I WAS lucky enough to grow up in a beautiful part of Scotland, where the air was clean (ish) and the people were (mostly) friendly. No-one seemed either ostentatiously wealthy or dismally poor. There were none of the overt schisms of race or religion that blighted life in other, larger towns and cities.
This was Dumfries in the 1970s. Not entirely untouched by that decade's industrial unrest and dodgy fashions, but still a pretty decent place to live. However, even this semi-rural idyll had a bad side. It was called Border TV.
Most of you will be
lucky enough to be unfamiliar with this curious little broadcaster. You may remember its proudest creation, the quiz show Mr & Mrs, but you likely never suffered its early evening news bulletin Lookaround. Every night, after the real news had finished, we had to endure 30 minutes of reports "from the Borders to Berwick".
With just three channels in those days, we had little choice other than to half-listen, waiting for a mention of "Dumfries" or somewhere else nearby that mattered to us. A story involving Carlisle, Longtown or the Isle of Man (foreign news, surely?) was a chance for the family to bicker some more about whose turn it was to wash up, or to put the kettle on.
Such micro-parochialism should probably put me in the Alex Salmond camp when it comes to the Scottish Six debate. Last week the BBC Trust ordered the Corporation to try harder after 45% of Scots said its news output was irrelevant to them. The First Minister went further, repeating his call for the Six O'Clock News and Reporting Scotland to be merged into an hour-long programme, made in Scotland, for Scotland.
The dear leader likes to throw Scots words and phrases into his own speech, so here's one for him: the idea of a Scottish Six gives me the boak.
For me, this is not a political stance – unlike Alex Salmond, who would demand a separate Pearly King And Queen of Scotland if he thought it advanced the case for independence. No, I don't want a Scottish Six because it would either be rubbish or cost a fortune. And probably both.
Let's take quality first. It's just common sense that, to fill 60 minutes, the new programme would have to do one of two things: run more Scottish news than currently makes the cut at Reporting Scotland, or cover the same UK and international news as the Six O'Clock News down south.
The former fills me with most horror. The BBC Scotland news team already struggle to fill their evening half-hour. On Wednesday night, for example, they spent several minutes discussing a giant tortoise in Aberdeen – a curious little tale that the day's newspapers had already dealt with in a few, sniggering paragraphs. Every day the show is padded-out with sport, usually football, and almost always the Old Firm.
What if the hour was instead filled-out with important events from across the UK and the world? Will BBC Scotland send its own "foreign" correspondents into England? Will it replicate the BBC's 14 overseas bureaus plus twice as many solo correspondents across the globe?
Of course not. Instead, the Scottish Six's reports on life south of Gretna and beyond these shores would merely be repackaged versions of those produced in London or sent there from abroad. What's the point of that? Is the perspective of events in Harare very different from Helensburgh than Hull? And even if it is, whatever happened to the BBC's famous impartiality? Unlike newspapers, which regularly campaign on issues and have comment pages such as this one, every BBC report should surely just tell the story, whether it be in an Edinburgh or an Estuary accent.
And what about the cost of making substance of this Scottish Six shibboleth? Alex Bell, a Nationalist commentator and advocate of the single show format, recently insisted that it wouldn't be "that much". Very scientific – thanks for playing, Alex.
Let's be honest: the BBC, stuffed with our licence fees, doesn't do anything on the cheap. In pursuit of internet domination, BBC online went £36m – almost 50% – over budget last year. In a bid to secure one of its "best" talents the Beeb is giving Jonathan Ross £18m over three years. What the hell, it's only 43,000 licence fee payers' money.
Some will argue that it is exactly because the BBC is fat from so much public cash that it should spend more of it serving Scotland. Well, last year the BBC spent £188m on its new Scottish HQ, a dismal grey box on the Clyde. I have no doubt that the same degree of prudence and imagination would be shown with a Scottish Six.
The full article contains 810 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
