the moon.

But this solitary shop, clad in corrugated iron, gave rise to the sort of imaginative meandering common to the make-believe world in which the young Inverclyder would go on to earn his living.

“I’d see it from the train when I was going by,” said Compston, speaking to The Scots Magazine at the launch of his latest drama Fear. “It was called Gate of India. I wrote a story when I was at school about the back of that shop leading to Mumbai. It was a story about a guy dating a girl from Port Glasgow. He couldn’t understand how her mum made the best curries, with all the different » spices. She'd been going through the portal at the back of the Gate of India shop. I loved the idea of that.”

The flight of fantasy about a long-abandoned unit in the Woodhall area of Port Glasgow was one of several sketches doodled by the young Compston, whose path in those days seemed set on football, as a youth squad member at Greenock Morton FC.

“I used to write stuff like that when I was at school. And I wrote one called ‘The Gospel According To Henrik’, about Jesus trying to get tickets to a Celtic game.”

The stories found their way into a drawer, soon forgotten about in the Compston household, and stayed there until the actor, best known as the star of BBC cop drama Line Of Duty, came across them years later.