50 Years of Reporting Scotland  ***

BBC1, 7pm

TRICKY things, anniversaries. Do you throw a huge party or let the day pass with little mention, confident in the knowledge there are many more good years ahead?

Reporting Scotland marked the occasion with the documentary equivalent of afternoon tea at a mid-priced hotel. Sedate, tasteful, and certainly no dwelling on the stickier parts of the marriage.

“Remember that demo by Yessers on our doorstep?”

“No dear. Think I’ll try a scone.”

“How about the raging furore over a Scottish Six?”

“News to me. Those eclairs look nice.”

A pleasant enough time was had in the company of Mary Marquis, Archie Macpherson and other well kent BBC faces, with actors from BBC River City and BBC Still Game offering commentary, and BBC anchor Jackie Bird doing the interviews. I wouldn’t say it was incestuous, but if there had been a soundtrack it would have been duelling banjos.

Being a documentary, there was a whiff of Scot Squad in the air initially, as if any minute Bobby might burst in, shouting “Awright Officer Jackie?” But things settled down and back we went to the days pre-1968 when London sent up snippets about nesting ospreys and whatever else HQ thought Scots would be interested in. It was a reminder of what a radical idea RepScot had been at the time.

Curiously for a programme about reporting, there was little questioning going on. Viewers might like to have known, for example, how much the programme manages on compared to the Six O’Clock News. But, like mentioning the demo, that would involve straying into tricky territory, which, being the BBC, it could not do. Instead it was back to the fluffier stuff. “Mind Viv and her hair?” chortled a River City bod, reminding us that as a piece of media analysis this was less Marshall McLuhan and more Mary, Mungo and Midge.

The best section featured veteran reporter Paddy Christie being teamed with political correspondent Nick Eardley for the day. Eardley, said Bird, embodied “today’s multiplatform, TV and online social media journalism”. That was the problem, as far as Christie was concerned. “You’re doing two things at once there,” she said as Eardley juggled devices. “You’re not concentrating on either.”

The elephant in the room that was nationalist criticism of the BBC was treated like it was Harvey the invisible rabbit. We had a cultural historian talking about how “representing the nation is a huge challenge”, Sally Magnusson revealing the Twitter flak she received after big interviews, but an actual critic? No. Maybe in another 50 years we’ll all be mature enough for that.