Sunday 26 August 2012

Chairman Eck's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution?

So Wee Eck has had a bash at answering one of my 37 questions in his speech at the Edinburgh International Television Festival. Apparently BBC Scotland and the increasingly autonomous STV aren't tartan and shortbread enough for him. His idea of public service broadcasting in a separate Scotland would be to sequester the assets of BBC Scotland, and using the £320m annual licence fee income in Scotland to buy in programming from the BBC and create "more nationally focused material". To placate the proles, the bought-in content would focus on mainstream drivel (or "programmes of of outstanding quality" according to Eck) such as EastEnders, but anything remotely intellectual (or "not of overwhelming demand in Scotland" in his words) probably wouldn't make it to Scotland. So the subtext here would appear to be that Scotland is "too wee, too poor, too stupid" to care about anything in the rest of the UK other than soap operas, or to have any significant audience for high-brow content. And isn't "nationally focused" just a nice way of saying "parochial"?

Of course, he pointed to BBC Alba reaching viewing figures of 900,000 as an indication of demand for more Scottish content. BBC Alba is the Gaelic-language TV channel that knocked ten BBC radio stations (ironically including Radio nan Gaidheal) off Freeview in Scotland in order to entertain, educate and inform the 1.2% of the Scottish population who have the Gaelic. However, I presume he didn't point out that the 900,000 figure was reached when BBC Alba was showing a Rangers football match.