HOORAY. Let there be dancing in the streets. After years of complaint, the BBC has finally relented and given Scotland its own TV channel – viewable only here -- with a bumper, hour-long, international and local nine o’clock TV news, which means 80 new jobs plus more cash to commission drama, sport, comedy and documentary series.
So that’s alright then? Well of course, new jobs are welcome, new programmes are always exciting and new opportunities make a big change from 15 years of relentless cuts.
But there are big snags.
The first is that the new BBC Scotland channel with its integrated, hour-long, Glasgow-mixed news, won’t appear until the summer of 2018 – so let’s hope Brexit, indyref2 and constitutional turmoil around the triggering of Article 50 all have the good sense to put themselves on hold until Aunty is good and ready.
In the interim, the “News where we are” must suffice — even though the inadequacy of this old format was effectively acknowledged by the BBC Director General Tony Hall’s surprise announcement and even though viewers thought they had been promised a Scottish Six starting right now by Aunty.
So let’s get this clear from the start.
Scots who subject this “offer” to critical analysis are not conforming to a bitter, creaking stereotype — we are not compulsively biting the hand that feeds. We simply wanted the BBC to deliver the much-discussed Scottish Six as the best way to fix the manifold problems within BBC TV News right now — a solution identified even by the Commons Culture and Media Committee which told BBC management to deliver a six o’clock news edited and produced entirely by staff in Scotland pronto – that’s a programme with a Scottish perspective on international, UK, Scottish and local news on TV precisely as the same journalists have been producing on radio Scotland for almost half a century.
MPs said it was “perfectly reasonable” for editorial decisions on broadcasts in Scotland to be made in Scotland. So expectations rose.
Instead, the long-advocated Scottish Six o’clock TV news has now been given the Great British Boot Off, despite months of feverish piloting at Pacific Quay. What was wrong with it? Fa kens – though the director general himself was always a big supporter of the existing “integrated news hour” with network news followed by a slightly duplicating, slightly toothless half hour of “regional” news.
Hall declares himself to be “genuinely excited” about the new offering to placate Scots viewers, which is fine – though someone should perhaps restrain their boss from over-repeating the breathless assertion that “there are really creative people working in Scotland”.
We ken, Tony.
It sounds a tiny bit as if he has to keep reminding himself, or the BBC board, of that fact.
Anyway, the new Scottish channel will apparently have the same budget as BBC4 – though as former controller Scotland, John McCormick, swiftly pointed out, BBC4 doesn’t have to finance a daily hour-long news programme from its income. The money scraped together for the new Scottish channel will include existing bits of money for BBC Two Scotland features, will be just greater than the Great British Bake Off budget – and £100 million of the surplus cash raised here from licence fee payers will still flow back south every year.
Not quite as fabby as it first looked, is it?
And in case you too were wondering about the strange timing of the BBC Scotland announcement, I understand it had much to do with Hall’s scheduled appearance today before Holyrood’s Culture and Media Committee. See BBC managers … see deadlines.
Anyway, the fabby new Scottish News at Nine, when it finally arrives, will be up against the biggest entertainment offering from every competing channel, and its presence will doubtless mean that network news bulletins will be stappit fu with blockbuster reports about the state of the English Health Service. Cos once BBC Scotland gets on air, once boxes have been ticked and once Scots have been given what they didn’t really want, business as usual will burst out across the corporation and it will be impossible for Scots to complain about network coverage for a single broadcast minute. You’ll have had your devolution of the airwaves.
Well, no actually – we haven’t.
With viewer satisfaction rates the lowest in the UK, the BBC must know it is in danger of becoming part of the story itself during the period of massive constitutional change that lies ahead. That’s why all had apparently agreed that Scots needed new, confident, well-tested and popular reform to TV news production – yesterday.
Instead, apparently successful Scottish Six pilots have gone nowhere and we’re not supposed to ask why. We’re not supposed to point out that much viewer dissatisfaction in Scotland arises from mainstream, prime time, nightly, network news and current affairs programmes which have become steadily more “Little Englander” in focus, and more south-east of England oriented in tone and content since the Brexit vote.
These problems of bias and choice are urgent ones – but there is no sense of urgency inside the BBC about really resolving them. The Scots, it seems, can wait.
And there are other problems with the new channel – one is the lack of diversity in editorial control. There is one person in BBC Scotland responsible for scheduling and commissioning programmes – is that OK? And if there isn’t a loosening of control will the new channel really encourage creativity and diversity, or just retread the viewpoints of existing top managers?
But the biggest difficulty with a new BBC Scotland channel appearing in mid-2018 is that STV will probably already be on air with their version of the same thing – complete with a totally integrated seven o’clock Scottish news, and without licence-payers’ cash.
I’d like to wish the new BBC Scotland channel well – and I would if I wasn’t so very weary of watching Aunty – like every other part of the faltering British state – serve up “solutions” that manage to be just behind the curve every time.
We pay our licence fee for better, bolder ideas than returning to the drawing board at this very late stage. Hopefully Culture and Media Committee members at Holyrood will get some answers when BBC bosses appear before them today.
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