Kane's Ladder

It's 1975 and Britain is a country in political flux. In Glasgow the dirty old Victorian slums have been razed to the ground, replaced with brand new slums twenty storeys high. Chips are a health food and the very mention of filet mignon would spark a riot on the Govan Road.

As its citizens struggle to adapt to their changing world, they wonder what ill replace the steel mills and the shipyards, whether they look stupid in flares and what the lyrics of the Bay City Rollers song 'Shang-A-Lang' actually mean?

Ten-year-old Steve Duff lives in one of the city's unexceptional newbuild estates but the longs to be poor and neglected like this friend Wally, whose parents are incapable drunks. Frustratingly for Steve, he's saddled with a conventional, stable and middle-class family. Then, over the course of a year, his father has a fling with a barmaid and leaves home, his mother's response is to start a psychology degree, his sister is arrested for demanding money with menaces and his brother gets a girl pregnant. As if the normal indignities of growing up weren't bad enough...