THE defining photo/image of the 1997 devolution referendum campaign is surely that of the Saltire being raised on the top of Arthur’s Seat in the early dawn, after the Yes result was announced.

The man responsible for thinking up this visual coup was my old friend Bob Cuddihy, who has just passed away at the age of 78.

If that famous picture looks a bit like the iconic one of US marines raising the Stars and Stripes over Iwo Jima in the Second World War, that’s no accident. Bob was an American refugee who made his home in Scotland and devoted a lifetime to making this a better place. With Bob around, life was never dull.

We are used today to thinking that the folk who matter when it comes to getting things done are the elected politicians. Sadly, the political class in Scotland and the UK in recent decades has turned out to be an anodyne, risk-averse, clueless bunch.

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It was left to folk like Bob – someone for whom the epithet “anti-woke” was coined – to think the unthinkable. And to come up with the radical – if sometimes harebrained – ideas needed to shake up a moribund, conservative place like Unionist Scotland at the end of the 20th century.

A long-time journalist with Scottish Television in its heyday as a serious news channel, then a jobbing media consultant and piratical PR man, Cuddihy was a force of nature who exposed hypocrisy and stupidity wherever he found it. And he found a lot in Scotland.

Bob and his siblings were sent to Scotland in the 1960s after the premature, tragic deaths of their parents. It was the making of Bob. The dour nature of Scotland in the 1950s and early 60s provoked a cultural backlash led by the likes of radical educationalist

As Neil, the anti-psychiatrist RD Laing, and impresario Richard Demarco. It was this questioning milieu that saved young Bob Cuddihy and fellow American refugees, including Demarco’s sidekick Jim Haynes, founder of Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre.

Young Bob went to Kilquhanity free school in Kirkcudbright where, under the headmastership of John Aitkenhead (essentially his surrogate father) the wayward boy became a talented, impassioned man.

Bob continued his experimental education at the (then) new Napier College in Edinburgh under the maverick Joe Dunning. Napier in the 60s and 70s (when I taught there) was dedicated to reburnishing the traditional polytechnical Scottish approach to education, mixing rigorous academia with practical experience – a tradition now destroyed by bureaucracy and state mismanagement.

Dunning hired an exotic array of other maverick thinkers and doers at Napier, and he happily invited Bob to represent the student body as part of the management team. One result was Bob editing The Red Paper On Education, still an unrequited blueprint for giving Scotland the education system it needs. Bob also learned the art and science of journalism at Napier under a faculty of real journalist hacks.

Bob’s golden moment was as a TV reporter and interviewer at Scottish Television in the 70s and 80s, where his American directness (and the fact he knew more about politics than the politicians) was a hit with the audience.

He had the good fortune to find another mentor at STV, Russell Galbraith, the station’s news boss and a hard-bitten newspaperman who saw TV reporting as a branch of news and not entertainment. Changed days, indeed.

As a reporter, Cuddihy took on everyone from Richard Nixon to Gordon Brown (below) and many a lowly toon councillor (including me) in between. There’s a lesson here: democratic politics and good government thrive on serious reporting and intelligent interviewing. Sadly, the days are long gone when either BBC Scotland or STV can be bothered.

It was for that reason that Bob and I embarked on a series of campaigns and projects to subvert and reform broadcasting in Scotland. We started in the early 90s, after Bob had quit STV, with a campaign to bring the headquarters of the proposed new Channel 5 TV station to Edinburgh. We quickly discovered that The media likes nothing better than to talk about itself, so we got lots of UK coverage for our insurgency.

WE also got the attention of some Scottish Conservative ministers who were beginning to react to the rise of pro-devolution sentiment. Our campaign failed, largely because we could not talk up enough local investment interest, but it made a mark.

It also had its funny moments. At our press launch, with a slick commercial featuring Dave Brubeck’s Take Five (inevitably Bob’s idea), all the TV monitors failed to function. Cue cynical comments from the attendant media.

With the 1997 devolution referendum, Bob and I resurrected our subversion by launching a campaign to get responsibility for regulating the media in Scotland devolved to the new Scottish Parliament.

This was not an altogether daft notion, as the German federal system had devolved a lot of media supervision to individual the individual Lender states, as an antidote to the dangers of a centralised control of the news. We took this as a template and did a lot of lobbying, including a presentation at the Edinburgh TV Festival. But we did not get a lot of support from within our movement, which was a dangerous political myopia.

I later discovered that our two-man band had put the fear of death into the Unionists. Labour-supporter Gus Macdonald, then chair of the STV group, worked behind the scenes with Donald Dewar to ensure that media did not come under devolved regulation. Macdonald ended up in Tony Blair’s Cabinet.

Bob and I also conceived the idea of putting the devolved parliament in Glasgow rather than in Edinburgh, which was (and is) too establishment. We approached Bob’s old friend John Brown, then head of communications and PR for Glasgow Council. He was enthusiastic, but the project never got off the ground.

The St Andrew’s House civil service in Edinburgh wanted the politicians in their pocket and thus it transpired. But I still rather fancy a parliament building in Freedom Square and closer to the people.

Frustrated, Cuddihy and I got involved directly with programme-making. We joined with Bob’s great buddy, the anarchist genius Dave McWhinnie, whose Lamancha company churned out wonderfully inventive documentaries from a modest studio in south Edinburgh.

McWhinnie passed away unsung last year. He fancied himself as a Scottish Roger Corman, the doyen of Hollywood’s low budget “exploitation” directors. McWhinnie excoriated the non-practicing bureaucrats who subsidise what passes for the Scottish film industry.

Ours was a factious partnership but McWhinnie turned out some adventurous productions (winning a best for cinematography at Sundance) plus one of the worst films ever made – I was a producer.

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Bob, McWhinnie and I shared a table at the Doric Tavern in Edinburgh every week for years, together with the late, great John Erikson of Edinburgh University, who single-handedly acted as the discrete interlocutor between the Pentagon and the Russian military.

We consumed too many bottles of red wine discussing outlandish movie ideas or the likely course of the Third World War.

I shall miss Bob Cuddihy. His passing leaves Scotland diminished. But somewhere in the Heavenly Doric Tavern, there is an empty chair waiting for me.