(Image: Mentorn/BBC Scotland)
Whenever I read yet another piece predicting BBC Scotland’s demise, I’m reminded of William Frederick Yeames’s painting. Only instead of the inquisitor asking the boy in blue, “And when did you last see your father?” he wants to know when the kid last watched the channel launched just seven years ago.
How would you answer? I would have to say hardly ever, and I review television for a living. I’ll watch, and have watched, paint drying (Sky’s Portrait Artist of the Year: v good). I’ve survived Mrs Brown’s Boys (Christmas specials included), and laughed in the face of Richard Madeley on Good Morning Britain. But watch BBC Scotland? Like the man almost said, I would do anything for the love of a wage, but I won’t do that. Well, not unless a commissioning editor tells me to.
So here we go, a no-holds-barred, Border biscuit-fuelled account of an evening watching BBC Scotland. Alternative title: I watched BBC Scotland for a night, and all I got was this lousy premonition of doom.
The channel comes on air at 7pm - how very 1970s - but the real start is Reporting Scotland on BBC One Scotland at 6.30pm. This is the flagship bulletin on the main channel, the one supposed to set the news agenda. On this night, Wednesday 14 October, the running order on RepScot featured reports on the Lewis fishing boat tragedy, an interview with First Minister John Swinney, treatment for people with brain tumours, endometriosis, and football (always the football). There was a heads-up or “puff” for Debate Night later on, and for Radio Scotland Breakfast, but nothing for the 7pm Reporting Scotland.
The 30-minute news show at 7 was part of a package meant to compensate for the loss of The Nine, announced in 2024. Also in the deal were more episodes of Debate Night and some hour-long special editions of RepScot.
The 7pm show’s remit was to “get to the heart of the day’s stories and communities across Scotland”. In short, dump the foreign coverage favoured by The Nine in favour of Scottish human interest stories, ideally from outside the Central Belt. The vibe was to be lighter, upbeat, a counterbalance to RepScot with its nightly dose of court reports and political mayhem.
On this evening, the show repeated what had been on RepScot with a couple of exceptions - items on Royal Mail delivery standards and an industrial tribunal hearing. More time was given to a story about old banknotes being given to a charity shop, the “big surprise” of how much they were worth (£86,330) being kept to the end. By then, however, the story had already been everywhere (including RepScot).
The presenter, Fiona Stalker, kept referring to “The News at 7”, which was technically correct. The original title was Reporting Scotland: News at Seven, but grouping the show with the BBC’s News at One/Six/Ten only exposes the differences in quality between the bulletins. The smaller Scottish budget was obvious. Where Sophie Raworth had reports beaming in from all over, Stalker was left to rattle around a too-large studio talking to contributors via patchy video links.
After the news came Life on the Bay, a fly on the caravan wall documentary filmed on Fife’s sunshine coast. Half an hour of perfectly pleasant folk going about their business. As is the way of such programmes, the producers could not resist trying to put bells and whistles on it, in this case setting up a rivalry between two park workers to see who would get the warden’s job. Would it be young Josh or the older Gibby? As the tale ground on I suddenly felt an urgent need to empty the dishwasher.
The same went for the next programme, Island Crossings. Another fly-on-the-wall doc, this time about CalMac and the ferries. It was beautifully shot and had better stories, including a look at the Stornoway-based organic skincare firm, ishga. This was more like it - show and tell us things we don’t know. Surprise the viewer. Open a window on parts of Scotland we don’t often see.
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Yet it was ultimately too similar to Life on the Bay and therefore too much. Now and then a gentle documentary is just what the viewer fancies, but every night? A large batch of observational docs was commissioned when the channel started, and they seem to have been playing on a loop ever since. From Inside Central Station to Paramedics on Scene, there can scarcely be anyone in Scotland who hasn’t been filmed.
Again, the attention wandered. I brushed the dog, made another cuppa, mended a leaky radiator, put a washing on, and went internet shopping for a two-plug extension lead (the glamour). This is what people do while “watching telly". Programmes need to work harder than ever to maintain interest, and neither Life on the Bay nor Island Crossings cut it in my case.
Nine o’clock and time for Debate Night. Stephen Jardine had set up shop in The Music Hall in Aberdeen with a panel of party politicians plus Geoff Aberdein, former special adviser to Alex Salmond, and a live studio audience. The latter were younger and better informed than your average Question Time crowd, and lively exchanges took place on topics ranging from oil and gas exploration to second referendums on Brexit and Scottish independence.
The set looked cheap as chips with cheese, and they could do with another camera, but this is a well-put-together programme and Jardine is a class act. He brought the audience in often, called the politicians out on any waffle, and generally kept the pot boiling nicely. Better than Question Time’s Brucie any day.
BBC Scotland director Hayley Valentine was an editor on Question Time and likes the format. The question is: if the BBC Scotland channel is closed, would Debate Night shift to BBC One Scotland? It already airs there after transmission on BBC Scotland, albeit at midnight. And would it be in addition to Question Time on network TV or instead of?
Next along were back-to-back repeats of Dinosaur, Ashley Storrie’s sitcom. Too cutesy and laugh-free for me when it first aired in 2024, the repeats did not make me change my mind.
By now it was 11pm and all decent folk, and dogs, were in their beds. But there was one more programme to watch (two actually, but I swerved Race Against the Tide on the grounds it was a steaming heap of piffle).
Island Crossings brought home the crucial importance of a reliable ferry service (Image: BBC Scotland)
The last man standing was Martin Geissler with Scotcast, a “visualised podcast”, on this occasion featuring two blokes and a camera. The former ITN reporter has been the driving force behind this programme, and it earned a shout-out from new director-general Matt Brittin at the Edinburgh TV Festival, so I think we can assume that, like Debate Night, it will survive any cull.
The show is at its best when it lets reporters kick back and talk about the big story of the day. That night’s programme, however, was a wide-angle look at AI, with a safety analyst as guest. Geissler said the subject was starting to keep him awake at night. Fortunately, the rather woolly discussion did not have the same effect on me and bedtime called.
I had survived the evening. Much of it had been taken up with fighting boredom. Granted, it was a snapshot of what the channel offers, but the bigger picture doesn’t offer much succour. As the BBC’s annual report states, the channel reaches just 12% of Scotland’s population aged four and over in an average week. The bill to the licence fee payer was around £42 million a year in 2024-25. Figures for 2025-26 have not been made available.
It is a lot of money for little return. The programmes that merit saving could go online or on the main channels (assuming they brought back BBC Two Scotland, axed in 2019 to make way for the new channel).
BBC Scotland started as a compromise, a halfway house between a Scottish Six covering Scotland, UK and world news, and the status quo. Like all compromises, it required work. Instead, there has been a process of slow, benign neglect. Pulling the plug on The Nine was just a symptom of a decline started long before. Maybe even on the opening night, if you want to be really cynical.
Since then, as one observer has said of the BBC as a whole, the channel has been getting smaller and more irrelevant at an accelerating rate. An evening’s viewing only confirmed that.
As I switched off (always at the wall, never leave the set on standby, kids), the question came to me again: when did you last watch the BBC Scotland channel? I can say, hand on heart, that it was only days ago. I only wish I had enjoyed the experience.