The BBC’s new TV flagship is already sailing at half mast
By Graham Grant
A STULTIFYING glut of repeats, a regular diet of distinctly bottom-drawer reality television – and hour upon hour of First Minister’s Questions…
It sounds like a kind of TV hell – indeed it resembles much of the homogenous fare currently cluttering schedules for many channels, digitally and terrestrially.
In fact, it describes fairly accurately the line-up for the eagerly anticipated new ‘BBC Scotland’ channel, set to launch in February with a budget of £32million a year.
At a recent briefing on the subject at BBC Scotland’s Pacific Quay headquarters, bosses admitted half of the output would be in the form of repeats dating back to the 1970s.
Sadly, they ruled out re-runs of Scotch and Wry, the sketch series starring the late Rikki Fulton: there may well be more of an audience for this than many of the other alleged highlights.
A new drama is promised (threatened?), though it won’t be anything like the dreary soap stalwart River City (small mercies…); otherwise it’s largely programming that might be described as eminently missable.
Take Meet Jamie Genevieve, for example, a documentary featuring a YouTube ‘celebrity’ who used to work on a make-up counter but is now described by the BBC as a ‘modern Scottish icon’.
Viewers, we’re told, will ‘discover how an ordinary young woman from Tillicoultry went from worrying if she could pay her mortgage to flying in private jets’.
Another programme, Test Drive, is presented by professional wrestler Graeme Stevely, better-known by his ring name Grado, who also appears in Scot Squad.
The game show will see three teams of two go on a road trip to a mystery destination, as a satnav asks questions that will determine the length of their journey.
The People’s News will present news and topical events ‘seen through the eyes of people from across Scotland who “dial in” to our screens each week’.
Darren McGarvey, a rapper and award-winning author also known as Loki, will be ‘taking an alternative tour of Scotland, meeting people and visiting communities that are seldom seen or heard’.
The channel will be on air 365 days a year, from noon to midnight, with core content screened after 7pm, and before then it will show BBC Two alongside BBC Scotland content – such as coverage of First Minister’s Questions.
The legendary Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman was famous for saying of the film industry that ‘nobody knows anything’: an executive who claims to know a project is a surefire hit, or flop, simply can’t be trusted.
So it may be that BBC Scotland – which one imagines has been shaped by innumerable brain-storming sessions familiar to viewers of the brilliant self-satirising BBC series W1A – will be a ratings winner.
One gambit that will probably prop up viewer numbers, at least in the early days, is screening new episodes of tried-and-trusted comedy shows such as Scot Squad and Still Game before they are aired on BBC 1.
But is it unsporting to wonder whether £32million is too high a price to pay for what might be charitably described as more of the same, only not quite as good?
True, the new channel could prove a testing-ground for risky new ideas which could ultimately find bigger mainstream audiences.
But this could be achieved more cheaply through the iPlayer – or simply by finding berths for the original material on existing channels.
How much are the executives paid who dreamt up the idea of digging up old shows to fill half of the air-time?
Well, the BBC won’t tell you – it argues staff on the channel will work across different shows and platforms, so it’s too tricky a calculation.
It also claims it would take too long to collate this information – two-and-a-half days, according to a Freedom of Information response – which means legally the BBC doesn’t have to answer the question. So much for transparency…
The news show, known as The Nine, will be fronted Monday to Thursday by Martin Geissler and Rebecca Curran; a laidback, open-collar shirt vibe is the general idea, and it will be filmed from an open-plan studio at Pacific Quay.
Veteran ITN journalist Geissler has said there will be a centre spot for news reading, which he calls the ‘bar area’, along with a big screen and long sofa for interviewees.
The show will have a ‘stripped back’ look devoid of ticker tape and graphics, and on Fridays John Beattie, a BBC Radio Scotland DJ, will co-anchor the show with Laura Miller.
There’s no doubting some of the journalistic firepower on offer here (with the exception of Beattie, a former rugby international), but TV news has never been so competitive, and even with such talent on display, it’s likely that The Nine will struggle to make its mark.
On too many occasions, BBC Scotland has caved in to political pressure from the SNP and its supporters over its news coverage, and is daily besieged by pro-independence web activists threatening to tear up their TV licences over some perceived slight or bias.
The corporation’s website recently quoted attendance figures for an independence march in Edinburgh, citing the organisers’ estimate of 100,000, contrasting with the council’s statistics – it reckoned there were about 20,000 participants.
Doubtless this placated the Twitter mob (which includes MSP Gordon Macdonald, the Nationalist who once branded Reporting Scotland ‘fake news’), but it was also something of a capitulation to the marchers.
Nothing much about the proposed package offers reassurance of political diversity – the much-feted McGarvey is firmly on the Left (at the weekend, he branded Scottish Tory MP Ross Thomson a ‘ f***ing a***’ on Twitter).
How long, one wonders, before The Nine falls prey to manipulation by that vocal lobby – and given that Beattie is no Andrew Neil, how much of a grilling will politicians face when they appear for interview?
An hour is a long slot to fill, and there is a risk the show becomes a kind of revamped Newsnight Scotland – minus the ties – labouring to generate enough material that differs sufficiently from the content broadcast two-and-a-half hours earlier on the evening bulletin.
New jobs for journalists (about 80) are welcome, but the corporation is using its big budget to lure talent away from newspapers – undermining the print industry by creating an uneven playing-field, all bankrolled by the licence-player.
Some of those journalists are now writing ‘long read’ features on the BBC website, giving the broadcaster another unfair advantage over the papers.
The alternative to The Nine was the ‘Scottish Six’, the long-standing Holy Grail of hardcore independence supporters, an evening news bulletin that would tackle all news – UK and international – using a team based in Scotland.
That idea was binned after a viewer backlash – and amid fears it would become a political plaything.
Its demise left the gap about to be filled by The Nine, which inevitably won’t have the budget to perform the function of a Scottish Six, and looks increasingly like a half-baked compromise.
Well, whatever happens, we can expect yet more Left-wing punditry, more re-runs, more trashy reality TV – and the chance to re-live every moment of First Minister’s Questions…
Now, where did I put that Scotch and Wry DVD?
