LAST Saturday night, a barren one as it happened and one which had promised nothing more than talent shows and the BBC’s obsession with the House of Hanover, suddenly took a turn for the better. There, on the fourth or fifth page and amidst all the American redneck channels, was ITV4 coming to the rescue with Escape From New York, one of my favourite all-time movies.

If you haven’t seen this film then I recommend that you do as soon as you can. Directed by the mighty John Carpenter, who has said that he conceived it as his personal reaction to the Watergate scandal, it is deliciously subversive. As well as giving us one of cinema’s great anti-heroes, it also possesses a music score, co-written by Carpenter himself, which is sepulchral and menacing in all its synthesised glory.

The film was made in 1981 and set in a then futuristic 1997, when the city of New York has been turned into a single, massive maximum security facility to house the country’s hardest criminals. The prowling military helicopters and machine-gun posts along the perimeter wall mean there can be no escape. When the President’s hijacked plane is forced down by leftist rebels, the state sends in Snake Plissken, a renegade Purple Heart veteran (and owner of the coolest name in cinematic history) to get him out. During the course of the 22 hours he is granted to rescue the Chief, Snake, played by Kurt Russell, encounters a weird and sinister assortment of vagabonds and desperadoes.

I was pleased then to learn afterwards that a re-make of Escape From New York is underway and that our own Gerard Butler is slated to have a turn at playing Snake, chibbing and battering his way through all the bams.

I’d want to make it a satire though, feeding off all the constitutional hoopla and mayhem that’s been abroad in Scotland for the last four years. Despite Scotland’s artistic community having been hugely engaged with the independence referendum, precious little has emerged since then that reflects this. To listen to some of our best-known auteurs and thesps you’d have thought that the nation was on the cusp of a golden age of creative thought borne on the seas of our new enlightened democracy.

Perhaps there has and I’ve just missed it; or perhaps I’m being unfair, as it’s still too soon after the event to develop a considered, profound and creative response to our big democratic engagement. The constitutional debate has sadly now been reclaimed by the chattering and political classes amidst their obsession with process and profits. “You’ve had your day out in the adults’ playground, so run along now just leave the real stuff to we, who are the professionals.” The days of dreaming are over, the visions have ceased and it is now the Smith Commission and fiscal deficits. It’s all got deadly serious again.

And so I am calling on Alan Bissett and some of his creatives to trip out together and think about a Scottish remake of Escape From New York. They can have this wee synopsis for nothing. I’d set it in Edinburgh and call it Escape From New Town. It would be set in a dystopian, apocalyptic future of the Unionists’ vivid imagination after Scotland has voted to break away from the rest of the UK.

The more hysterical of the Unionist leaders have persuaded tens of thousands of the gullible and well-meaning to come with them to England because there are already reports, spreading on social media, of rampaging bands of Nationalists killing all the first-born of Unionist families who refuse to recant their Unionist beliefs.

But when they get to England a shock is in store for them. Owing to the global refugee crisis, England has put up the shutters and is refusing to let in any of the revolting jocks. They are traumatised and give themselves up to all sorts of vile passions and practices as they refuse to accept the rule of law in the hated Nationalist jackboot state Scotland has become.

So they are rounded up and herded into Edinburgh’s New Town (where many of them stay anyway). A 20-foot wall is erected to keep them in. Over time, the New Town adopts a medieval way of life where only the strongest can survive and where the sick and the elderly are fed to feral packs of designer cockapoos and labradoodles. An uncompromising and rudimentary economic system based on bartering is developed. The community (if you can call these savage gangs of paranoid malcontents a community) is ruled over by a sinister figure known only as The Dook of New Town, who wears a 19th century naval great-coat, dark sunglasses and a furry, leopard-print fedora. He has a mane of silver hair and, when dispensing summary justice to those who cross him, is heard to pronounce the words “You will now suffer a deficit.”

One fateful night though, the Scottish President’s helicopter runs out of fuel and is forced to ditch on Charlotte Square, where she is quickly kidnapped by the crazed mendicants who roam the streets after dark. She is brought before The Dook and forced to debate with him for her life on charges of witchcraft on a specially constructed scaffold. She knows that one clumsy phrase, one cocky shake of her well-coiffed mane, could see her swinging from the nearby gibbet. A sinister Comintern of black clad women are sitting at the side, knitting Arran sweaters and reciting the Daily Record vow.

A grim race against time ensues as the Scottish government turns to the only man who can insinuate himself into the New Town and come back with the Madam President alive before the cold dawn breaks: Buckfast Tam, a gifted former politician brought down by drink and women and jailed for tax evasion.

Buckfast Tam would be played by Peter Mullan, under the recently passed law that Peter Mullan must have a part in every television drama production made in Scotland. The Dook of New Town would be played by Brian Cox. In a cameo, Robert Carlyle would reprise his role as Begbie, this time playing a psychotic, women-hating internet troll.