Take the High Road (renamed High Road from 1994 to 2003) was a Scottish soap opera produced by Scottish Television, which started in February 1980 as an ITV daytime programme, and was broadcast until 2003. It was set in the fictional village of Glendarroch, and exteriors were filmed in the real-life village of Luss on the banks of Loch Lomond.
The series was dropped by most ITV stations in the 1990s – the Scottish, Grampian, Border and Ulster stations continued to screen it until the last episode. From April 2020, the entire series is being made available free to view on the STV Player app.
History
Origins
In 1979, the ITV network decided that its daytime schedule would be improved by the inclusion of a soap opera set in Scotland. At the time the only soap opera being made by any of the three Scottish regional companies was Scottish Television's Garnock Way, set in a Central Belt mining community not far from Glasgow. It had been running in Scotland for three years and was very popular there, but the network rejected it because they wanted, in their words, "lots of Scotch Lochs and Hills". It was decided that a new programme would be made which had its central core in a rural, lochside setting where the community were all part of an estate, comprising a village and several farms. As Michael Elder puts it, the series would have a romantic background against which a practical story of everyday events would be set.
The original name for the fictitious estate and village was Glendhu and the proposed title for the programme was The Glendhu Factor. The network did not like this, because viewers in other ITV regions may have had difficulty with both the placename and the role of factor. As a result, the village was renamed Glendarroch. In Scotland, a factor is a person responsible for managing an estate, but the word has other connotations elsewhere.
Location filming for a pilot had been done in and around the village of Luss on the western shore of Loch Lomond, overlooked by Ben Lomond. The popular song "The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond" contains the line, "O ye'll tak' the high road, and I'll tak' the low road" and so the title High Road, Low Road was suggested, but this was also dropped after someone pointed out that, said quickly, "it sounds like a Chinese takeaway". After some debate it was decided that the series would be called Take the High Road.
In late 1979, partly because of an ITV strike at the time, Garnock Way was axed, and production began on the new programme.
Links to Garnock Way
Take the High Road was introduced as a replacement for Garnock Way, which contained very similar characters and actors to the original characters of Take the High Road. Some viewers were rather displeased about Garnock Way being axed; to help defuse some of the anger, Todd the garage mechanic, played by Bill Henderson, would suffer a nervous breakdown, and would move north to set up business on his own to help resolve his alcohol problems.
Because of shortage of time and the wish to keep most of the existing actors, it did not follow this plan. The appointed producer Clarke Tait decided to have a scenario where Henderson's character, Todd, had his name changed to Ken Calder who happened to be a garage mechanic with a drink problem.
Production and changes
The main writer was series creator Don Houghton. Many of the early scripts were written by Michael Elder, who also played Dr Wallace in the show. Books by the same name as the show were also produced by him. Until 1986, the series only broadcast 40 weeks of the year, with a break usually from January to the spring.
During the course of its existence, Take the High Road went through some major changes and face lifts. Perhaps the most noticeable was the renovation of Blair's store: at first, everything was kept behind the counter as was once common practice; in series two, soon after Brian Blair was released from prison, it was transformed into a walk-around store. A few themes in Take the High Road were broadly in line with Scottish culture – for example, the relationships between crofters like Dougal Lachlan, villagers like storekeeper Isabel Blair, the "lady laird" Elizabeth Cunningham and the estate factor, originally Alan McIntyre. The Protestant religion was a recurring traditional theme and the series highlighted the remoteness of the village and estate. Several storylines focused on the difficulties of access faced by agencies such as the health service and the police, as when an RAF helicopter had to be summoned to Ardvain for Grace Lachlan following her near-fatal heart attack.