EDITORS who want a Scottish angle on a story will tell reporters to “put a kilt on it”. Never mind a mere kilt, the new, £32 million a year BBC Scotland channel has enough cash to buy full Highland dress. After its launch last night, did it end the evening looking world class, like a red carpet Sean Connery, or was it more Fran and Anna 2.0?
Three, two, one went the countdown and there was Chvrches' singer Lauren Mayberry singing a number which would not be out of place in the next Bond film. Programming proper began, oddly, with A Night at the Theatre (**) hosted by Iain Stirling, the voice of Love Island, the ITV2 reality show infamous for the thickness of the contestants and the thinness of the sheets under which they have sex on camera.
ChVrches and SSO open new channel
If you know who Stirling is then you are probably the target demographic of the new channel. If not, then you, like me, are part of the fuddy duddy majority, those who sit down to an evening’s viewing as we would a meal, consuming one programme after another till we’ve had enough, or the wine runs out. The Love Island lot are the take away set, snacking on “content" whenever and wherever they choose, either on social media or iPlayer.
Whatever your age, the only thing worse than A Night at the Theatre would have been an afternoon in surgery. Tired, unfunny and peppered with audience participation games, it made The Good Old Days look like Sinatra at the Sands.
STV2, which closed down last year after failing to attract enough viewers, was run on £2 million a year, bawbees in TV terms. BBC Scotland has £32 million, but from that sum, which would buy three and a bit hours of Netflix’s The Crown, it has to fund 912 hours of programmes. Getting Hitched Asian Style (***) gave a hint of how the new channel would make the pennies stretch. A documentary about wedding planners Saffron Events, it had good talkers (give Usman his own show) and some mild drama (would the guest list be ready before the guests arrived?), but it was baggy and repetitive, just about it making it to an hour’s worth of material. There are two more parts to come. Is there really more to say?
The People’s News (**) gave people the chance to, er, give us their views on the news. There was one official taxi driver on it, and lots of people who could have been taxi drivers so in love were they with the sound of their own voices. A little bit Gogglebox, and accompanied by a head-splitting soundtrack, the hipsters at Channel 4 news will be kicking themselves they did not think of this first.
At last, a proper event for event TV: the first episode of the final series of Still Game (***). With the dreadful timing of the Scotland football squad, the gang have found their form again when it no longer matters. The story about Jack and Victor entering the YouTube age was about as original as jokes about cat videos, but it left plenty of room for what SG does best: daftness laced with cyanide-strength sarcasm (“Ye want us in it?” Jack asked a boy seeking a selfie with internet sensation Winston. “Naw,” said angelic child. “Yeez are naebuddies and ye’ll be deid soon.” How we laughed.
Burnistoun Tunes In (***) was patchy, but some of the old stuff still works a treat. The night’s final offering was the brilliant documentary Nae Pasaran (****), about a boycott by Scots engineers that curbed Pinochet’s bombing of his own people. Running it earlier would have given the channel a stamp of quality and seriousness, which it needed.
Last night was supposed to be about the thrill of the new, if there is such a thing any more in a multichannel world, yet there was something familiar about the evening. It took a while to pin down, then it came to me. The widely-trailed return of favourite shows that inevitably struggled to live up to expectations, lots of familiar faces, a whiff of prissiness. Yes, it was Hogmanay TV, but on a Sunday in February. BBC Scotland director Donalda MacKinnon has said the channel’s goal is "success over time". Consider the clock ticking.
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