A Policeman Steps Into Colonsay’s Oyster Succession

English-language television will show a former Munich policeman learning oyster work on Colonsay from 6 September 2026. The island counted 122 people at the 2022 census, ten fewer than in 2011, and the film arrives as a family succession story, not a holiday postcard.

Lars Mack asked his Scottish wife, Sandy Abrahams, to leave city life so he could train on her father’s beds. The 30-minute film first shown on German television on 4 February 2025 follows that bet through one hard winter.

The Policeman Who Asked to Learn the Beds

Mack grew up in Nattheim in Baden-Württemberg, trained as a butcher, then left the family shop for the navy and a ship’s galley before more than 20 years as a police officer in Munich. A difficult separation cut him off from two older children. On the job he felt respect draining out of the city, and an angry driver came close to running him down.

He met Sandy, a lawyer who grew up on Colonsay, at a swimming contest. They married on the island in July 2022. Their son, Finn, was on the way. Mack’s father-in-law, Andrew Abrahams, had been looking for someone to take on the oyster farm on The Strand, the tidal flats between Colonsay and Oronsay. Mack volunteered.

If I had never met Sandy, I would still be a police officer.

Lars Mack, former Munich police officer, speaking after the move

He also told the film crew he put it to her straight: a new life on the island would be something, so they should go and leave the rest behind. Sandy said yes. She knew the place. He is, by his own description, lively and sociable. The film’s question is whether winter silence will suit him, and whether oyster work can hold a man who used to work a city shift.

The English version is scheduled on DW English from 6 September 2026, with Sunday slots at 00:02, 03:30 and 11:30 UTC and further showings through 10 September. The German original, from the Echtes Leben series, is the same 30-minute portrait.

122 People, and a School Down to Two

Colonsay and Oronsay sit in the Inner Hebrides, about 10 miles long and two miles wide, with the next settled community almost 20 miles away. Scalasaig has the pier, the shop and post office, a hotel and a café. There is a resident doctor. There is no high school.

Kilchattan Primary, on the west side of the island, has a listed capacity of 21. When Colonsay Community Development Company advertised a family croft tenancy in January 2025, the school had two pupils. Older children board at Oban High in the week and come home by boat or plane at the weekend.

COLONSAY IN FIGURES

Scottish planners have classed among the Reliant Outer Isles Colonsay and Oronsay, a group with thin on-island services and a ferry that has to do a lot of the work. The island’s own welcome page promises daily summer and thrice-weekly winter boats from Oban, plus a summer link via Islay, and a small air service.

That is the setting the film treats as solitude. On the ground it reads as a labour problem. A shop, a school, an ambulance crew and a fire service all need working-age people who stay after the last tourist car drives off the ramp.

Andrew Abrahams Built the Beds and the Bees

Abrahams started oyster farming on The Strand in the late 1970s. He is also the island’s beekeeper. The British Beekeepers’ Association, advertising him as a speaker in February 2026, said he has kept bees commercially on Colonsay for around 50 years.

The oysters sit in the tide between the two islands. Seed to plate takes years of lifting, grading and fighting crabs and weather. The film calls it a tough business that feels like a holiday in summer. Abrahams had looked for a successor for a long time before Mack offered to learn.

The bees are not a sideline. Colonsay and Oronsay hold one of the few isolated populations of the native black honey bee, Apis mellifera mellifera, in Europe. Joseph Tinsley, a west of Scotland bee inspector, used the islands’ isolation in the 1940s and 1950s. Abrahams rebuilt the stocks from empty hives.

THE BLACK BEE RESERVE

• The law: the 2013 black bee order bans any honey bee on Colonsay and Oronsay except Apis mellifera mellifera, and it came into force on 1 January 2014.
• The stocks: The reserve page records 60 stocks of native black bees, kept for honey and for conservation.
• The crop: About 100 free-mated queens and 20 nucleus colonies go out each year on top of the honey.
• The gap: The islands have stayed free of varroa, which is why the stock matters to scientists as well as to a single commercial keeper.

If Mack is the next pair of hands on the oyster trestles, he is also walking into a specialist holding that took half a century to build. Luxury Hebridean cruises now sell Colonsay oysters as a tasting stop. The product has a market. The winter work still belongs to whoever will lift cages when the light is short.

A Smokery, a Croft and Nine New Houses

The oyster farm is not the only job the island has tried to press into a newcomer’s hands. Richard Irvine, 65, built Colonsay Smokery with salmon from the Mowi farm off the east coast and then said he wanted to give the business away for nothing, once he had his money back, to a family who would live there year-round.

The population is dwindling on the island. We need younger people to staff the ambulance service, the fire service and actually to just become the next generation to run the community.

Richard Irvine, founder of Colonsay Smokery

Irvine said the salmon farm employs 10 people on the island. Mowi has operated a farm of about 3,500 tonnes off Colonsay since around 2015. When a first phase of community housing opened in May 2025, three of the four homes for affordable rent were earmarked for Mowi staff.

THE JOBS ON OFFER

• Oyster farm: Andrew Abrahams wants a successor on The Strand, and Mack is there to learn the work.
• Smokery: Irvine offered the hand-smoked salmon business free to a couple or family who would settle.
• Croft: CCDC, with Scottish Land Fund backing, advertised the 11-acre Ben Sgoiltaire croft at Uragaig in January 2025, with a four-bed house to rent and a deadline of 23 March 2025, aiming at a family with primary or nursery children.
• Houses: The May 2025 opening mixed two homes for low-cost ownership, four for affordable rent and three discounted self-build plots, nine units in that phase.

Dannie Onn, a CCDC director, said earlier community crofts had already brought people of working age, and that the primary school itself supports island jobs. Darragh Keenaghan, another director, called the croft a rare chance for a family who could handle year-round island life. The allocation was written to grow both the school roll and the settled working-age count.

The housing math sits under all of that. Campaigners, including land-reform voice Lorne MacLeod in 2023, have put second homes and self-catering at more than 40 percent of Colonsay’s stock, a figure repeated when the new houses opened. You can offer a smokery for free and still fail if there is no house a worker can actually occupy through February.

HOW THE ISLAND TRIED TO RECRUIT

1. 1 January 2014: The bee order comes into force, locking Colonsay and Oronsay as a black-bee reserve.
2. January 2025: CCDC advertises Ben Sgoiltaire to a family, with Kilchattan Primary at two pupils.
3. 4 February 2025: The 30-minute film of Mack’s first season is shown on German television.
4. May 2025: The first phase of affordable housing opens, and Irvine goes public with the free smokery.
5. 6 September 2026: English-language slots begin for the same film.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The move: Mack, Sandy and Finn live on Colonsay, and he is training on Abrahams’s oyster farm.
• The count: The 2022 census figure is 122, and the January 2025 school figure is two pupils.
• The law: Only native black bees may be kept on the two islands.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The smokery: Whether a family has taken Irvine’s offer, and on what terms.
• The croft: Whether Ben Sgoiltaire was let after the March 2025 deadline.
• The farm: Whether Mack has, or will, take legal control of the oyster business, or remains a trainee in Abrahams’s operation.

Those gaps are the point of the recruitment drive. A film can show a man learning to lift a cage. It cannot show whether the next child on the school roll stays long enough to board at Oban.

The Winter Ferry Runs Three Times a Week

CalMac lists the Oban to Colonsay crossing at two hours 15 minutes from Oban. In summer the boat is a daily fact of life. In winter it drops to three days a week. Storms cancel sailings. Prescriptions and parts wait. Islanders in the film have a phrase for the season: the demons come.

Daylight shrinks to a few hours. Mack is a cold-water swimmer and goes into the sea when he can. Sandy goes back to paid work from home, which leaves him with long stretches of childcare and oyster labour in an old house the crew found warm only by the fire. The film treats that as a test of temperament. It is also a test of a timetable. When the ramp is up for four days, a sociable newcomer has a very small public.

Summer still feels like a holiday, which is why visitors remember beaches and the café. The year-round island is the three-boat week, the two-pupil school and whoever is willing to work shellfish in a gale. National islands policy, published in 2026, still leans on inward moves. A 2023 survey found 79 percent of islanders aged 18 to 35 intended to stay, up from 71 percent in 2020, and 41 percent of respondents had moved to their island for the first time. Deaths are expected to outnumber births. The people who arrive have to want February, not only July.

The School Sandy Attended Now Has Two Pupils

Sandy Abrahams went to Kilchattan Primary when the roll was a handful. Head teacher Kim Bentley, quoted when the croft was advertised, said the school runs on relationships, child-led and play-based, with a lot of time outdoors. That model only exists while there are children to teach and a teacher to keep.

In 2019 the same school was recruiting a head for six primary pupils and one preschooler, with a house attached to the job. The January 2025 figure of two pupils is the line the community company used when it asked a family to take a croft. Finn, still small in the film, is not yet a statistic. He is the reason a lawyer and a policeman can change the roll by one household if they stay.

Mack told the crew that 120 inhabitants is not many, and that the smallness is what appealed, something you have to live through. The census number is 122. The difference is not the story. The age mix is. Pensioners can keep a beautiful island looking inhabited. They cannot staff a night ambulance or fill a composite classroom.

Why Colonsay Keeps Advertising for Families

The English broadcast will present a man in the Atlantic, a toddler in a tub by the fire, and oyster cages on a tide. That is the watchable version. The quieter version is an island that has already put a smokery, a croft and nine houses on the table because lifestyle migrants who come for summer light do not automatically become the fire crew.

Mack’s bet is personal. He wanted out of Munich, and he wanted a father figure in Abrahams after his own father died young. Colonsay’s bet is demographic. It needs the next oyster farmer, and it needs Finn’s age group, and it needs the houses that are not listed as holiday cottages. The film ends. The three-day winter boat does not.

On 6 September 2026 the English slots begin. Out on The Strand the cages will still need lifting, whoever’s name is on the business, in whatever light the month allows.