By Pat Kane. First published on FEBRUARY 25TH, 2017
‘ALL things are possible. But happen less and less”. It’s always been a sore line from Deacon Blue’s Fergus Sings The Blues – a shot straight to the heart of our national miserabilism.
But the new BBC Scotland channel is something of a triumph for those who steadily believe things can happen more and more in Scotland, even short of our necessary statehood.
Not forgetting, of course, that it’s the threat of statehood that has doubtless sharpened the focus of the BBC’s London mandarins. Poorly-reported referenda, protesting crowds on the Pacific Quay forecourt, successive majorities of pro-indy Scottish politicians in both Parliaments, worryingly low levels of popular trust in BBC Scotland’s output … You’d have to be at North-Korean levels of bureaucratic insularity not to respond to all that. And I can’t help comparing the BBC’s creative, quasi-federal response to the “Scottish problem” with the May Government’s bluff rejections of a differentiated Brexit for Scotland. It is worth noting, in passing, that the British establishment does not move entirely in lock-step.
But as someone who delivered my download to the Scottish Broadcasting Commission in 2008, facing those impeccably non-partisan chairs Blair Jenkins and Elaine C Smith (pause for emphasis), it is always a pleasure to see a great plan for reform in Scotland even partially brought to pass.
Most of the focus has been on how the “Scottish Six” has become the “Scottish Nine”. We shouldn’t underestimate the importance of this. When this paper simulated an edition of the Six in March last year, edited by Stuart Cosgrove, the first bold decision was to lead with an EU summit – where Turkey was being arraigned for raising barriers to migrants.
You can argue his call – but the challenge is obvious. How might a Scottish “world view” – which is, for example, evidently more pro-European – make different choices about international stories?
It may be a blessing in disguise that the Scottish Nine isn’t on at prime time, or a on mainstream channel. Channel 4 News often conducts itself brilliantly and daringly under C4’s legislative brief to “experiment and show diversity”.
If the renewed remit of BBC Scotland news is to attend to the information needs of all of Scotland’s citizens, their creativity should be applied as much to global topics as national ones.
And as has often been noted, BBC Alba’s Eorpa – let alone the editorial flow of Good Morning Scotland on radio – shows the capacity and imagination for that has been in the organisation for years.
But here I want to open up a different response to the opportunities of the new channel. The veteran former BBC broadcaster Derek Bateman has blogged that people should “start firing in ideas for programmes. Demand access. Insist on new formats and proper budgets. If it’s our BBC channel, let’s claim it”.
Even at the worst of times, Mr Bateman is inarguable. So why don’t we? There will be an address at the end of this piece, where you, dear reader, can “fire in” to your heart’s content, and we will publish the best and most interesting.
I claim columnist’s privilege, and will kick this off with my top three proposals, idiosyncratic and selfish (and budget-indifferent) as they are. The model in my head is much more BBC4 than BBC2 or BBC1 – probably no surprise there – but anyway, here goes.
Scottish music on the box. This country is fizzing and crackling with music of all kinds, and often every kind of hybrid between them. (I could make parallel cases for contemporary art, drama and literature, but I’ll let their advocates do that).
From my own career, I know many of the different music communities well – from serious players in nationally-funded orchestras, to sweet kids with Beyonce-like voices coming out of Motherwell College. And every fraction of folk, funk, pop, jazz, EDM, rock – add your own genre – in between.
Nobody’s perfect, of course. But as characters, I generally love Scottish musicians. They are both resilient and creative.Many of them have figured out how to survive as multi-tasking freelancers, in perpetually tough times, paying the bills (or most of them), while still making music that moves the heart or fires the mind. I’d even say they are something of a model for the enterprising, indefatigable selves we’d need in the early years of indy.
I want our new Scottish channel to celebrate and showcase them in all their ragged, committed glory, in their lives as well as their art.
BBC bosses are seeking a new music-only radio channel in Scotland, which is great news.
But television can show a culture, make it sparkle in a spotlight.
So we need documentaries, masterclasses, retrospectives, a weekly Scottish version of “Later” set in the Old Fruitmarket in Glasgow … Let’s get it on.
A weekly show on Scottish innovation and discovery, past, present and future. By head count, Scotland is regularly marked as the best educated country in the world. So there should be an appetite among all these enlivened intellects, for an hour-long show which puts the inventiveness of Scotland – in every field of activity – front and centre.
It would take three approaches. The first would be a radar sweep of Scottish universities, art and design schools, business clusters, digital tech hubs, engineering and manufacturing centres, making sure we know what’s best and cutting-edge practice in the country.
I would include “social” innovation in this. People are trying out experiments in organisations across Scotland, which often produce change as significant as any new gizmo.
The second would be reportage on major global trends and futures in innovation, keeping audiences up to speed with the leading voices and scenes (here’s where the promise of access to the BBC’s “global reach” starts to get cashed in).
And the third would be historical, showing how Scottish-based breakthroughs in science, technology, culture and society often underpin what we regard as the most contemporary features of our lives (eg Hutton and climate change, Clerk Maxwell and computerisation, Patrick Geddes and urban renewal, etc). I vote Kenneth MacDonald as presenter, gleefully holding a fistful of airline tickets.
Make risky, ambitious, cinematic drama serials. This would put the channel on the world map, in a similar way to what the Danes have so effectively done.
But could we please set ourselves the task of not automatically going down the crime story or police procedural route? Let me suggest two extremes, rooted in very strong existing cultural traditions.
One, coming from Scottish poetry, novels and theatre, would concern what one might call the “radical interior”. What happens when you let people such as David Greig, Ali Smith, Carol Ann Duffy, Alison Kennedy, Cora Bissett, James Kelman chart the modern labyrinths of the mind and heart?
Why can’t we align the best of these and many other soulful writers – indeed, the vast canons of work already produced – with the subtler traditions of “indie” film and television making? Other than a cringe at such aesthetic ambitions, what’s to stop us?
Secondly, and finally, let’s give the new BBC Scotland channel an extremely clear target: figure out how to turn Iain M Banks’s Culture novels into a viable, well-produced SF franchise. Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror series shows how, in the era of ever-cheaper digital effects, mind-blowing future-scenarios can be rendered plausible if the underlying ideas are strong.
In terms of our current obsessions about the future – around the generation of resources, or AI and robots, or bio-engineering, and how we ethically handle these – I can’t imagine a better resource than Banks’s meticulously worked out universe. Thinking ships, transmuting bodies, delicious dilemmas between duty and pleasure: really, the rest of the 21st century is all there, pushed to a riotously entertaining extreme.
OK, there are my suggestions from a list that would fill up the next two pages. Readers of this paper know what they want, politically.
But one way to defeat a democratic deficit is to summon up an imaginative surplus. A modest broadcasting door is open – let’s barge through it. And let’s hear from you.
So what are your big ideas for programmes on the new BBC Scotland channel? Mail them to us at [email protected], including “Pat Kane” in the subject line.