Introducing Doric TV’s webmaster – Gordon Mackay

Back in October 2019 I had a blether with Jill McWilliam who was looking for some advice on how to best distribute her video content. I’ve been friends with Jill for around 25 years and have always been aware of her interest in documenting the heritage, culture and language of her Doric roots.

At the time of our ‘blether’, Jill was uploading videos to her own YouTube channel but felt she needed to go about it in a different way to optimise the availability of her content to anyone who might be interested. We decided to set up a website, and as we chatted that first evening, we secured the doricfuture.co.uk domain name and as I had a little bit of experience in building basic websites, we set about creating a platform to showcase Jill’s work.

Since then the platform has expanded to include Blog submissions from a wide range of contributors and during the lockdown of 2020 Jill’s much acclaimed lockdown video collection was the catalyst behind our sister platform dorictv.co.uk. Doric TV instantly caught the attention and imagination of a diverse and talented group of people ranging from worldwide superstars to ordinary people who have done extraordinary things.

My job has been to pull all of this together in a format that visitors will enjoy, and from the feedback we continue to receive from every corner of the world, I think we must be doing something right.

For my own part, I’ve always been interested in design, I went to art college after leaving school, but never actually worked in the industry. I’ve actually been involved in sales all of my working life, and now in my 64^th year, I’m semi-retired with my passion for design reignited by the amazing software and technology available today which is a million miles away from the tools I used at college nearly 50 years ago!  So every day’s a school day when working on projects like Doric TV.

I’m also proud to say that I do have my own Doric roots, my mother is a Peterheid quine from a Buchan Doric speaking fishing family, so the Doric language has been around me all of life, even although the first 24 years of them were at a bit of a distance as I was born and brought up in Grangemouth before relocating to the North East in 1981.

I’ve also had a life long interest in folk music, I was still at school when I played in my first band ‘Garron’ pictured here (I’m the one 2nd from the left), and 50 years later I still get a lot of tunes out of the same 3 chords. I have made a lot of great musical friends along the way and played in a few great bands. I was a founder member of the Cruden Bay Folk Club and also built and run their website. I have been happy to feature many of the talented musicians and performers from that club across the musical sections of the Doric Future and Doric TV websites.