Why aren't we getting value for money from BBC Scotland?

Ask yourself what’s meant by BBC Scotland drama, however, and things become trickier. Today, it’s easier to say what it isn’t. For example it is not content made using actors dressed in period costume. Although the form is popular and the Scottish literary canon is stuffed to the gunwales with novels which would require stays and frock coats, some years have passed since BBC Scotland took on the task of adapting works like Kidnapped, Sunset Song or The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde.

Another thing BBC Scotland drama is not is big budget. At least in the way of, say, Netflix hit The Crown, or six-part supernatural chiller The Rig, which was shot at the nine-acre FirstStage Studios complex in Edinburgh’s Leith district and was the first Amazon Original production to be made entirely in Scotland. Not that its cultural and geographical specificity necessarily made it a hard sell for a streamer with a global audience. Speaking to Westminster’s Scottish Affairs Committee in 2022, Amazon Original executive Georgia Brown told MPs: “I think The Rig will prove to the world that shows can go out that are hyperlocal.” She wasn’t wrong. It was a hit. Season two is incoming.

What do we get instead from BBC Scotland? Another, different, John Rebus. More cops and robbers only this time in Shetland. A drama set on a submarine (Vigil). A drama set on a train which had most viewers yearning for a bus replacement service by episode three (especially enticing if that bus was driven by Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves as in Speed, the high octane movie Nightsleeper was inevitably compared to).

What else do we get? Budget cuts across the board and a nebulous, inter-connected production world where it’s sometimes hard to know what qualifies as a BBC Scotland drama in the first place. Although shot partly in Glasgow with a largely Scottish cast and a Scottish director, Nightsleeper was actually made for the BBC by the appropriately named Euston Films. They’re based in London and owned by UK multi-national Fremantle.

So ask yourself, too, if we are being properly served by BBC Scotland drama. The BBC, remember, is a state broadcaster funded by what’s known as a hypothecated tax, one we all pay and which is ear-marked for a specific purpose and therefore ring-fenced. That purpose is making television programmes and maintaining a service across multiple networks. Moreover, it’s an offence under section 363 of the Communications Act 2003 to watch BBC television programmes without a licence. The current annual cost for such an item is £169.50, unless you’re watching in black and white in which case you pay £57. Cheaper, but the snooker must be hell.

To put it in terms someone under 30 would understand, it means you’ll pay £14.12 a month for the right to watch the BBC’s televisual output. That’s slightly less than if you subscribed to Apple TV and Amazon Prime and took up the cheapest Netflix deal. A difference to the streamer service is that nearly everyone is obliged to have a TV licence, unless they have a very good reason otherwise. Another difference: you can’t end up in jail for streamer service infractions like password sharing, but a custodial sentence for BBC TV licence violation is ultimately possible under the law. That’s the context within which BBC Scotland drama operates.

Of course like its parent organisation, BBC Scotland doesn’t have the cash pot available to Netflix and Amazon. Worse, production costs are rising while revenue heads in the opposite direction. The BBC’s annual report for 2023-24 shows a £7million drop in estimated income from Scottish licence fees from the previous year, from £304m to £297m. Meanwhile the cost of the BBC Scotland service rose from £35m to £40m, eating up a large chunk of the £77m total (the rest of the allocation is divided between BBC Radio Scotland, BBC Alba and BBC Radio nan Gàidheal).

(Image: Shetland)

At the same time the number of adults in Scotland using all BBC content has dropped from 87% to 84% over a year, and specific BBC Scotland content, which includes radio and online, is ‘consumed’ by just 57% of us. In terms of perception, there is little movement in opinions about programming as it relates to entertainment value and its quality. But when respondents were asked how effectively BBC Scotland output reflects “people like them”, there was a 10% drop off. It’s now well below 50%.

That’s not to say there aren’t still wins, both critical and commercial, or welcome innovations. BBC Scotland soap River City was intended partly as a nursery for Scottish writers, director and actors and it can point to notable successes. Last year the River City Training Academy was established, offering a two-year training programme for successful applicants, future-proofing against the progress already made.

Meanwhile, in its section on Scotland, the BBC report name-checks Guilt, Shetland and Vigil as examples of successful networked content. Fair enough. To that list we should probably add Mayflies, the adaptation of Andrew O’Hagan’s affecting novel about male friendship, and Float, a comedy-drama about love, identity and lifeguards set in Helensburgh.

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Moving and engaging, Float comes in handy, watch-on-your-phone-on-the-bus episodes of 10 minutes each. We could soon also be lauding an adaptation of The Young Team, Graeme Armstrong’s searing novel about gang life in the west of Scotland. It’s being developed for television by Glasgow-based production company Synchronicity Films, though there’s no word yet on which broadcaster or network will air it. If the streamers truly do have no fear of the hyperlocal then BBC Scotland might have a fight on its hands to secure it.

Those programmes are all hits or possible future hits. But critics would say there should be much more of that kind of thing. Also, that the television we make should better reflect Scotland as a country and more courageously mine the output of its many creative talents.

A decade on from the independence referendum, where is the epoch-defining, Our Friends In The North-style examination of the vote and the political and societal fallout from it? Where’s the dramatisation of the recent SNP psychodrama? Alasdair Gray would have turned 90 in December, but where’s the TV adaptation of Lanark to capitalise on that anniversary and on the success of the recent Oscar-winning film version of Poor Things? 

Or take writers of the current generation. Why is nobody at BBC Scotland beating down the door to secure the rights for Thirsty Animals by Scots-Egyptian author Rachelle Atalla, set in a future Scotland where the water is drying up? Or Hazardous Spirits by Scots-Palestinian writer Anbara Salam, set in 1920s Edinburgh and last week nominated for Scotland’s National Book Awards by the Saltire Society?

These things needn’t swallow up huge budgets either. After all, the great Scottish television writer Peter McDougall created an iconic piece of Scottish television drama in 1976 with The Elephants’ Graveyard, a simple two-hander starring Jon Morrison and a certain Billy Connolly.

(Image: Float)

As luck would have it, you can currently watch The Elephants’ Graveyard on the BBC iPlayer, along with an interview with McDougall which aired on BBC Four last month. “One of the things I never had to do was write an outline,” he says tellingly at one point. “If I was to write an outline about The Elephants’ Graveyard, what am I going to say? Two guys meet on a hill? Because that’s what it would be.”

Perhaps all that’s needed these days is vision, imagination and courage – and maybe a soundtrack by Mogwai. The Glasgow post rock icons did the honours for a French TV series, so why not? Dream big. Ask them.

So is it good enough to say that harsh economics alone should drive production decisions at BBC Scotland’s Pacific Quay headquarters? That the best we can hope for is that the stuff we do see – Vigil, Shetland, Guilt, Rebus – is decently made and entertaining enough?

Or should we demand that to the BBC’s founding principles – the mission to educate, entertain and inform – is added something else: a requirement for envelope-pushing, dial shifting, risk-taking? Ask again if we’re being served by BBC Scotland drama and, measured against those demands, you’ll have to conclude that we are not.