NEVERMIND the Brexit (as the Sex Pistols so nearly said), I am full of admiration for the volume of sustained quality commentary in The Herald from my colleague Alison Rowat this past week about The Television.
It wouldn’t (couldn’t) be me, because I have always had an ambivalent relationship with the box, despite doing a fair bit of work on and for it in the last decade of the previous millennium.
Truth to tell, I have never bought a television. I lived without one for a long time, and switch on the one that is currently connected to the rooftop aerial of my living quarters but rarely.
I should say that I have always had a TV licence when appropriate, but the sets have all been hand-me-downs. My favourite was a monolithic Sony late-cathode-ray edifice that required its own bespoke plinth, possibly by Forsyth of Denny, and was a three-man lift to take to the dump at the end of its life. I delighted in telling flat-screen hipsters how much more green it was in energy usage terms.
I do now have a slimmer model (another cast-off gratefully received) but you will not be reading anything about BBC Scotland TV and The Nine here, you’ll be relieved to know, because I haven’t yet worked out how to see it. All that has happened at the Forth Estate since the advent of Scotland’s new channel is that I can no longer watch BBC2. I have no idea how to retune the TV to address this state of affairs, am convinced that if I try I will lose access to the little I do want to see (some sport and the occasional programme on BBC Four), and will be just fine until someone more technologically adept visits me, which may not necessarily be that soon. I am, to make my position absolutely clear, one of those older people who never switches the telly on without first looking at the newspaper or TV guide to learn if there is anything I might want to see.
Scoff all you like, but one of my favourite contributions to social media has been the confession on Twitter by either my former Herald editor or his award-winning columnist wife that they were forced to make their own entertainment on a blissful weekend when their teenage children had conveniently billeted themselves at the homes of friends and they realised neither of them had learned to work the new smart TV.
My current set is not smart, I don’t think, even if it is clearly cleverer than I am. Yet it is true that I was once on the other side of the glass, presenting an arts magazine programme on Scottish Television (at around the same time as Alan Partridge was in his pomp with Knowing Me, Knowing You, it occurs to me).
Alison Rowat: Marks out of 10 for BBC Scotland's The Nine?
I fitted it around my work for The Herald, in that way younger, more ambitious folk do, and might have been on the telly longer if the editor had not instructed me to stop when the paper was bought by STV. (It’s a complicated story.)
Of the fine folk I worked with then, only one, I think, is still making programmes – Antiques Road Trip last time I asked. A director on the show wrote a racy novel that was made into a film, and my producer re-trained as a countryside ranger and quickly become responsible for the protection of Scotland’s red squirrel population, at which he proved equally skilled.
There is perhaps a metaphor there, dear reader, which bodes well for the new BBC Scotland TV channel, even if – as Alison Rowat pointed out – its many recent kin are now extinct. I look forward to finding out. Eventually.
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