ONCE upon a time, I was a television personality, famous in the streets of Mintlaw, in the glory days when Grampian TV was seen in every household between the Silvery Tay and Stornoway, before all these other fancy channels started getting in the way.

They were strange times. If you secretly switched the television on during the day, you could watch the delights of the Test Card for hours on end. And at the close of day, the real-life Reverend IM Jolly sent you to sleep over a nice cup of cocoa.

Then Breakfast TV and Channel 4 came along, and before you knew it you woke up to Anna Ford – or was it Frank Bough? – and never slept at all as you watched Prisoner Cell Block H and Eurotrash in the middle of the night. And then came Sky, with its constant news and football: 900 channels and nothin’ on, as Bruce Springsteen sort of said.

Those early television days were a real monopoly: no wonder Roy Thompson described it as a licence to print money. Who could resist rushing off to Esslemont and MacIntosh’s great store to buy the advertised settee as soon as Welcome to the Ceilidh was over? I was delighted back in the day to work with such broadcasting legends as John Duncanson, Selina Scott, Kennedy Thomson and David "Ginger Peachy Goodnight" Bennett. Awesome. I was even boss for a while to Anna Soubry, who meantime has risen to the heady heights of David Cameron’s Cabinet.

The politics of television always fascinated me. Being in charge of a TV station, or editing a news programme, is like a kind of medieval priesthood: it gives you power and prestige. You can decide what’s "important", simply through the process of selection. And once you film an item you have the further power of putting it into a running order, with the unspoken message that early stories are more significant than the ones at the end. I was always conscious that an editor had no more right to make that decision than Mrs MacTavish in Mastrick.

The media I worked in was immensely hierarchical: there was a chain of duty from the office junior up to the senior editor. I slipped badly after the third rung or so. Unfortunately, I hadn’t taken Harry Redknapp’s advice and made enough friends on the way up to cushion my crash on the way down.

Thirty years or so on, it all seems very different, though some of the old oligarchies cling on. BBC Scotland seem much as it was then, though I personally always preferred the tiny corridors of Queen Margaret Drive, and the open-all-day bar, to the glass cabinet that is Pacific Quay. But it’s still the news where you are, which strangely enough always seems to be elsewhere.

Meantime, BBC Alba is one of the great achievements of Scottish broadcasting over the past decade. It has shifted geography. Like most rights, it was earned, not given: the result of a long, hard-fought campaign over the previous 20 years or so. And it’s worth pointing out that some of the biggest supporters of Gaelic development were the Tories – help from the likes of former Conservative Secretaries of State George Younger, Michael Forsyth and Malcolm Rifkind was crucial. Oh, for half of their vigour and action from the current Scottish Government.

Social media has cut through the past like an electric saw through a sponge-cake. Who on earth can wait for the 6 or 10 o’clock News, when you can access them any time any place (signal permitted) with the touch of a thumb? And why listen to experts when you can construct your own commentary? YouTube has made us all media-moguls. We have all become Horace Bachelor, transmitting from Keynsham – spelt K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M – Bristol.

We spent Christmas together as a family and I know that my children, ranging in ages from 12 to 23, would rarely consider sitting down to watch television in the old-fashioned sense. Maybe Doctor Who, but apart from that if anything is of interest they catch up with it later on Iplayer in their own time. It is a measure of control.

BBC Alba has brought my native language, via compulsory subtitles and a calculated policy of promoting English, into homes across the country. Apparently, that’s the way out of the ghetto. If you tuned in from Mars you could well believe that here we all are, happy on our little island crofts, endlessly singing at Celtic Connections, whistling at sheep-dog trials, and playing Pro 12 rugby. It’s like the Gaelic version of the news where you are not.