Gerry Hassan does a disservice to the many talented and dedicated BBC Scotland staff when he glibly offers up just one single example – A History Of Scotland – of daring and evocative programming in the last 25 years (It’s time to change the channel”) .
The production teams who made Planet Oil, Hebrides, Still Game, The Scheme, Katie Morag, and, of course, Balamory, would beg to differ while award-winning investigations such as The Men Who Sold the Jerseys and Sins Of The Fathers, and the most comprehensive and wide-ranging referendum coverage provided by any broadcaster, are not evidence of an organisation lacking in pride or creativity – and that’s just on TV.
While he makes a number of valid points, a number of his contentions are simply incorrect. The decision that the cost of free licences for the over-75s should be met by licence fee income was made by the UK Government, not volunteered by the BBC. There was no pressure placed on the Director-General by London-based executives to force him to backtrack on decisions about Scotland – it is in the context of the decision on licence fee funding that the debate on Charter has been framed.
And the BBC does not spend only £30m on Scotland and Scottish programmes – the BBC’s annual spend in Scotland is significantly greater than that, around £200m. Like every other broadcaster, we’d like to spend more on our programmes and, in this respect, our Charter proposals are ambitious.
On the general question of governance, it is for others to determine how the BBC should best be governed, but it is our role to educate, entertain and inform audiences in Scotland – and we believe our staff, and those of the many independent companies we work with, will build on the many successful programmes they’ve made as we approach a new Charter.
Ian Small
Head of Public Policy
BBC Scotland
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