Scotland isn’t a very big place. You don’t need me to tell you that, or maybe you do? I don’t know. The fact of the matter is there aren’t thousands of professional Scottish actors on either our big or small screens.

We discovered early on, that the same actors tend to pop up in one capacity or another in most Scottish productions from the last fifty years or so. Show me a working Scottish actor today who hasn’t popped up in Taggart? Not a lot.

There aren’t many movies set in Scotland from over the last thirty years that haven’t featured James Cosmo. He also appears in an early Taggart serial as a pest exterminator and murder suspect.

With this in mind, we began keeping a tally over all the tv shows and movies we’ve covered over the last 50+ episodes and the actors who have featured in them. Luckily for us, the word Tally rhymes nicely with Swally, thus, the Swally Tally was created.

As you can see, the great Alex Norton is running away with it, but can Stephen McCole, as the younger actor catch him up? Have a word with your agent Stephen!