IT’S thought the Outlander TV series has contributed to the increase in Scottish tourism by showing Scotland off in its scenic finery with a wee dab of history-drama thrown in. It wasn’t made by the BBC, which doesn’t seem interested in Scottish historical stuff.
It’s thought that Channel 4 setting up in Glasgow could lead to an increase in jobs, both in administration and production. Wouldn’t it be nice if our BBC licence fee money was being spent doing a similar thing?
Because Scotland doesn’t get a decent return on its licence fee from the BBC. England gets a reported 100 per cent-plus. Wales gets nearly 100 per cent, but Scotland receives nothing like that return.
Even the money that does come to Scotland is split, and much of it is hived off to make programs with no Scottish connection. So we in Scotland can watch our TV and see very little of ourselves, either in personnel or in programming content. We were told we could not have a “Scottish Six” as it would be too parochial, yet that stricture doesn’t seem to apply to the network news and News24 which is pretty well entirely English in outlook, with no serious attempt to show UK-wide context or perspective. Scotland gets a very poor deal when it comes to any BBC output whether on TV or the UK radio platforms: sport, news, drama, history, politics.
But I certainly don’t want the proposed “ghetto” Scottish channel. It would be more of the dreadful quality of BBC Scotland and the once-excellent Radio Scotland: neither of which is of the quality of the past, and neither seem to have an ounce of broadcasting integrity, ambition or originality.
We need to get the same deal from our licence fee money as England/Wales. We need to get some ambition from the people spending the money. We need to spend it on Scottish content, not on funding the careers of Home Counties luvvies who don’t even seem to like Scots. Scotland probably has more good fiction writers at present than it has ever had. Why don’t any of them get commissioned to write a TV series? We might even be able to sell it to the Scandinavians, the French or the Dutch...
GR Weir,
17 Mill Street, Ochiltree.
NICOLA Sturgeon is encouraging a British company, Channel 4, to base its new regional HQ in Glasgow (“Glasgow tipped as leading bid to host Channel 4 base”, The Herald, May 9). Why would she do that when her sole aim is to remove Scotland from the UK? Why would C4 have a base in what, if Ms Sturgeon had her way, would be a foreign country? Curiouser and curiouser.
Jill Stephenson,
Glenlockhart Valley, Edinburgh.
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