It’s difficult to recall a time before British television began to fetishise cookery programmes. Fanny Cradock was then followed by Delia Smith and, occasionally, there was a wee cooking slot for the kids on Blue Peter. Now, at any given time of the year, there are around a dozen television programmes focusing on food and its preparation. It’s broadcasting gluttony and it’s all done under flags of virtue such as supporting British sustainable produce and encouraging ideas around healthy eating.
This is, to borrow a gastronomic phrase, mince. These programmes are relatively cheap to make and provide a bonanza for independent television production companies. They provide platforms for other ideas with the stars, like Mary Berry’s Country House Secrets. Any African child who pitches up in the UK and who has wondered why there seemed to be so little food in his country of origin now has an answer: judging by the number of food programmes on British television, most of the world’s food supply seems to be confined to these shores.
These programmes also seem to showcase the leisure habits and soft-furnishing choices of the exclusively English middle classes. Occasionally, a house-trained Scot is permitted to join in to maintain the myth that we are all just the same and that the BBC is a force for national unity.
The BBC’s second biggest obsession is history, or at least a view of it, supplied almost exclusively through the eyes of English imperialists. Occasionally, BBC Scotland does history, but it’s produced in easily digested bite-sized chunks by telegenic sorts who have no proper historical qualifications.
In Scotland, though, we now have an opportunity to convey to our citizens that our nation actually has its own history and culture which is distinct from England’s. Certainly, we have much in common with our great southern neighbours, but much of the beauty of each of our nations lies in our separate and distinctive identities.
Next autumn, BBC Scotland will launch its new £30m digital channel which will focus on drama and factual programming, including a nightly 9pm Scottish news programme. That sound you hear belongs to the tills of delicatessens throughout Glasgow’s West End, as BBC executives get together with Scotland’s cultural Sanhedrin to plan edgy programmes that keep everyone in blueberry muffins for the foreseeable future.
A cultural programming gap within BBC Scotland is brought into sharp focus at this time of the year. Next week, BBC Scotland’s Hogmanay Live will help us all to see in the new year. It is a truly dreadful crock of couthie and homespun nonsense that gives succour to those Scots who don’t believe their own country is capable of running its own affairs. There is deedly-dee fiddle music and a studio audience so inert that it makes Madame Tussauds look like a rave. Then we go live to Edinburgh to watch another fireworks display and affluent people in Puffa jackets air-kissing each other. Everyone has been persuaded to wear tartan of the loud-and-yellow variety that turns people into walking Liquorice Allsorts.
This is the high point of Scotland’s “festival season”, where we try to convince ourselves and others that we are the happiest and most cultural wee nation on Earth by staging lots of festivals. More than 250,000 poor and homeless children and their families will have other things to worry about than watching an all-night party for the middle classes paid for by millions of pounds of public money. There are dubious claims that this helps the local economy, but I doubt very much if any money makes its way into Wester Hailes, Pilton and Craigmillar, communities which boutique Edinburgh tries to pretend don’t exist, as if they were a delinquent older brother.
My BBC Scotland Hogmanay Special would start off with Loki, the irascible and eloquent hip-hop artist and his crew giving a concert in Wester Hailes. Then I’d have a BBC camera team touring those streets where the real homeless will sleep under the stars in cardboard beds, instead of an army of well-meaning and well-fed home-owners and celebrities quoting poetry and making plans for their night out at the Christmas market later in the week. Instead of fireworks, I’d light up the castle with a giant son et lumière (Edinburgh likes its sons et lumières). This would depict a series of numbers which make up the pattern of Scotland’s poverty: 145,000 food packages processed by our foodbanks; 260,000 children living in poverty; £856bn owned by the wealthiest one per cent of Scots – more than the poorest 50% combined.
Instead of the Great British Bake Off we could have The Great Scottish Knock-Up, in which teams of joiners and plumbers compete to build something useful like a kitchen or a bathroom, preferably in a place where it might be needed. I don’t have a problem with baking cakes per se, but ultimately it’s a meaningless and pointless indulgence. Rather than allowing itself to be used as a vehicle for a propaganda documentary about Police Scotland, I’d like BBC Scotland to mount a proper investigation into the corrupt shambles that Police Scotland has become. It could have one of those wee calculator devices at the top of the screen like they have on Children in Need to show us the increasing total being raised. This one would show how many senior cops had been suspended pending investigation that week. Meanwhile, members of the public could be asked if they have heard of Michael Matheson, the Scottish justice minister. Fellow MSPs could be asked if they recognise him.
The investigative unit at Pacific Quay could turn its attention to the number of lobbying firms with close links to the Scottish government. Just what is this relationship and to what extent are they used to increase the pensions of former political advisers and politicians? How much Scottish legislation has been tickled and primped to fit the interests of a secret and select group of super-rich entrepreneurs?
BBC Scotland spends a small fortune each year on sport. The new digital television channel could make history by being the first to bring the BBC’s coverage of football into the 21st century. Judging by its current output, we may need to wait until nearer the end of the century before that happens.
