There's Something about Mary(hill)... What happened when Hollywood came to Firhill 🎬
The unlikely tale of how top screen talent took their access-all-areas cameras to Patrick Thistle... and lucked out with a memorable playoff melodrama
“Saved your documentary, by the way.”
Brian Graham’s memorable one-liner in the final episode of an exceptional new four-part documentary on Partick Thistle is delivered with the timing and accuracy which the veteran striker usually reserves for the penalty box.
Graham’s zinger was directed towards a relieved documentary crew huddled on the touchline after Thistle dramatically managed to secure their spot in the 2024-25 playoffs on the last day of the season. “Brian was 100% right,” laughs director of STV’s One Team in Glasgow, Sam Neave. “My view was that playoffs and relegation are good for drama. Anything in the middle, not good. So, I had been absolutely shitting myself!”
Ironically, Graham’s finest hour would arrive shortly after his immortal punchline, when his two goals — his 99th and 100th for the Maryhill club — edged them past Ayr United at Somerset Park in the second leg of their playoff quarter-final. Their eventual loss to Livingston in the semi bookended a turbulent campaign, in which Graham (nowadays playing at Premiership Falkirk) and current manager Mark Wilson took over in February 2025 and not only resurrected their playoff ambitions but saved the documentary.
One Team in Glasgow charts the highs and lows of season 2024-25 in expert fashion. This is no PR puff piece, no sanitised All or Nothing bore-fest. It is a serious slab of storytelling directed by multi-Emmy nominee Neave (The Jinx) and exec produced by Academy Award winner Charles B Wessler (Green Book). But even the best storytellers need drama, and if Thistle had failed to winkle their way into the playoffs at the last moment, then a year-long project would have fizzled out.
“To me, we could always make something out of them not winning because winning has not been the story of this club, but we were given a few golden nuggets at the end,” says Neave. “We were also given the incredible storyline of Kris Doolan and [assistant] Paul McDonald ending up being replaced by Brian and Mark Wilson. It fell into our laps.”
Graham is the central character in this access-all-areas documentary. His story is told on the pitch, through numerous net-bulging contributions, and off it, when cameras visit his home streets of Barmulloch. He is also the key figure in incredible dressing-room footage when he scraps with under-performing teammates and drives the side forward through sheer force of will.
When director Neave cut together a small amount of early footage to give the players an idea of the project — though he stresses that the club had zero editorial control — goalkeeping coach Kenny Arthur joked that “It’s the Brian Graham show!”. It’s not — there’s much more to it than that, but from the moment he wanders on screen with his matinee-idol looks and unstoppable mentality, Graham is box office.
Neave adds: “Right away, Brian understood the potential of it. He’s a very rational, long-term strategic thinker — and it doesn’t hurt that he’s good-looking and charismatic and comes across well on camera. It’s not that he doesn’t have media training, it’s that he doesn’t give a shit. He wears his heart on his sleeve, and is genuinely passionate and annoyed when they don’t do well.”
So how did an Academy Award-winning producer and an Emmy-nominated director end up making a documentary about Partick Thistle? The story begins with Donald McClymont, a successful Scottish businessman and Thistle director since 2023, who is based in Palm Springs, California. McClymont put in a call to Wessler — whose credits include Green Book, There’s Something About Mary and Dumb and Dumber — with the offer of a Welcome to Wrexham-style access-all-areas documentary on the Maryhill club.
An intrigued Wessler started looking for a director with football chops and alighted upon Neave, who had just concluded work on The Jinx Part Two, the follow-up to the ground-breaking 2015 documentary which led to the murder conviction of Robert Durst. Neave’s family moved around a lot when he was young and he spent three years in Edinburgh. When Wessler quizzed him on his football knowledge — suggesting that he may not have heard of the Maryhill Magyars, Neave responded by telling him the Billy Connolly joke about Partick Thistle: “Most Englishmen think they are called Partick Thistle nil.” At that moment, Wessler knew he had found his man.
Neave then immediately jumped on a flight to Scotland, to take in Thistle’s playoff tie against Airdrie in May 2024. They won — before losing to Raith Rovers in the semi-final — and Neave saw enough to fire his imagination. “I immediately locked into this idea of who the fans were and what this team means in this city,” he says. “I knew Rangers and Celtic were the dominant forces, but I didn’t know no one else had won the fucking league since 1985! And I didn’t know quite the extent of the rivalry and the way that they overshadow everything. Partick Thistle exists very much in the context of Glasgow — and of not being Rangers or Celtic. And they’ve been around 150 years — they’re not a flash in the pan, they’ve done things in their history, but generally speaking, they don’t win much. So, the question becomes: ‘Why are you here?’.”
The series avoids the lazy stereotyping of a club frequently cast as a refuge for West End bohemians and local students. There is colour aplenty — their famous mascot Kingsley wrestling punters to the ground in the hospitality suite — but a noticeable absence of couth. This portrait of a community features a boy who volunteers to pick up rubbish from the stand after his school day, and when asked if he has ever met star striker Graham, replies: “Yeah, I look after his dog.”
Neave says: “When you look at All or Nothing, it’s not like you’re getting into the penthouse of dressing rooms, with Pep moving the magnets. We knew early on, this was never going to be about football tactics. Nobody gives a shit about that. It had to be about the personalities and emotions, and then mirroring that with the fans. When they’re in alignment, and when they’re not in alignment, that’s really the heart of the story. That’s the engine. It’s about community, a locus of a community where people can get together and express their emotions on the weekend. Even when I spoke to the players, I explained that this was not a piss-take, not a gotcha, not sensationalist. It’s also not nerdy football. It should be full of life.”
All four episodes of One Team in Glasgow are available now on the STV Player.
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