Brian McNair: We can enjoy best of both TV worlds. Period

Published on Monday 4 October 2010 13:44

STV's decision not to broadcast Downton Abbey and a clutch of ITV network programmes was quietly announced at the end of July, sparking a heated debate only when eager Scottish viewers gearing up for a period drama with "quality" stamped all over it realised that they were getting instead a 15-year-old documentary featuring Billy Connolly prancing about in the Arctic. Naked. Again.

Not good enough, say viewers. Ah, but wait, protests STV. Viewers are getting to see brand new episodes of Taggart before the audience down south. We'll see if this placates the critics.

STV is stuck on the horns of a dilemma. Like BBC Scotland, the channel is under pressure to produce and broadcast more Scottish-made programmes. Unlike its licence fee-funded rival, it must do so in an exceptionally tough business environment, with dividend-seeking shareholders to satisfy. So while BBC Scotland has seriously raised its game in the production of drama and documentary programming for the UK network (most recently announcing an adaptation of Denise Mina's Glasgow-set novels), STV gives us another series with the reliable DCI Burke and the team. Cutting edge it ain't, but it's a guaranteed banker.

Audiences understand that STV's room for manoeuvre is limited. Expansion of Scottish content inevitably means opting out of the ITV network. If that is done for the best of reasons - to make room for indigenous content of comparable quality and appeal as the network programmes being dropped - then audiences will accept it. But if it's about the STV bottom line, as some believe, that won't wash in these hyper-competitive TV times.

While STV deals with this short-term public relations hiccup, Scottish television more broadly is wrestling with the strategic issues which underpin the Downton Abbey controversy - how to build and sustain a financially healthy, creatively dynamic production sector which is part of and integrated with, yet distinct from, the UK industry.

Scottish audiences want BBC and ITV network programming, surveys repeatedly show. They also want more indigenously produced content, and would be prepared to pay a reasonable premium for it. This in a context where Scottish TV production has been under-represented within the UK industry.

That is changing now, under the influence of tighter quotas for regional content in UK TV overall, but there is still a long way to go.In August an industry working group proposed an objective of 50 per cent growth in Scotland's home-produced network programming (from 215 million per year to 346 million by 2013), matched by an equivalent growth in employment to nearly 5,000. This to be achieved by a combination of public funding, private investment and innovative thinking at all stages of the production process, from skills training to infrastructure planning to marketing the product down south and overseas.

Scotch pie in the sky, perhaps, at a time of unprecedented economic austerity, but we're talking a few millions, not billions, to pump-prime a key sector of the creative industries. And if we wish to improve both the quality and quantity of Scottish TV, we must surely be prepared to support investment in its growth.

The Scottish government, meanwhile, has set up an independent panel to progress the Scottish Digital Network (SDN) - the distinctively Scottish public service content model proposed by Blair Jenkins and his broadcasting commission in 2008. Jenkins is chairing the new panel, which will also consider the implications of the forthcoming Shott Review proposals on the future of local TV.

The digital network, should it ever transpire, is supported by a wide spectrum of Scottish political and media industry opinion, not least because of its potential to solve the problem faced in such stark terms by STV - that of Scottish audiences having to opt out of UK network programming if they wish to see more home-produced content. The SDN will create space for all the home-grown content Scotland can produce, and more. And it won't cost the earth - much less than S4C in Wales, according to most estimates, and less per taxpayer than most citizens spend on a year's subscription to a daily newspaper. We can afford a digital network if we really want one.

And here we come to the delicate matter of talent. Do we have enough of it in this small nation to sustain the ambitious televisual culture made possible by a digital network? Are we setting ourselves up for huge disappointment?

No-one doubts that the Scots punch above their weight in UK and global television terms. Could an expanded, adequately resourced Scottish sector replicate that level of quality, or would it be a bit like the sorry tale of Scottish football, which produces global icons like Sir Alex Ferguson on the one hand, but when constituted as a national team struggles to beat Lichtenstein?

Comparable European countries such as Norway and Denmark find good TV a challenge, which is why they import so many British programmes, and adapt for their own markets so many transnational formats such as Wife Swap and Big Brother. In Australia, with a population four times as big as Scotland's, the quality of locally produced TV is recognised as lagging behind the UK.What could a reconfigured Scottish TV sector do, then, with only five million people, that would dispose us to choose it on the Electronic Programme Guide over the existing networks? Even if the production resources can be found, is there enough spare talent in Scotland to fill a digital network, as well as existing BBC Scotland and STV schedules, with more than cultural clichs and petty parochialisms? Would we get the 21st-century equivalent of Trainspotting, or would it be Take The High Road for breakfast, dinner and tea?

We do have the talent, yes, and more would be drawn back to work in Scotland by the expanded creative opportunities. We can have the resources too, modest as they can be, if Scots are persuaded of the long-term cultural benefits of a few quid a year from their taxes invested in indigenously produced TV.

To combine the two will take vision of the kind one might hope to see from Blair Jenkins and his panel, married to a hard-headed identification of the types of TV we are good at making in Scotland, and an outward-looking, internationalist approach to the marketing of Scottishness in televisual terms. Taggart by all means, and even Take The High Road in moderation, but Scottish TV won't prosper on clichs alone.

An expanded, dynamic, innovative Scottish production sector will have the capacity to make programmes for Scotland, on UK network and Scottish channels, and for the world beyond these borders - exportable sit coms like Still Game; dramatic adaptations of Scottish writers, past and present; popular formats made by Scots but having little to do with Scotland as such, like Footballers Wives and Countdown; documentaries about Scottish nature and history, which will appeal to the global fascination with Scotland as much as to domestic audiences.

It will make more and better local TV news. It will make accessible television entertainment from uniquely Scottish cultural events, such as the Edinburgh Festival, and expand a still deficient coverage of the Scottish parliament.

We can have all of this, and still be part of a UK televisual culture that is acknowledged as the best in the world. It shouldn't be necessary to choose between one or the other, as STV's viewers are being asked to.

• Brian McNair is Professor of Journalism, Media and Communication at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. He was, until recently, Professor of Journalism and Communication at the University of Strathclyde