BBC Scotland had an announcement for us this week: the new head of drama is Gaynor Holmes.
You may not know the name straight off, but Holmes is an experienced TV executive who has been at the BBC for 14 years, making programmes such as Monarch of the Glen and River City. She's also been doing the job of head of drama for a few months already after her predecessor Christopher Aird headed off to London last September.
Is it an overly cautious decision to plump for an insider in this way? Possibly, when you consider some of the profound changes affecting television drama just now: the falling viewing figures on mainstream TV, the creation of original drama by internet companies such as Amazon and Netflix, the increasing dominance of satellite channels. But the fact that Holmes has worked for so long at the BBC shouldn't matter too much. What matters more is what she does next.
What we'll see in the immediate future are dramas green-lit by her predecessor. In the next few weeks, filming starts on One of Us, a four-part drama written by Jack and Harry Williams, who created The Missing. Late last year, BBC Scotland also spent a few weeks shooting a version of Iain Banks' novel Stonemouth in and around Macduff in Aberdeenshire.
Stonemouth does look promising, not least because it's written by the consistently fine David Kane and Peter Mullan is in the cast, but both it and One of Us are safely within the comfort zone. Stonemouth has a dark subject matter - the rivalry between two criminal gangs - and One of Us deals with how a murder affects a community and is clearly a child of Broadchurch. In other words, it's more crime drama in a schedule that's already full of it.
This lack of originality should be Holmes' first target. Aside from soaps, much of the output from BBC drama is set in one of three places: the police station, the hospital or the school. But where is the drama about the wider community? In the last few days, I've been watching the American HBO series Looking, which stars Russell Tovey, and what's striking about it that it's just a slice of life. There are no dead bodies, no gaping wounds, no flashing lights: just people like us. It would be a good model for BBC Scotland.
Holmes has a couple of other challenges. The first is commissioning, which has become like a malfunctioning drain: choked and slow. When I interviewed John Cleese recently, he told me how Monty Python was commissioned: it was one writing team, one commissioner and then, bang, off they went. Nowadays, the writer's role has been minimised which is the wrong approach. As the actor Christopher Eccleston put it the other day: "The problem with television is when it starts to get created by a group of bean counters or by one actor."
The second challenge is deciding what role BBC Scotland should play in the bigger debate about the film and television industry. What we need urgently in Scotland are better studio facilities, an argument that goes back to at least the 1940s when the BBC producer Joseph Macleod proposed a studio complex in Inverness. We also need, for want of a better word, a czar: a prominent industry figure can proactively fight to bring more productions to Scotland and make it one of the centres of original, exciting drama. As the new head of drama takes over at BBC Scotland, we are still a long, long way from that destination.
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