The Great Tartan Tea Swindle
The Food Programme
BBC
4.4 • 976 Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When Tam o’ Braan began marketing Scottish Tea from his Wee Tea Plantation, the response was astonishing. Upmarket retailers such as Fortnum and Mason and hotels from the Dorchester in London to the Balmoral in Edinburgh paid top prices for the supplies of this rare treat. Scottish farmers caught the bug and bought tea bushes from Tam's plantation that he promised were bred especially for harsh Scottish conditions. Magazines, national newspapers and even the BBC profiled the entrepreneur behind the innovations that were putting Scotland on the tea map of the world.
The only problem was that Tam’s business was based on lies. His name wasn’t Tam o’ Braan, he wasn’t an award-winning tea grower and his tea certainly wasn’t Scottish. Jaega Wise follows the story of Tam and his tea from the hills of Perthshire through the tea salons of London to Falkirk's Sheriff Court.
Producer: Nina Pullman
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:07.4 | This is the story of a book. |
| 0:09.8 | It's a wonderful book. |
| 0:10.9 | She's an immensely valuable writer. |
| 0:13.1 | Award winning, commercially and critically successful. |
| 0:16.6 | Then, cancelled. |
| 0:18.3 | It just infuriates me. |
| 0:19.9 | You're reinforcing stereotypes. I remember feeling sick by |
| 0:23.5 | page 8. A culture war about race, class, and who has the right to say what? I do not think that I wrote |
| 0:30.6 | in any way a racist book. Shadow World, anatomy of a cancellation. Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:40.2 | If he'd picked every leaf of every plant in my plantation, he could still not have achieved |
| 0:45.3 | the amount of tea that he was showing me in this bucket. |
| 0:47.9 | I mean, there were plenty of other things that were suspicious about it, you know. |
| 0:52.9 | Nicknames, they were comparing him to Del Boy. |
| 0:55.3 | This is the story of a tea fraud that shook the industry. |
| 0:59.5 | Well, he was in the newspapers as Tam O'Brien, |
| 1:02.0 | but he transpires his real name is Thomas Robinson. |
| 1:04.7 | I honestly have no idea how that got through. |
| 1:10.0 | I'm angry, actually, I am. |
| 1:12.6 | One that conned the world's tea specialists and the media. |
| 1:16.6 | Oh my goodness, you'll never guess what's happened. |
| 1:18.8 | I made this program about tea 10 years ago. |
... |
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