A shoestring revolution is happening beneath the noses of most of Scotland’s population. It’s why I watched a Glaswegian hairdresser last night discussing sex, religion and politics as he bobbed and weaved with scissors around his customer’s salt and pepper hair.
I came to bury this show but I am enchanted. The revolution is unfolding nightly on the BBC’s new Scotland channel, launched three months ago amid industry pessimism and the wide-angle cynicism of commentators like me.
The Scotland channel was the BBC’s fudged and compromised response to growing demands for a dedicated 6pm Scottish news bulletin after the first referendum on independence. BBC mandarins had stoically resisted calls for this for more than 20 years, believing that they were protecting the cornerstone of our shared British identity.
After all, is this not where the nation puts aside all regional and class differences and sits down together for a little while to get its nightly lesson in what it means to be British? To have shattered that illusion by giving Scotland its own 6pm news programme; why, rogue nations would be withdrawing their diplomats and getting all belligerent. And so they threw us the Scotland channel, a pantomime horse of an offering, stitched together with the spare parts of old repeats and the remnants of dusted-down ideas that hadn’t quite cut the mustard in the threshing rooms of London’s commissioning editors. When the BBC unveiled the line-up, it was seized upon by Scotland’s rightwing press and eviscerated. These publications had previously derided the idea of anything separate and Scottish on the BBC and dismissed all calls for such as politically motivated and driven by nationalist grievance-junkies. Even insiders confided their concerns that the annual £30m budget wouldn’t buy you much.
Let’s face it – the launch night might have gone better. We had been promised edgy, new, shaky-camera concepts, but the channel was sent on its way with a Scottish version of a Night at the London Palladium. I expect this nightmare soon to crop up in a found-footage horror flick set in a disused Highland asylum.
The first three monthly anniversaries were greeted with predictably smirking newspaper features about a seemingly catastrophic collapse in audience figures. A figure of 4,000 for a recent edition of The Nine, the channel’s flagship news programme, was greedily fallen on and held up for our contempt (further down, the article was forced to admit sullenly that the numbers had since rallied). This channel, they said, was a dead parrot: its metabolic processes were history and it would soon be expired and gone to meet its maker. They couldn’t be more wrong. It has grown to become the most successful non-terrestrial channel in Scotland. Each week, a quarter (24%) of Scotland’s population (aged four-plus) tunes in for 15 minutes or more, ahead of Channel 5 and just behind Channel 4.
I have news for those who have yet to tune in – you don’t know what you’re missing. A View From the Terrace, the best football show on UK television by far, lives here. Four hipsters in throwaway Matalan get together in Mum’s front room and talk mainly about football in Scotland’s bargain-basement leagues. Uniquely for a football show, it doesn’t treat viewers as adolescents and English isn’t their second language. In one item, they sent a man and a camera to record a day in the life of Airdrieonians FC with no dialogue and a classical music soundtrack. For this alone it must be shortlisted for a Scottish Bafta.
I’ve watched a glorious fly-on-the-wall account of a big Scottish Asian wedding and a beautifully conceived documentary about Glasgow’s transvestite nightlife. Repeats such as the once-in-a-generation splendour of Tutti Frutti have been augmented by Scot Squad, the genius comedy borrowed from the main BBC Scotland channel. The Nine itself is fresh and relaxed but will need time to build an audience in the most crowded time slot in the schedule, where it has competed against some of the finest drama of this decade.
I conducted a poll of friends and family about the channel and was astonished. “I wasn’t expecting to be a fan of the new channel,” said a young mother, “but I feel I’m getting to know about the diversity of Scotland’s communities, with many of the programmes such as The People’s News, Sanjeev Kohli’s Big Talk, Getting Hitched Asian Style and Debate Night. Our family have stopped watching Reporting Scotland and switched to The Nine.”
Another who wasn’t expecting to be impressed was a young female media professional. “I think The Nine is well made and the proper grown-up news Scotland needs. It should be on BBC1. Seven Days is a brilliant round-up of the week’s news, with warm and affable hosts. It’s very watchable and a welcome change from the confrontational style of other panel programmes, while The Collective is thoughtful and provocative. The channel is a great example of Scotland’s potential.”
The channel is also bucking the trend over engaging younger audiences, attracting a significant proportion of viewers aged 16-34. In its first few months, BBC Scotland has the youngest age profile of any BBC TV channel, encouraged by the opportunity to take it online and via social media platforms.
This age group is the YouTube generation. It embraces those subjects that my kind still approach with caution before quickly retreating 10 paces. This new Scotland channel seems to have caught them.