A FORMER drug addict is to uncover the “truth behind Trainspotting” after being commissioned to produce a drama for the BBC.
Garry Fraser will spend the next six months working on the hour-long production, which will be shown next June.
The 33-year-old plans to use a mixture professional actors and local youths for the piece about life in north Edinburgh.
The programme, which will be filmed in the Muirhouse area of the city, is a concept Garry has been working on since he was introduced to film and media as a mature student at Telford College.
The film will allow him to revisit his troubled youth, when he was placed in care homes 38 times between the ages of eight and 18.
He believes the popularity of the four-part documentary The Scheme helped him promote his own ideas.
Something positive
He said: “What I want to do though is very different from The Scheme.
“It will be based on my own life, overcoming adversity growing up somewhere like Muirhouse in the 1980s to do something positive.
“I want to show why people in housing estates do the things they do, and think the way they think. It’s easy for people to think why that might be, but spend a couple of months there and they’ll soon realise.”
Garry, who has previously worked with Channel 4, is keen to get children from deprived areas involved in the project.
He said: “I definitely want to use local kids because the improvisation they come out with is just incredible and they’ve lived through it too
“But I’ve learned you need a balance of that and professional actors, and they take real inspiration from each other.”
The Irvine Welsh novel Trainspotting was inspired by life in north Edinburgh but Garry, a former heroin addict, wants to show the reality as part of a hard-hitting drama.
Research and background work for the project have already been carried out and filming is due to begin next month.
It is expected that the film will make its debut at the Sheffield Film Festival next summer before appearing across the UK.
