By T.S. Flynn

Fifty years after its first broadcast, Peter McDougall's Just Another Saturday remains one of the most powerful dramas produced by the BBC's legendary Play for Today series. Following a young Orange Walk drum major across a single day in Glasgow, it begins as a celebration of communal identity and ends as a devastating examination of tribalism, inherited history, and moral awakening. Viewed in retrospect, it also reveals how deeply the narrative architecture pioneered by James Joyce's Ulysses had permeated twentieth-century storytelling.

Introduction

Originally broadcast as part of the BBC's celebrated Play for Today anthology in 1975, Just Another Saturday follows John McNeil, a young Orange Walk drum major whose confidence in the certainties of his world gradually unravels over the course of a single day. What begins as a celebration of communal pride evolves into a painful encounter with violence, hypocrisy, and unexpected acts of human solidarity. The drama remains one of the finest productions ever to emerge from Play for Today, winning the Prix Italia for Best Drama.

Viewed today, the film appears to share a remarkable architecture with James Joyce's Ulysses. This is unlikely to be a matter of direct influence. Rather, Peter McDougall inherited a storytelling tradition already shaped by decades of literature, theatre, television, and cinema that had absorbed many of Joyce's innovations. The result is not imitation but cultural inheritance.

I. The Architecture of the Heights

Both Ulysses and Just Another Saturday begin above the city they are about to explore. Joyce opens atop the Martello Tower, where Stephen Dedalus surveys Dublin from a position of intellectual exile. McDougall begins in a Maryhill high-rise, where John looks down upon Glasgow before descending into the streets.

Both young men begin the day convinced they understand their place in the world. John's careful preparation for the parade resembles a ritual. He polishes boots, adjusts his uniform, and rehearses with his mace as though preparing for a sacrament. Like Stephen, he possesses a coherent identity that the city will steadily dismantle.

II. The Two Fathers

A central irony of McDougall's script is that John is pulled between two men named Dan.

The first Dan is a prominent Orange Lodge official and local loan shark. Immaculately dressed in ceremonial regalia, he represents tribal authority, historical mythology, and institutional power. He links the present to an idealised vision of communal loyalty and Protestant triumph. Yet beneath the symbolism lurks a harsher reality. The same man who speaks of loyalty, fellowship, and tradition profits from the poverty of his neighbours through money lending. Like Joyce's Citizen in the Cyclops episode, he wraps himself in the language of collective identity while exercising power over those around him. His authority depends not only upon maintaining tribal divisions and inherited grievances but upon preserving a social order from which he materially benefits. In both works, the self-appointed guardian of the tribe proves far less interested in solidarity than in control.

The second Dan is John's father. Initially presented as diminished and disappointed, he gradually emerges as the drama's moral centre. Unlike the Lodge official, he possesses no ideology to defend. He offers empathy instead of authority and humanity instead of tribal certainty. In this sense he bears a striking resemblance to Leopold Bloom.

III. Hades in Glasgow

One of the film's most overlooked sequences is its funeral procession. It can be read as McDougall's equivalent of the Hades episode in Ulysses.

For much of the day, the Orange Walk presents itself as a triumphant performance of historical continuity. The funeral quietly undermines that certainty. Generations pass away. Communities change. Rituals survive, but the people carrying them do not. Beneath every grand historical narrative lies the unavoidable reality of human impermanence.

IV. The Long Afternoon: Beer, Boredom, and the Cracks in the Myth

Before the film descends into violence, McDougall exposes something equally corrosive to the mythology of the day: banality.

At Kelvingrove Park the rhetoric of history remains ever-present, but much of the crowd appears far more interested in drinking than in listening. Beer circulates freely. Some participants help themselves to drink from a nearby pub. Speeches are delivered from the platform with immense seriousness, yet much of the audience seems distracted, restless, or entirely uninterested in what is being said. The contrast is devastating. Leaders invoke history, faith, and communal destiny while sections of the crowd treat the occasion less as a sacred ritual than as a day out with friends and an opportunity to get drunk.

The sequence reveals a widening gap between mythology and reality. The leaders speak as though they are participating in an event of immense historical significance. Many of the participants behave as though they are attending an ordinary social gathering. The grand narratives of heritage and destiny dissolve into drinking, gossiping, boasting, and killing time.

Viewed through a Joycean lens, the sequence recalls the wandering social observations that occupy much of the middle movement of Ulysses. Joyce repeatedly punctures grand ideological claims by focusing on ordinary behaviour, bodily needs, and casual conversations. Before McDougall exposes the destructive consequences of tribalism, he first exposes its banality. The myth must be weakened before it can be broken.

V. Nighttown: Fenian Alley

If the funeral procession recalls Hades, then Fenian Alley can be read as McDougall's version of Nighttown.

Here the carefully controlled symbolism of the parade begins to unravel. Music ceases to be celebration and becomes territorial assertion. The march enters hostile ground. Missiles are thrown. Tempers explode. Violence becomes inevitable.

Fenian Alley represents the moment when the myths embodied by banners, uniforms, and songs collide with reality. The city reveals itself as something far more complicated than the narratives John has inherited. Like Nighttown in Ulysses, it is a place where illusions die.

VI. The Two Dans Collide

After the parade returns, the film stages one of its most important confrontations.

The two Dans finally collide. On one side stands the Lodge official with his rhetoric of history, loyalty, and communal obligation. On the other stands John's father, who sees only contradiction beneath the pageantry.

The scene transforms what has previously been symbolic into something explicit. John's father recognises that beneath the banners and speeches lie poverty, exploitation, drunkenness, and violence. Where the Lodge official sees purpose, he sees a machine that consumes its own people.

By this point the reversal is complete. The apparently powerful man has been exposed as hypocritical, while the apparently broken man emerges as the wisest figure in the drama. In Joycean terms, the confrontation recalls Stephen Dedalus's gradual rejection of false fathers and inherited authorities. Tribal certainty gives way to scepticism, experience, and humanity.

VII. Paddy's Shield

The consequences of Fenian Alley do not disappear when the march ends.

Later, in a pub, John finds himself confronted by the brother of one of the youths arrested during the disturbances. Although he is no longer wearing his uniform, he is immediately recognised.

What follows is one of the most memorable scenes in Scottish television. Paddy, played by Billy Connolly, and his Catholic workmates place themselves between John and danger. The irony is unmistakable. The young Orangeman is protected not by his own tribe but by the very people he has been taught to regard as outsiders.

Connolly's famous warning remains unforgettable:

"You'd better save up your Embassy coupons for a Daktari gun, 'cos that's the only way you're gonna get near him!"

Like Bloom shielding Stephen in Circe, Paddy rejects tribal logic in favour of simple human decency. The people John expected to be his enemies become his protectors.

The scene is all the more powerful because it follows the confrontation between the two Dans. What John's father has argued in words, Paddy now demonstrates in practice. Human solidarity proves more meaningful than tribal allegiance.

VIII. Ithaca in Maryhill

The film culminates not in violence but in conversation.

After the long day is over, John returns home and talks with his father. Structurally, the sequence resembles the Ithaca episode of Ulysses. The journey has ended. What remains is reflection.

The men whom John once admired have failed him. The father he initially regarded as weak emerges as his most reliable guide. Like Leopold Bloom, Dan offers no grand theory of history. Instead, he offers perspective.

The achievement of the scene lies in its modesty. John has not escaped Glasgow. He has not solved sectarianism. What he has gained is the ability to see the world around him with greater clarity.

IX. The Hidden Inheritance

The connection between Ulysses and Just Another Saturday becomes more persuasive when viewed through the history of cinema.

Three films are especially revealing. Carol Reed's The Third Man transformed post-war Vienna into a moral labyrinth navigated through encounters and revelations. Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night demonstrated how the compressed urban journey could become mainstream popular cinema. Walter Hill's The Warriors later transplanted the same basic structure into the gang territories of New York.

In each case, protagonists move through a city divided into distinct social worlds. Encounters replace conventional plotting. Movement through urban space becomes a form of self-discovery. The city itself becomes a character.

Around these works sits a wider tradition that includes Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey, Billy Liar, After Hours, and Inside Llewyn Davis. By the time McDougall began writing, the urban odyssey had already entered the creative bloodstream of twentieth-century storytelling.

One consequence of Joyce's achievement was the creation of a narrative architecture that proved remarkably adaptable for later writers and filmmakers. What makes Just Another Saturday remarkable is not that it consciously imitates Joyce, but that it demonstrates how thoroughly that architecture became embedded within modern storytelling itself.

X. Waking from the Nightmare

The power of Just Another Saturday lies in its refusal to offer easy consolation. By the end of the day, John's inherited certainties have been stripped away. The city has forced him to confront the gap between mythology and lived experience.

Fifty years on, Just Another Saturday stands as one of the clearest demonstrations of how narrative forms migrate across culture. McDougall did not need to imitate Joyce directly because he was working within a storytelling tradition that had already absorbed many of the possibilities that Ulysses helped establish. The urban odyssey had become part of the grammar of modern narrative.

Whether carried by an intellectual through Dublin, a drum major through Glasgow, or a gang member through New York, the journey ultimately arrives at the same destination: the individual confronting the cost of belonging to the tribe.

Viewing Note

At the time of writing, complete versions of Just Another Saturday appear to be available on online video-sharing platforms, including YouTube. Availability may change without notice and can depend on copyright status, licensing arrangements, or regional restrictions. Readers should access authorised sources where available and comply with applicable copyright laws in their jurisdiction.

About the Author

Tim Flynn (T.S. Flynn) is an Irish-Australian novelist, essayist, and commentator whose work explores Irish historical memory, migration, literature, music, and cultural identity. His essays have appeared in The Wild Geese and A Sense of Place Magazine, and he writes regularly on Irish history and culture through his Substack.

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