Yes/No: Inside the Indyref, BBC Scotland ****
HOW do you turn an event that is relatively fresh in viewers’ minds into must-see television?
If you are Paul Mitchell, the maker of Yes/No: Inside the Indyref, you know that heaven is to be found in the detail. So it was that we found out how the running battle between the BBC’s Nick Robinson and some Yes campaigners began.
Given the protest outside the BBC’s Glasgow HQ it was inevitable that the former BBC political editor turned Today presenter would be interviewed. The demo itself will feature in next week’s third and final episode. Last night’s instalment provided some intriguing context.
Mark Carney’s visit to Edinburgh was always going to be a critical moment for both camps. In the event, the speech by the Bank of England Governor carefully avoided taking sides on a shared currency. The then FM Alex Salmond reckoned he had got a result. “It was from our point of view quite helpful, because it clearly did not say the policy we were putting forward was impossible,” he told Mitchell.
We then saw a clip of the BBC’s 5pm news bulletin in which it was reported that Carney had said any plans for an independent Scotland to share the pound with the rest of the UK needed “careful consideration”.
From there, the film cut to Nick Robinson, being interviewed at home. “I wasn’t sent to cover that story,” recalled Robinson, “but I remember sitting in my office in Westminster … and seeing this very nuanced piece.” Cue a clip of James Cook reporting from Edinburgh. Yes, that James Cook, now chief news correspondent on The Nine.
Back to Robinson: “I thought, I wonder if he [Carney] was really that subtle. Part of the job of being political editor of the BBC is decoding what people in public life have said. Making it real for people, making it comprehensible, and frankly I didn’t think we were doing a very good job of it.”
Robinson got hold of Carney’s statement and went live from Downing Street on the 10 o’clock news, saying the Governor’s speech had raised the spectre of the eurozone crisis and a repeat of the economic dramas in Greece, Portugal and Spain.
Salmond was furious. “All of a sudden the Governor’s speech had been reinterpreted as an outright assault on the idea of a sterling union … which it hadn’t been and wasn’t.”
Given the referendum was the biggest political story of the year, Robinson would have taken a lead in the coverage anyway. But how and when he initially became involved in a major way - essentially, because he thought he knew better than reporters up here - was notable. Moreover, it could be said to have paved the way for the row to come by creating tensions.
Here is the thing, though. The programme shown last night did not contain the Cook clip. But the preview made available to the Sunday papers last week did. The Herald’s sister paper, The National, mentioned the Cook clip in its news story about the episode, published on March 10. In the final edit, however, Cook was out, replaced by footage of Huw Edwards in London interviewing Better Together chief Alistair Darling.
Programmes change all the time right up to transmission, but one is left wondering if the edit was done to avoid the appearance of Robinson criticising a highly regarded colleague, one who is now central to the channel’s flagship news show, The Nine.
Like The Nine and Tutti Frutti, Mitchell’s series has been the best thing on the new channel so far. The irony is that said channel’s creation was, in part, a reaction to the “London knows best” attitude typified by Robinson’s intervention on Carney. Nick Robinson: My Part in BBC Scotland’s Creation - how about that for a commission?
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