Newspaper bosses are uncomfortable, to put it mildly, with its internet news service, and its position as a hugely resourced and free competitor to their own websites, such as our own, heraldscotland.com. Politicians can take a whack at Auntie Beeb over the expenses claims of its executives without a scintilla of irony, while others just attack it just because, as Hillary attacked Everest, it is there.
Now Alex Salmond, in his latest peek into the (apparently) inevitable future of an independent Scotland, has said it will be done away with, at least, north of the border, as the main public service broadcaster. In its place, there will be a new national broadcaster for Scotland: the Scottish Broadcasting Corporation. It would have a budget of around £300m, funded from a new licence fee for everyone north of the border. More money for it could come from direct taxation and advertising revenue. None of this money, of course, would allow the SBC to have the £4.7bn in revenue which the BBC currently enjoys. The £300m figure would also have to pay for the transmitters, infrastructure, central finance, overheads and other items paid for Scottish broadcasting in London. And, of course, not everyone pays the licence fee, and there is a cost in collecting it.
It may not need that kind of money, however. Because BBC Scotland would be taken over, or to use polite words, “used as the basis” for this new Scottish broadcaster, according to the words of the Scottish Government’s Opportunities for Broadcasting paper. I wonder what the BBC thinks about that: it has spent more than £188m on its new BBC Scotland headquarters on Pacific Quay in Glasgow, after all. It’s hard to imagine the corporation just giving up this building and its infrastructure, or indeed selling it off, not to mention what would happen to its hundreds of staff, many of whom are, of course, proudly Scottish.
Amid all the brickbats, it is easy to forget that the BBC is one of the few genuinely popular cross-border institutions (there is also the NHS). Despite its many critics, people watch and listen to it in their millions. And what, in its place, would the SBC be? The report says: “greater autonomy in broadcasting policy would give Scotland an opportunity to set priorities which are specifically attuned to the needs of viewers in Scotland.” But who decides what are the needs of the viewers in Scotland? If it is, as it should be, the viewers, then the recent uproar over the opt-outs of STV should illustrate amply that Scottish viewers are very similar to viewers south of the border: they want to watch the best dramas and the most popular shows. There is a need for more Scottish factual, historical and, particularly, arts programming, and the Scottish Broadcasting Commission confirmed this. But viewers also don’t like missing The Bill, Lewis or the latest million-pound dramas. They want to watch sport from south of the border, and not only football.
So how would the SBC sit with the BBC? Well, it appears that if you have SBC in your home, but also wanted to watch Match of the Day, Newsnight, Strictly Come Dancing and EastEnders -- not unpopular shows in Scotland -- you would have to buy a BBC licence as well as pay the SBC tariff. BBC radio may not be free much longer either, or the BBC channels on Scottish Freeview boxes, or iPlayer.
BBC Scotland needs to reform and change. More shows from Scotland need to be on the network, for economic as well as artistic and social reasons. But do these faults mean that, come independence, it should be done away with as the public broadcaster in Scotland? After all, come the day, we would be keeping the same Queen. She may, however, when she comes to stay at Balmoral, be unable to watch EastEnders.
There would also be a more basic question: would the channel be any good? Of course, no-one doubts that the talent exists in Scotland, and in the wider Scottish diaspora, to make good programmes, provide decent news coverage and film exciting sports. But would the inevitably restricted resources raised be enough to pay also for a replacement for the Beeb, which, despite its faults, we turn to day after day? We may remember how annoying it was to many when Billy Connolly referred to Holyrood as the “wee pretendy parliament”. Let us hope the SBC would not become, after all the current grand talk, the “wee pretendy BBC”.
Phil Miller
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