In this week’s Marketing magazine, Ray Snoddy discusses the Alex Salmond proposed Scottish Broadcasting Commission (not online currently, but it should appear somewhere here – free registration may be required).
The gist of the argument is that national news emanating from London, does not cover Scottish issues properly and indeed ignores them. Many discussions about legal issues or education, are in fact English, and don’t apply in Scotland (For example, you can be found “not proven” in law, and there are no tuition fees for Scots attending Scottish higher education institutions).
I can’t deny that, as Snoddy says, the only times Scotland (or Wales or Northern Ireland) really hit the headlines these days are when there’s been a nasty murder, or some kind of freak weather conditions.
But then you could argue the same for Cornwall, or the North-East, or East Anglia.
The problem is that unless the story affects, or is of interest, across the whole of the UK, then it really doesn’t belong on the national news; not when there’s a regional or local news programme following it.
Now it’s been a while since I last saw the local news programme on BBC1 in Scotland between 6.30 and 7.00pm when the whole country gets its main local news, but surely that’s where a proper Scottish news belongs. Perhaps it should have the authority that the main national news has, as part and parcel of the devolved parliaments we currently have.
I get worried when there are calls for a more parochial view of news. Arguably, we’re already too local in our outlook. I recently had the misfortune to watch the BBC Six O’Clock News, and it’s not exactly where to go if you want to find out what’s going on in the world. It’s far too UK-focused for my liking. Fortunately we have the much broader Ten O’Clock News and Newsnight later in the evening.
Surely it’s doing a disservice to Scots if the Six O’Clock News becomes the Scottish Six O’Clock News?
I completely agree that news editors in London need to be wary of pushing London-centric news stories up the order because they’re close to home. For example, there’s a lot of coverage currently of various murders of young males in South London. Does it deserve the level of coverage it gets compared with any crimes occurring, say, in Glasgow? Are Scottish viewers really not interested in the flooding that took place in central England?
Of course the wider idea that we might end up with a Scottish Broadcasting Corporation in place of the BBC is laughable. As soon as you break up a structure the size of the BBC, you’re left with significantly fewer resources, and simply would be unable to make anywhere near the same level of programming that currently can be achieved by pooling resources. If Snoddy is right, then more resources should be spent in Scotland. And I suspect that much of this is behind the suggestion that Casualty, currently produced in Bristol, might move across the Severn to Cardiff, so that, voila, it’s a Welsh production all of a sudden (Kind of ludicrous since Casualty, although set in the fictional Holby, is patently supposed to be Bristol, since that’s where it’s always been made). However, I’d still be interested to know where Film 2007 is actually shot, since it’s a BBC Scotland production fronted by Jonathan Ross, who lives in London, and who almost certainly views all his screenings in London screening rooms (Undoubtedly there are Scottish screenings for local critics, but I’d hazard a guess that there are fewer overall).
The danger of breaking up the BBC in that way is that we end up with the patchwork quilt of public television that America has, with a couple of strong stations in some big cities, and everyone else struggling to cover the local news and their staffing costs.
It’s interesting to note that there’s no BBC Radio England, although we do get lots of local stations, and while there is a BBC Radio Scotland, you don’t get BBC Radio Glasgow or BBC Radio Edinburgh.
I suppose this all boils down to whether or not Scottish citizens want to remain part of the United Kingdom. As someone who would qualify to play football for Scotland, I’m opposed to any kind of break-up. I genuinely don’t see what there is to be gained.