Tutti Frutti was a BBC Scotland six part drama series, transmitted in 1987 and written by John Byrne. It starred Robbie Coltrane, Emma Thompson, Maurice Roëves, Richard Wilson and Katy Murphy. It brought many of the cast to national prominence.
The Majestics, a legendary Scots rock 'n' rollband, are on the eve of their 1986 "Silver Jubilee" tour, and find themselves in trouble when their lead singer, Big Jazza McGlone, is killed in a car crash.
The group's devious and exploitative manager Eddie Clockerty (Wilson) talks Big Jazza's younger brother, Danny (Coltrane), home from New York for the funeral, into joining the band as their new lead singer. Suzi Kettles (Thompson), a sharp cookie and old classmate of Danny, picks up the guitar and also joins the band. From that moment the ill-fated tour and the band's fortunes appear to take a turn for the better.
The series is a sharply-written and very black comedy. The Majestics' final dispiriting tour of Scotland's less salubrious clubs and pubs is punctuated by childish backstage squabbling and a series of personal disasters. Ageing heart-throb Vincent Diver (Roëves), 'the iron man of Scottish Rock', is cheating on his wife Noreen (a community nurse and sister of drummer Bomba) with girlfriend Glenna (played by Fiona Chambers as simultaneously pathetic, manipulative and glutinously cloying), who has an apparent pregnancy and when it is proved to be false commits suicide by jumping from a bridge into the Clyde. Vincent is also knifed in Buckie by a girl who believes she is his illegitimate daughter from a one-night stand on a tour of long ago. Suzi Kettles proves to have an abusive ex-partner, a dentist, who is eventually given his comeuppance in the dentist's chair by Danny. The fractious on-off relationship between rotund Danny McGlone and Suzi adds a further comic dimension, along with the 'double-act' of the dour Mr Clockerty and his lippy secretary Janice Toner (Murphy). In the final sequence, during the Majestics' grand final concert at Glasgow Pavilion, Vincent douses himself in Polish vodka and sets himself alight.
Genre: Comedy, Drama
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