It is BBC anchorwoman Jackie Bird’s most famous interview and, even today, she finds the story of the man who almost got away with living his life over again utterly compelling.
Brian Mackinnon was 32 when he returned to his old high school and fooled classmates and teachers into thinking he was a Canadian teenager called Brandon Lee to fulfil his dream of going to university and becoming a doctor.
A quarter of a century later, the story is being told in the film My Old School written by a former classmate and starring Alan Cumming but whose voice is actually that of Mackinnon himself.
Pursued by the world’s media, Jackie was the first person he spoke to after his double life was exposed.
Here, she remembers their extraordinary meeting.
We broke the story on Reporting Scotland that a chap had gone back to his old school years later and posed as a pupil.
It was truly jaw-dropping. Very quickly the whole world wanted the story. Journalists were flying in from everywhere, particularly the USA.
People wanted to see him and hear him speak. They wanted to know how he pulled it off and persuaded the school that he was 16 when he was really 30-odd.
Thanks to a lot of negotiations behind the scenes, we persuaded Brian to tell his story in a documentary, The Lives Of Brian.
Throughout the whole saga, he always wanted to be the man who told his own story.
The problem was at that time the media was following him everywhere he went.
I knew of a hotel in Tighnabruaich in Argyllshire that would be the last place you would expect to find a media fugitive.
They agreed to put Brian and I up with a TV crew. We even booked in under assumed names.
The only problem was the hotel receptionist, who hadn’t been told.
Her jaw dropped when Brian walked in as his face had been splashed over every newspaper.
She must have thought we were having some sort of lovers’ tryst.”
Jackie spent hours with Brian before recording the interview. We would go for long walks on the beach.
This romantic hideaway hotel was the ideal place for him to tell his story, which he did over a series of interviews.
We got on well together because we were about the same age and shared common interests.
He was very quietly spoken, highly intelligent, with a very, very dry sense of humour. I liked him.
He was an obsessive. He was obsessed by the fact that what had happened to him was unfair and unjust.
He was a man who was trying to right a wrong, by any means.
So the end justified the means, in his eyes. The audacity of it almost seemed to pass him by.
I remember when we were just saying goodbye, I said to him, ‘Do you think you will make it? Do you think you will become a doctor?’
He said, ‘Just imagine one day in the future you are going under the anaesthetic, you are having a procedure and a face with a mask looms over you.
That will be me and I will say to you, ‘Hi Jackie. Trust me, I’m not a doctor.’
That sums up his very, very dry sense of humour.
I am not sure if he really understood what he had been doing but I did not find him a bad man.”
Jackie said it was one of the stories that stand out in her long broadcasting career.
There have been very few that have elicited so much curiosity from my friends. Everyone wanted to know what he was like.
He always wanted to tell his story in his way and did not want to deviate from that.
I have often thought about him over the years and writing his story myself.
Many others have tried but they have all fallen foul of the fact that Brian wants his story told his way.
I think everyone who has dealt with him, if they deviated in any way from the story that he wanted to tell, then he wasn’t very pleasant about them.”
Brian, 58, lives alone in Glasgow and, apart from the words he recorded for the movie, continues to refuse to talk about his life.
Had he not been found out, then the story would have had a very different ending.
He would have gone to university.
He may well have graduated with flying colours as he was a very clever man and may have been a doctor by now.
And no one would have known but for a quirk of fate he was found out.
Knowing Brian, he would not want you to feel sorry for him.
He believes no one knows the real story and who is to say that he is not right in that belief.
I do not believe he meant to do anyone any harm.
I find him absolutely compelling.
The story has lasted to this day because it is a daydream for all of us to go back and live our lives again.
The thing about Brian is that he almost achieved it.
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