In 1993, a 17-year-old pupil at a Glasgow school was unmasked as a fully grown adult. Now his classmates have made a documentary – My Old School – about the astonishing deception
hat most people remember about Scotland’s notorious schoolboy impostor Brian MacKinnon is the size of the lie. How did a 30-year-old man, with only a dodgy accent and a worse perm, succeed in passing himself off as a 17-year-old high-school pupil in one of the most salubrious suburbs of Glasgow, hoaxing teachers who had already taught him some years before? Moreover, why would anyone want to?
He was eventually exposed but not before dazzling his teachers, hosting house parties for his new teen pals and taking the lead in the school musical South Pacific, delivering an off key and – in hindsight – bravura performance of Younger Than Springtime. Although he secured the necessary grades, he was later expelled from his medical course at Dundee University when his double life was exposed in the media.
“It’s shocking how, in plain sight, people can get away with the most incredible things,” Cumming told me when we met in Glasgow. “People pretend to be different things all the time, but as Scots we think of ourselves as canny. ‘You can’t pull the wool over my eyes.’ So for that to happen here … that’s why it was such a huge story and why we’re still talking about it all these years later.”
The film-making process was like trying to piece together a jigsaw, he explains. “When you’re dealing with this many lies, it’s really difficult to get to the truth. So this is just as close as 30 classmates and teachers can get by coming together.” That kiss proved a particular challenge for McLeod. While concerns were raised at the time of MacKinnon’s exposure, there was not the safeguarding outcry that there would be nowadays – a reminder of how significantly responses to potential sexual exploitation have changed in a fairly short space of time. “We all collectively felt that, while the film someone else would make would be that sinister, dark take, we didn’t want that,” says McLeod.
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