Thoughtland

PK column in The National: This is how shows like Jeremy Vine's feed social media

By Pat Kane. First published on JUNE 29TH, 2019

BELIEVE me, I know all about morning television. The soft furnishings, the militantly pleasing colours, your face literally aching from its permanent smile. The researchers chopping away at your massively subtle perspective (book/politics/album), until it fits their news grid for the morning.

The twitchy alertness of the news presenters, caffeinated out of their gourds, trying to balance journalistic rigour with holiday-camp bonhomie. The green room collisions, whether it be with basketball players, misery memoirists, urban gardeners. Or some unidentifiable reality TV star, sleek as a seal.

PK column in The National: It's time to ask some serious questions ... about the BBC's Question Time

By Pat Kane. First published on OCTOBER 13TH, 2018

THE tweets went round, a little less desultory than usual: “I suppose this seems like a BBC Question Time (#bbcqt) I might watch this week.” And indeed, Thursday’s show – its cast-list scattered all over the HolyroodParliament chamber – looked as if it might rub cliches together vigorously enough to catch some flame.

A strangulated editor of the Spectator, a Duracell-powered young Scots Tory, the near-papal Michael Russell, a Celebrity Who’s Clearly Getting Out Of Here, and Val McDermid (representing literature and humans). Plus a “diverse” audience which we now know is carefully assembled by an “audience producer” (with equally carefully placed “star turns”, in case the pabulum threatens to choke us all). Haud me back.

PK column in The National: Let’s all channel our thoughts on what we want to see on the BBC's new Scottish platform

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.

PK column in The National: Are we ready for the space-time shift of having a female Doctor?

By Pat Kane. First published on FEBRUARY 18TH, 2017

SO the bookies say Tilda Swinton, our resident White Witch of Nairn, leads the betting on who will become the new Doctor Who.

For this viewer – best described as a brooding former fan – the prospects of this are instantly pleasing. First, there’s the scene where the reincarnated Doctor starts to gingerly lay hands on his (now, hopefully, her) new form.

For connoisseurs of those moments when TV captures a moment of social change, there are great possibilities here.

PK column in The National: Why serious stuff still demands a sense of humour

By Pat Kane. First published on FEBRUARY 4TH, 2017

SO if you’re going to prank Donald Trump by chucking swastika-covered golfballs at him, as he opens one of his tremendous courses, you should do it at Trump Turnberry.

According to the comedian Simon Brodkin, whose stage name is Lee Nelson and who perpetrated said stunt last June, he was slumped in custody when a Scottish sergeant noted: “You’re that guy”.

The National column: Isn’t it time the BBC started taking Scotland seriously?

My Saturday column in The National, dated August 29th, 2015 (online version). All shares and comments welcomed. Note: ***response to social media criticism of the column, below fold at end of the piece. 

Isn’t it time the BBC started taking Scotland seriously?

Pat Kane for The National

THE First Minister took the stage at the Edinburgh Television Festival on Thursday, and sought to insert a new Scots cog in the grinding wheels of the BBC’s Charter Review.

Not easy. Between Alex Salmond and the BBC’s Nick Robinson bumping chests like silverbacks, and Armando Iannucci hymning the “British soft power” of public broadcasting in his Mactaggart lecture, there’s not much media-space left for calm, detailed reform proposals from Scotland.

Yet it’s worth putting Sturgeon’s plan – essentially one more public TV station, and one more public radio station in Scotland, with an implicit argument that the BBC as a whole should move to a federal structure – in an obvious European context.

 The best example is Germany’s system of federalised TV stations. Do a five-minute Wikipedia search on public broadcasters WDR (serving the state of North-Rhine Westphalia), BR (serving the state of Bavaria) and HR (serving Hesse) – then go to their programming pages.

With a population of six million, Hesse has six public radio stations (digital and analogue); the other two lander (between two to three times more populous than Scotland) have 10 each. Each has at least one public broadcast TV channel, and also contribute material to German national (and international) TV.

Whatever way you want to cut that proportionately – and even accepting Germany’s greater prosperity and taxes – there is clearly room, and precedent, for the very basic expansion of Scottish public media services proposed by the Scottish Government.

With BBC3 closing down, we have the broadcast spectrum available. Even accepting budget constraints, surely a merging of BBC Alba with a new Scottish channel is doable? *** And doesn’t it make blinding sense to separate out BBC Radio Scotland into two channels – one for music and sport, one for news, discussion and features – rather than the maddening tone-and-mood changes you hear in a day’s listening?

But here we come to the content question, so lyrically raised by two archetypal ScotLab representatives over the last 24 hours. On STV’s Scotland Tonight on Thursday, Ken Mackintosh MSP asked, with incredulity in his voice, what we would put on an all-Scottish channel – how would it be filled? Just with Scottish stuff?

And on the BBC, Iain Martin MP reminded us that, of course, Scots must have utterly unimpeded access to baking, dancing and time-travelling programmes from the BBC every Saturday night. Otherwise, naturally, a collective nervous breakdown.

We went round the houses on Martin’s point ad nauseaum during the indyref. One look at the average TV diet in Ireland, in a multi-channel and multi-platform age, should answer those anxieties. But Mackintosh’s mild derision over how a Scots TV channel could even be programmed – displaying all the sensitivity to Scottish national ambition so notable in recent ScotLab leadership – is worth a brief answer.

Only one short strapline would be required for a separate and new BBC Scotland TV channel: Taking Scotland Seriously. And that means, by implication, taking more time and going into more depth with Scottish affairs. Does anyone really believe that the 10-minute rammys and point-scoring of the items on the BBC’s Scotland 2015 (or for that matter, STV Scotland Tonight) cover more than a fraction of what each topic deserves?

It’s a paltry response to the active citizenry that has emerged over the last two plebiscites in Scotland. The citizens have responded themselves, of course. Their appetite for a more substantive discussion about Scotland’s past, present and future sustains – via both clicks and pounds – a growing range of alternative digital media (and of course, this paper).

But I don’t know any of the committed enthusiasts in the Scottish alternative sector who wouldn’t welcome a Scots channel that properly served the citizenry. Something that gave crucial areas (like health and medicine, business and the economy, sci-tech and innovation, energy and environment, education at all levels, our global impact on the world) the dedicated screen-time and journalistic/investigative brio they deserved.

Can we imagine some relationship between Scottish civic media and new Scottish public broadcasting channels? Could a percentage of its operations be more like the early years of Channel Four: a television publisher with an explicit remit for diversity of opinion, and a willingness to prototype new hybrid forms of broadcast and digital media? 

But before these cutting-edge matters, there is surely no end of Scottish needs that dedicated Scottish public channels could satisfy. Simply to cover what the French would call our “arts of living” is a task at hand – not just our vibrant art, not just food, drink and recreation, but our sense of history.

That’s not just about putting Tom Devine to service as our Simon Schama, but also televisual history – deploying the Scottish archive we have, using material from both commercial and public resources, to give perspective and context to our sense of ourselves. (BBC4's relationship with its archive is a brilliant template here). 

But, as we fondly plan and scheme, here comes the brick wall. The new Tory culture and media minister, John Whittingdale, made matters abundantly clear in Edinburgh the other day. He regarded a No vote in the referendum as a recommitment to British identity – and, by association, a recommitment to the BBC as the “[UK] national” broadcaster.

I enjoyed the brilliant, likeable – still evidently Glaswegian, but also pretty establishment – Armando Iannucci and his Mactaggart Television Lecture [full text here]. But as you listen, it’s easy to imagine the case for Scottish channels being drowned in the grander storm of liberal-left and conservative UK elites, battling mightily for the “soul of the Beeb”.

That’s what happens when you don’t vote to become a nation-state: all that’s left is supplication and reasoned argument to the centre, most likely resulting in a head-pat and a “terribly sorry”. And there you can bundle up BBC Scotland reform with lots of other devolutionary frustrations. But, of course, there’s more to Scottish media than pining after Pacific Quay with an SBC badge on it.

Isn’t it worth stating the obvious – that the resignation of Police Scotland’s Stephen House has come after many months of detailed, pertinacious reporting (and a few well-timed exposes of Holyrood’s back-stage process) by dogged members of Scotland’s press?

Or to remember the bravery of the young members of National Collective, successfully facing down being sued by Ian Taylor of the Vitol oil group, in response to their article raising questions about his funding of Better Together?

So we bide our time, waiting for the constitutional and structural stars to align, and produce a Scottish public broadcasting culture worthy of the name. But, meantime, let’s make sure we don’t forget to support those whose media activity “afflicts the comfortable, and comforts the afflicted”, as the American muckraker Finley Peter Dunne once put it.

“Team Scotland” does not necessarily equal “Democratic And Self-Aware Scotland”. Top-down institution-building and reform does not solve all problems in our good society. And even as we eat popcorn before the political spectacle of the long break-up of the Union, let us remember that the relationship of media to government should be, to some extent, that of dog to lamp-post. And that this is absolutely fine.

The National column: A BBC worth defending?

My Saturday column in The National (online edition), July 18th, 2015. All comments/shares welcome.

A BBC worth defending? 

Pat Kane for The National

THE future of the BBC is the obvious topic of the week, on both sides of the Border. It catches me as I’m doing a turn at the corporation’s beating heart — as one of the critics’ panel on Radio Four’s Saturday Review, on tonight.

It’s a fabulous gig, custom-designed to annoy every one of the BBC’s enemies. You get to swan around London seeing hot art and orotund theatre, reading buzzy novels and watching gloomy European movies. Ban this bourgeois-bohemian filth! (Actually, Saturday Review was originally commissioned by oor ain James Boyle, once director of Radio Scotland and then Radio Four. So blame him).

But there is one item we’re covering tonight which— no matter how many saltires and Yes flags I’m happy to see waving outside Pacific Quay — makes me unproblematically defensive of the basic concept of the BBC.

It’s called Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners, a two-parter by historian David Olusoga. The documentaries lay out with patience and precision the extent of slave ownership in the UK at the time of abolition in 1840.

They itemise and contextualise the £17 billion (in today’s money) paid to those owners as “compensation” for loss of their “property”. Proportionately, by the way, Scotland had the most slave owners (it’s not like we don’t need to discuss this, folks).

It’s brilliant, moving, shaming, radicalising TV. It doesn’t shy away from contemporary parallels (the slave economy was “too big to fail”, it gave birth to racial ideologies that persist to this day). The panel gave it a thumbs-up, the full Blue Peter badge. Answering the BBC’s historic brief, the show “informs”, “educates” and even “entertains”, so beautifully is it made.

This BBC — not the BBC of Saville and Hall, of massive Newsnight cock-ups, of bloated fees for “Talent” and management, of cloth-ears and establishment collusion during the indyref — is the one you’d go to the wall for. Or, if you had a mind to found a small new European state, the BBC you’d want to set your own public service broadcasting star by.

As in so many aspects of Scottish experience at the moment, we see the Tory free-market fundamentalisms bearing down on the BBC, and understand it as a distant attack on familiar battlements — knowing that we have an escape route ready, if we can just amass the nerve to attempt it. Like Scotland, the BBC is both on their target list and their neglect list. We might have stuff to learn from each other.

One area of mutual interest may be technological. We often neglect the BBC’s crucial role as an innovator, beyond just TV and radio programming. And some imagine that this role might well be the ultimate saving of it.

Do you remember Ceefax? Launched on September 23, 1974, as the first teletext system in the world, it was effectively the internet before the internet. For a few years, you could even download computer programmes from Ceefax to your BBC Micro — which was itself a stunningly bold intervention.

The BBC Micro was a UK-made open computer, running several programming languages (including BBC Basic). It was the instrument for the Beeb’s island-wide Computer Literacy Project, launched in December 1981.

Generations of geeks pay tribute to the BBC Micro as the inspiration of their coding passions. And they’re still trying to inspire. The BBC Microbit came out last week. This buzzing, blinking little device (free to all 11-12-year-olds) has the same ambition to tech-educate kids — but for a different era.

Part of the current complaint against the BBC, ironically, is that it’s far too digitally literate anyway. There are claims that its massive online news operations — local, national and global — crowd out commercial providers at each of these levels.

At the Edinburgh Television Festival Lecture in 1996, the then director-general John Birt said that, without digitalisation, the BBC would be “history”. With 59 per cent of adults who get their UK news online using primarily BBC sites, the organisation has been a victim of its own roaring success.

Some within the building argue that the best defence is visionary attack. The BBC’s head of archive, Tony Ageh, has for the last few years been saying that the corporation should be the lead developer of something called “digital public space”.

It’s undeniable that commercial interests currently shape and direct our access to network society. Even the most seemingly enduring services could one day financially crash, fall or merge into something different. Can there be a Lord Reith-like assertion of the digital rights of the everyday citizen – backed up not just by law, but by actual content and structures?

The key is open access to the island’s content archive — not just of the BBC’s content, but from cultural institutions, local government, education, and other publicly funded bodies, says Ageh.

We should guarantee access to, and usage of, all the content the British public has paid for over the years. Further, we should corral and regulate a zone of our bandwidth that is truly public; whose platforms and tools evolve at a pace which serves the citizen, not the shareholder. 

Ager asks: can all this make up a renewed argument for the licence fee?

I’m not sure whether this “Beebnet” fits, or jars, with current crude Tory visions of a BBC doing less popular programming, and more of a “higher quality”. But I can say to its advocates that the idea of a “digital public space” chimes very well not just with Scottish aspirations, but also actions.

The kailyard of Scottish media broadcasting, as we know, sports many jaggy thistles. The BBC’s own audience surveys identify that only 48 per cent of people in Scotland think the Corporation “represents their life well” in news and current affairs content, compared with 61 per cent in England, 61 per cent in Northern Ireland and 55 per cent in Wales.

Last week’s Ofcom report on public sector broadcasting backs this up, but broadens it out: Scotland has the second highest proportion (21 per cent) of its audience who “feel negatively portrayed” in broadcast media, more than the North of England but less than Northern Ireland.

We know — in fact, if you are reading this on tablet or paper, you are physically holding — the consequences of this degree of Scottish popular alienation from mainstream media. 

We know the range of crowd-funded websites and editorial floors that have sustained themselves — and thereby constructed their own “digital public spaces” – through indyref and the last UK General Election.

And while I’m sure all of them treasure their practical (as well as their ideological) independence, I know that all of them would want a national public broadcaster and regulator in Scotland that was genuinely worthy of the name.

But I wonder whether Ageh’s Beebnet vision meshes more with the way that an engaged and enlivened Scots populace might think about their media these days. What might a comparable “ScotNet” be like?

I would have thought there was huge Scottish appetite for a public media system which (to some degree) takes its priorities from its links with community users; and which takes as a major aim the archiving of, and universal access to, the nation’s culture and data.

I’ll leave it to others to argue the usual Caledonian toss for bigger programme budgets, killer franchises, loosened strings from Auntie. I’d rather be inspired by the BBC as the baggy, unpredictable, creative monster that it can be. And wonder, not for the first time, whether this is yet another classic collective British institution that is better defended on Scottish soil.

Pat Kane (www.patkane.today) is a musician and writer. Saturday Review is on tonight, 7.15pm, BBC Radio 4

Map of Thoughtland: Newsnet Scotland

Newsnet Scotland was launched on March 2010 to address a perceived imbalance in the reporting of Scottish News and current affairs.  We believe that a nation without a balanced media is the poorer for it. Staffed by volunteers Newsnet is the fastest growing news outlet in Scotland, each month we enjoy double digit readership growth.

via www.newsnetscotland.com

I was chatting with Mick Fealty of Northern-Irish-Huff-Post-esque Slugger O'Toole today about the crisis of newspapers - and how they might learn from the way that passionate user communities stream a flow of free editorial into their networks. Newsnet Scotland is a paradigm example of the phenomenon. It was set up by some Scottish independence supporting activists and coders, and is explicitly aimed at redressing what they percieve to be (and arguably is) a media imbalance in the reporting of independence politics in the MSM (Mainstream Scottish Media), ie a bias towards "Unionist" (pro-UK) perspectives. Amid some kitschy cultural moments, Newsnet Scotland does a great service in giving its activist constituency a mix of curated pieces from independence-learning mainstream writers, and "commissioned" pieces from a range of activist voices (Thoughtland has already been sought out). Revenue? Trying to surmount the usual online ad hump. But vibrant and authentic to the mood of the Scottish Spring.