Even now, almost 46 years after its release, the Thames television documentary The World at War retains its appalling beauty. Its 26 episodes continue to rattle around the twilight stations, beyond Channel 5, so that you are rarely more than a few months away from its presence somewhere. Sometimes, when I see that one of its chapters is unfolding, I watch what remains of it, knowing that Carl Davis’s haunting theme music will soon be making me cry again.
The World at War, along with the BBC’s startling coverage of apartheid in the late 60s and Meryl Streep in the 1970s television mini-series Holocaust, probably formed my political conscience more than anything else. We liberals and lefties are occasionally fond of scolding the BBC for being too easily led by the establishment, but my parents deployed it sparingly and adroitly.
Thames commissioned Jeremy Isaacs, the future founder of Channel 4, to make The World at War at a cost of £900,000 (around £11m in today’s money). I remember my dad telling me that British documentary-making would never get better than this. Laurence Olivier’s spare and solemn narration seemed to sanctify all the human suffering of the Second World War. The footage and the testament of the victorious, vanquished, victims and survivors required no subliminal nudges. Every school head in the UK should ensure all children passing through their gates should see each of those 26 episodes before they must try to make sense of the war. It will leave them exquisitely scarred for life.
Later this month, the BBC will unveil its most important project in Scotland for a generation when it launches its new Scotland channel. It will broadcast nightly from 7pm to midnight and will be composed entirely of new and archived Scottish programming. Its linchpin will be an hour-long news strand from 9pm, made and produced in Scotland. Recruitment for this alone has energised journalism in Scotland, a sector that was in retreat for many years. Already, some have talked about the publicly funded BBC’s unfair advantage in cherry-picking bright, new talent. Such, though, has been the decline in Scottish newspapers that many of these journalists would have been destined to waste their talents in the promiscuous world of PR, writing dismal jargon for LinkedIn.
This 9pm slot isn’t exactly the fabled “Scottish Six” opt-out that has long been the staple item of conversation at Saturday night dinner parties in Scotland’s urban, chardonnay estates. But there are more than enough talented journalists and producers within BBC Scotland to ensure it becomes an important player in the political and cultural life of the nation.
The new BBC Scotland channel is to be given £32m in annual funding and overall spending on factual and drama productions will increase annually by £20m. This all sounds quite rock’n’roll until you remember that in figures collated by the Scottish parliament’s information centre the BBC raised around £324m in 2017-18 from licence-fee payers in Scotland but spent just £223m in Scotland, with the remaining £101m flowing into its London headquarters. This equates to 69% spent in Scotland, down from 72% for the previous year. In comparison, Wales and Northern Ireland, at 92% and 89% respectively, retained a significantly higher amount of the licence money raised in each country. To put this in perspective, the new set being designed for EastEnders will cost more than the entire BBC Scotland channel. So let’s not pretend that London is somehow letting the Scottish natives off the leash.
A sum of £20m doesn’t go a long way when you’re trying to usher in a bright, new dawn for Scottish broadcasting, but it’s a start and much will depend on the imagination and creativity of BBC Scotland executives in ensuring the money is well spent. Thus far, we know that around 50% of the output will be repeats or, in the words of one jejune executive, “superior” repeats. I don’t have a problem with that and hope that they won’t be confined purely to old Scottish material. The success or failure of this enterprise will rest on the ability of BBC Scotland’s senior executives to construct something ground-breaking and extraordinary.
In the past 20 years, Professor Tom Devine’s epic sweep of historical works has provided the nation with a grown-up chronicle of Scotland’s journey. In his analysis of Scotland’s role in the slave trade and last year’s work about the Scottish clearances, he has also held up a mirror revealing hitherto concealed flaws and cracks in the hagiography that we like to create about ourselves. The BBC, though, has followed the Hollywood model in its approach to Scottish history. Ours is a craggy, brutal and complicated story, played out on the stages of Europe, England and America. Yet thus far the BBC has permitted it merely to be served up in bite-size, easily digestible chunks provided mainly by the photogenic archaeologist Neil Oliver (it’s nonetheless entertaining for that).
The proper story of Scotland deserves something much more nourishing than this in the manner perhaps of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s magnificent and spellbinding A History of Christianity. Devine is Scotland’s pre-eminent historian and has sparked global interest in our story. I’d be disappointed if his support for an independent Scotland and his leftwing politics rendered him too hot to handle for BBC Scotland.
• Kevin McKenna is an Observer columnist
• This article was amended on 3 February 2019 to take account of the fact that The World at War was made by Thames television
