TONIGHT, no doubt with a degree of jollity and optimism usually reserved for the Hogmanay show, the BBC will herald the arrival of its brand new BBC Scotland channel. Caught somewhere between genuine interest and professional curiosity and in the gaps between humphing bookshelves and sofas around (we’re flitting!), I’ll tune in to watch the party coming live from the BBC’s Pacific Quay headquarters.

I hope their big launch night goes well – I’m sure it will - and I genuinely wish the new channel a bright and successful future.

I know many of the individuals involved in this new venture from my former life as a television producer and I can testify to their ability, their professionalism and their passion for making high quality, entertaining television.

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Scotland should have high-quality, high-value, network-standard productions, featuring Scottish stories, told with Scottish voices, made here in Scotland but with an eye on the rest of the world, utilising the incredible talent that BBC Scotland and our independent production sector has available to it.

And no one will be more pleased than me if the new channel meets its own stated aim of being “a channel for modern Scotland” and that it is able to rise to the challenge set it by Lord Tony Hall, the BBC’s Director General, of being “bold, creative and ambitious”.

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It's also great see my hugely respected, former STV colleague Martin Geissler back working in Scotland. And the return of the excellent James Cook certainly augurs well for the standard of news journalism on the new channel.

But…and there’s always a but…I do have serious, long-held and previously expressed concerns about this new channel, particularly around the BBC’s motivation in creating it and the amount of money it has been given by London in order to become that bold, creative and ambitious platform the Director General expects it to be.

And of course, it launches at a time when public trust in the BBC in Scotland has rarely, if ever been lower, following it’s, frankly lamentable performance in covering the 2014 independence referendum.

I know that loss of trust among a substantial proportion of Scots hasn’t gone unnoticed, either at Pacific Quay or SW1 and the new Director Of BBC Scotland, Donalda MacKinnon -someone for whom I have the highest personal regard - is on record as saying that part of her mission is to try and win back that lost trust.

I hope she succeeds but self-inflicted wounds like the most recent Question Time audience scandal and the way the BBC dealt with the subsequent fall-out tells me that BBC management have a long way to go in rebuilding that trust. Indeed that job may just have become a great deal harder because of the last few weeks.

The way in which the SNP’s position as the third party at Westminster is routinely and deliberately ignored by BBC network news producers, particularly when discussing Brexit matters is ridiculous and it seems no matter how often it’s raised or how often they apologise for their “error”, nothing much changes.

Of course the new BBC channel can play an important part in winning back some of the trust it has lost in Scotland. To do that however, it needs to be credible, relevant and be of quality that viewers have come to expect and can find on any one of the plethora of other stations available to them. People will not accept and inferior product, simply because someone has “stuck a kilt on it”. Nor should they.

The new channel has to be - and be seen to be - fair and impartial. It has to be editorially independent and reflect Scotland as it is…not as it was…not as the BBC thinks it should be …and certainly not as the senior panjandrums in the BBC in London would want it to be.

If the BBC genuinely want to win back public trust in Scotland, then people have to believe that the corporation’s senior executives in London are serious about the new channel and that it isn’t a sop either to try and appease those demanding greater autonomy for BBC Scotland or a tawdry attempt to silence the growing demand for a “Scottish Six”; a proposal backed unanimously by the DCMS Select Committee back in 2016 when proposed by my predecessor on the committee, Mr. John Nicolson.

Although not always a guarantee of quality, nevertheless funding, or cost per hours is usually a good barometer when assessing standards you are likely to get when it comes to television production.

Good TV doesn’t come cheap but it seems the BBC are asking for high quality product but without the necessary investment that requires.

Back in 2009, when the Scottish Broadcasting Commission first proposed a bespoke Scottish channel, they calculated that such a venture would require to be funded at around £75 million a year. A decade later, the BBC are funding their new channel to the tune of just £30 million a year, with £7 million of that ring-fenced for news.

That is a massive discrepancy and explains why one Glasgow based indie told journalist Kevin McKenna last year, “We are not convinced the £30m per annum content budget is sufficient to produce the required number of hours of original, high-quality primetime content the BBC proposal suggests and the audience will expect from Scotland’s new national broadcaster.”

I think they are absolutely right not to be convinced.

From my own experience of twenty years working in television production, I just cannot see how a channel can produce quality television with an annual (non-news) programme-making budget of just £23 million.

By my reckoning the average hourly spend contributed by the BBC for the new channel will be around £25,000.

Of course I understand that securing co-productions and other innovate ways of raising money are being pursued – and good luck to them in doing that – but how sustainable will that be in the long term and how much more money will that bring in to increase that per/hour spend?

To put that figure in perspective, on the last series I made for BBC One from Pacific Quay, my spend was £220,000 an hour…and that was 10 years ago.

When he appeared before the DCMS Select Committee in December 2017, Tony Hall told me that he would judge this channel on the standard of the content it produced.

I know many of those involved in the new channel and I know they are capable of producing excellent content but they are not magicians and unless properly funded, they simply won’t be able to deliver the quality programmes they’d want to make, to the standard viewers expect.

But still the Director General insists they make television on a shoestring budget while demanding high standards of production.

My great fear is that with such a low programme budget and in the face of huge competition from other channels, people will eventually just stop watching, thereby allowing the BBC at some point in the future to throw its hands up and say, “Well, we tried, but it turns out there simply wasn’t the demand for a Scottish channel after all”.

I wish I shared Donalda MacKinnon’s steadfast and unshakable belief in this new channel because I really like her image of BBC Scotland “making something precious”.

I just worry that the BBC leadership in London has failed to provide them with the adequate funding to enable them do that.

That is why when the Director General appeared in front of the Select Committee, I told him bluntly that I believed this new channel was born to fail.

I sincerely hope I’m proved wrong.

Brendan O'Hara is an SNP MP and former TV producer