Tom Shields on the box

Logically, not being a Gaelophone, I should be outraged by the concept of £20 million of public money being spent annually on a TV channel for a language which is not so much minority as miniscule.

But I don't have it in me to be a Gaelophobe. I have been watching BBC Alba, the new Gaelic channel. Despite my almost total lack of the Gaelic, I found Alba a lively and vital place to tune into. It is a Scottish TV station with a smile on its face and a refreshingly innocent approach.

I liked An La, the evening news, starting off with an item about Barack Obama visiting George Bush at the White House, with a link to ABC News, and then moving on seamlessly to footage of Hamilton Accies beating Motherwell 2-1 in the CIS Cup.

An La, by treating the world like a global village, makes a nonsense of all that sterile debate about a "Scottish Six". News is news, whether it's the credit crunch in Washington or a bit of footie in Lanarkshire. If it can be done in Gaelic, it can be done in Scottish.

BBC Alba also offers a great learning curve. I now know that the Gaelic for snooker is snuicar. I suspect I may be susceptible to BBC Alba because I have some Gaelic DNA from Archie McArthur, my maternal grandfather, who was a Skye man. The rest of the genes go back a century or so ago to Ireland, in the vicinity of Fermanagh. This accounts, perhaps, for my ability to speak fluently through my erse.

But we are all world citizens now. I was watching BBC Alba in Barcelona on Sky TV, as opposed to Skye TV. For the first couple of hours of its daily transmission Alba is a cartoon network. I was watching with my wee pal Ivan, who is only seven but already speaks Spanish, Catalan, Russian, English and a bit of Scottish. We were watching Calum Achair, which is the Alba version of Bob the Builder.

Being quicker on the uptake than us Buffers, Ivan now knows the Gaelic for "Can he fix it? Yes he can." Ivan is a world citizen and also a child of the digital age who insists on being in charge of the TV remote control. Thus, we moved from Calum The Builder in Gaelic to a local Barcelona channel which had Noddy in Catalan and then on to his all-time favourite, Tom And Jerry. Or, as I now call it Tom Is Jerry.

Is' is a Gaelic word for and'. I know this from tuning into an Alba programme called Charlie Is Lola. Nothing to do with transvestism, as in the Kinks song, but just Charlie And Lola. I told you BBC Alba is a learning curve.

There are some nice touches on Alba. The station IDs feature some lovely clips of Scottish scenery and also a pair of sandshoes dangling from telephone wires, which is a potent urban image. Be warned that there may be a bit too much scenery on BBC Alba. A half-hour of folk traipsing up and down sundry Munros was about 25 minutes too much. And clarsachs? Lovely instruments, but perhaps not worthy of an entire programme.

With so much more air-time at its disposal, BBC Alba was able to celebrate the new era of broadcasting with a look back. A programme promising "a nostalgic look at some of Gaelic TV's finest moments" might sound ominous, but it wasn't.

It was an A to U guide to the story of Gaelic telly so far (the Gaels get by on a much shorter alphabet). There was plenty of fun in the reprise. Like Tormod Air Telly's gentle mickey-taking of Free Church ministers. Or Ran Dan (an appropriate name for a series of rumbustious comedy sketches) on the culinary delights of the midgie-burger.

The clips were coming fast and furious and I may have misheard but I think there was someone on a real cooking programme called Haggis Agus, who said a particular dish was "fandabidozi". This word from the Krankie lexicon could certainly not be used to describe one island chef's healthy, but definitely daunting, offering of a snail and seaweed stew.

There was music aplenty. From Anne Lorne Gillies to Runrig and from Blair Douglas on accordion to a bunch of Arab bagpipers mounted on camels. As I said, you often get a smile on Gaelic telly.

To get the most out of BBC Alba, it looks as if we will have to learn some of the language. Again, the keynotes seem to be friendliness an gentleness. They don't just say "How are you?" They say: "How are you yourself?" Which is nice.

Other phrases encountered early on in Gaelic for beginners include: "Are you thirsty?" and "What will you have?" But let's not go down that stereotypical cul-de-sac.

The good news would seem to be that by chucking a few million quid at Gaelic TV, we can make Scotland a more interesting place and the Scots more confident in their culture. The next step is to invest considerably more millions of pounds on making TV programmes in English or Scottish. By Scottish I don't mean just that Scots leid stuff, although your doric and braid Ayrshire can be part of the rich tapestry of how we communicate.

There are hopeful signs of recovery at Scottish TV, which has finally moved away from its disastrous Scottish Media Group persona. Now called stv plc, the company is getting back to its core business of making and broadcasting television programmes.

There is the small problem that stv is inextricably linked to the British ITV system which is intent on cutting back its local output. Ofcom, the British TV regulator, is actively promoting the cut-backs. Our other national broadcaster, BBC Scotland, is not exactly thriving in the business of programme-making. It may well be time to opt out of the BBC. (We could presumably still watch all the BBC channels on Freeview.) Then, all the bawbees raised from licence-payers could be invested in the new Scotland channel proposed by first minister Alex Salmond's broadcasting commission. A budget of about £200m a year would seem to be a fair starting point. All those nice new facilities at existing BBC studios all over Scotland can be put to good use as our nation takes control of its broadcasting future. The yoke of parochialism foisted on us by BBC London can be lifted.

As a nation, we are not short of actors, writers, documentary-makers, and broadcast journalists. There is a whole rake of talented young people eager to get into the business. Many of them will learn their trade here and then move on to London or Hollywood, which has always been the Scottish way. Some might come back and ply their trade occasionally in Scotland. People like David Tennant, Allan Cumming, Craig Ferguson, Lorraine Kelly and even that fellow Connery.

It's a big broadcasting world out there and there is no reason why Scotland cannot grab its share of the action.