Eileen McCallum has been a mainstay of High Road, the Loch Lomondside soap, for 20 years, but has burst through the bubble which effectively seals off some high-profile soap opera actors from other areas of work.

"I was lucky in that I was working for about 20 years before I was in High Road," she says, explaining that she has always been keen to keep up her theatre work in addition to television.

Now she's making the break with a different sort of television performance. Saved, the half-hour drama about Alzheimer's disease in which she plays a leading role, will be screened on October 17, as the fourth of six competition winners in the New Found Land series on Scottish Television. All the programmes are about mental health and range from the surreal to black comedy, exploring taboo subjects like schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Callousness

This one is set in a women's psycho-geriatric ward where Laura, a young nurse in her first job, is shocked by the apparent callousness with which her experienced colleagues treat their deluded patients. They urge her to cultivate "professional distance", but it's difficult when the real human beings keep shining through the disorientation.

McCallum's character, Fiona, lights up with joy every week when her husband comes to visit, complete with bunch of flowers. She and Laura share a significant moment of understanding when they release a trapped tiger moth into the sunshine. Marianne, a former schoolmistress, played by Edith Macarthur, is intent on leading an escape. Laura's attempts to explain that they are not in prison but in hospital are met with a knowing: "That's what the red guards always say."

Spark Extinguished

It's heartbreaking stuff and becomes ever more so as McCallum's character, apparently calm at the prospect of going home, attempts suicide by slashing her wrists in the shower. It's a shocking, and gory, incident. The nurses "save" her life, but the spark that was there is extinguished by medication.

This is the second year of the competition, funded jointly by SMG Television and Scottish Screen, to enable emergent film-makers to make the transition to longer-length drama of 24 minutes from six or eight, using digital technology which makes it suitable for cinema or television transmission.

Opportunities for young people are close to Eileen McCallum's heart. She clearly gets a buzz from helping them and is frequently consulted by young hopefuls on how to audition for parts.

This one, she says, was very professionally done, although other than the parts played by McCallum and Edith Macarthur, the patients were "lovely ladies from the Sunshine Club in Portobello".

Student Inspiration

How we care for people with dementia is a subject of great concern for Christeen Winford, the writer/director, who who had already made a documentary series on couples, where one of them had Alzheimer's disease and the other became the carer. The inspiration for Saved was from Winford's experience as a student in a psychiatric hospital, but she's convinced that the central conflict between the young nurse's imaginative empathy and the distanced conformity urged by her colleagues is common to many work situations.

This is a complex drama emphasising the precariousness of human understanding. It's not a moral treatise, but it is a drama which its makers hope will stimulate debate both within the professional community and society at large. "Disconnection from others' needs as a form of self-preservation is often encouraged by colleagues and trainers as developing professional distance, but it could be seen as the deliberate deadening of communication and understanding, leading to the emotional neglect of confused and frightened people," says Winford.

She clearly hopes it will be thought-provoking, not least in a personal way. "Dementia is a condition which we are all in danger of contracting. It is much less frightening if we believe it will be cloaked in comforting oblivion. The idea that as memory and ability to communicate fail, the individual inside may be struggling to make sense of a world made frightening by a malfunctioning brain is made even more terrifying if fear, outrage, or confusion are treated as symptoms to be ignored or drugged into apathy," she adds.

McCallum is grateful that her own parents died without having to endure the indignity of Alzheimer's, and rolls out a long, rich chuckle now over the memory of her mother using a wrong word and when asked by McCallum what she meant would say: "You used to be quite bright, now I have to say everything twice."

She had a happy childhood in Glasgow, but her parents were from Aberdeenshire and it is their Doric dialect which provided the basis for the Scottish voice she's happiest in and which she put to good use for an audio book of the Lewis Grassic Gibbon classic, Sunset Song. "Thirty-three hours of recording, but I loved doing it."

Bitten Early

The acting bug bit early. "I was a typical only child who loved reading and had a strong imagination and I dragooned my friends into putting on shows. We had a variety show for Halloween which we started planning in the summer holidays. Do children still do that?" she wonders. Even then, standards mattered.

Live Performer

Radio performances followed her first appearance in a school quiz team and increased when she went to university. By then, people she knew from radio were going on courses for television. It seemed natural to follow and she was in very early television broadcasts from Scotland. "Everything was live in those days, because we didn't know it could be done any other way. You used to have to change your costume as you moved under the camera. I don't know how I'd feel about doing that now, because for many people TV is the medium which allows you to make mistakes and do things again."

The Glendarroch postmistress, however, is impatient with criticism of soaps, pointing out that High Road still has a 44% audience share in Scotland after 20 years, compared with the mere 9% of the Scottish population who bother to go through the door of a theatre.

Good Causes Benefit

At a personal level, she has learned how to deal with being recognised in the street. "I don't go to B&Q on a Saturday afternoon. If people are trying to chat with me, it's impossible to get information about a product." At the same time, she's generous in giving time to causes which can benefit from the blessing of Isobel Blair. After a High Road storyline involved her suffering from cancer, she helped launch Pain Association Scotland.

Rumours of the soap's demise provoke a quietly voiced conviction that it would be a mistake, particularly with such a loyal following and with the BBC about to launch its own Scottish soap.

As she skips off in the sunshine shoes to take up her grandmotherly duties, it's difficult not to see her in the role of unacknowledged national treasure.

The New Found Land series is on Scottish Wednesdays at 10.35pm. Saved is on October 17.