If there are good days to bury bad news it stands to reason there are good days to bury bad news programmes. The first Monday in January seems like an obvious point in the calendar for that second activity.
But if January 6 is about laying to rest BBC Scotland’s unloved 60 minute news bulletin The Nine, it’s also about re-birth. So today it’s goodbye to the purple sofa, the chest-high desks and the rotating cast of presenters who propped up The Nine throughout its five years on Planet TV – and hello to the duo now at the helm of its replacement. They are Laura Maciver and Amy Irons, and the vehicle in which they will journey is the snappily titled Reporting Scotland: News At Seven.
But is this jalopy of news more roadworthy than the last one? It’s certainly shorter than The Nine and it certainly feels lighter as a result. In fact it feels like a rushed edition of The Nine but with not enough to differentiate it from Reporting Scotland, which immediately precedes it on BBC One and to which it is clumsily tethered by that cumbersome title.
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It also seems to be a vehicle intended for one driver at a time. And so to Amy Irons fell the honour of helming Monday’s opening edition, she being one of the Beeb’s rising stars. She even stepped across the floor of Studio C to help Reporting Scotland presenter Laura Miller plug the new show. “Amy Irons is here to tell us more,” said Ms Miller enthusiastically. “This is exciting. What can we expect?”
And how did Ms Irons reply? There would be news, obviously. But also stories about community – stories which maybe aren’t news but which still matter. The programme duly delivered on both counts, though having just sat through Reporting Scotland I had no need to watch the same interviews with the same Aberdeenshire kids building the same Aberdeenshire snowman, or watch reporter Louise Hosie in Westhill once more say: yes, it is cold isn’t it?
Community came in the company of reporter Louise Cowie who took us to Lochee Boys Club in Dundee. There we met professional boxer Sam Hickey and 13-year-old aspiring champ Jenna Daley, as well as those who run the place as a haven for troubled youth. Good stuff. We also heard from Mull resident Susan Ringwood about the Oban earthquake (“It sounded like a freight train,” she said, and she had lived in California so she would know) while in Eskdalemuir we followed Cameron Buttle into a so-called Warm Hub where he encountered a very cheery Buddhist nun sheltering from the cold.
In fact cold was something of a theme, there also being a interview with Frazer Scott of Energy Action Scotland (“Are you worried about the winter months?” asked Ms Irons afterwards. “Do let us know”) and another with celebrity guests Greg Hemphill and Julie Wilson Nimmo. They were in to talk about wild swimming and to plug the new series of their BBC Scotland show about it, Jules And Greg’s Wild Swim. An aside: if you believe the panjandrums at Pacific Quay, one of the factors involved in The Nine’s demise was the need to clear the 9pm prime time slot for, well, prime time shows. On Monday, Jules And Greg’s Wild Swim was it.
And so The Nine is dead and buried and what we should probably just call The Seven has risen to take its place. But was The Nine actually that bad? Personally, I liked it. It did what it did pretty well, and 60 minutes of in-depth coverage of Scottish politics, culture, society and sport should have been enough to placate those who feel the BBC is too London-centric.
The Nine, for the record, came from something called Stage One, a fancy name for what always looked to me like Pacific Quay’s upstairs foyer. I always expected to hear the shuddering of a nearby vending machine as it spat out a can of Irn Bru to a panicked intern. But that oddity was also part of its appeal and it was a more inspiring set, however, than the one Ms Irons and Ms Maciver are going to inhabit. But maybe that’s all part of the cunning plan – to ensure that this brand new jalopy of news remains untouched by criticism and simply blends into the background.
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