But rather than rake over the same ground, maybe this is a good moment to take a step back and look at Radio Scotland in the round and ask the question, what is it for exactly? Because here’s the thing. I’m not sure I’ve ever really known.
A couple of weeks back I was talking to Dougie Donnelly at the Boswell Book Festival about his days on Radio Clyde back in the 1970s and 1980s. One of the reasons that Clyde was such an important and successful station back in the day, he suggested, was that Radio Scotland didn’t offer much competition back then.
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Has much changed? The truth is Radio Scotland has always seemed to me home to capable broadcasters and dreary programming. It serves some audiences pretty well – Scottish football fans are well catered for – while conspicuously failing to cater to others. Scotland’s business community seems poorly served on the whole and when was the last time you heard a half-hour documentary about any aspect of arts and culture on the station apart from music?
To be fair, even after the departure of Iain Anderson, Billy Sloan and Natasha Raskin-Sharp from the late night slot at the end of last year, music still gets a fair showing (the musician Stephen McAll, aka Constant Follower, one of Radio Scotland’s most trenchant critics might have a different opinion). But, beyond that, much of the station’s arts coverage is reduced to 10-minute interviews on the afternoon show.
The current direction of travel, critics suggest, is that the broadcaster is increasingly looking to commercial radio as a model. The powers that be at Radio Scotland argue otherwise. They can also point to an uptick in ratings of late. In a letter to a newspaper this week, Luke McCullough, head of Corporate Affairs, Policy & Communications, pointed out that the station has become “the most listened-to service in the nation, for the first time in many years.”
And, it should be noted, there are plenty of fine broadcasters on Radio Scotland. Grant Stott is definitely one of them. I’d suggest, off the top of my head, Anna Massie, Roddy Hart, Vic Galloway, Ricky Ross, the inimitable Bryan Burnett, Mark Stephen and Rachel Stewart on Out of Doors, and, yes, Martin Geissler and Laura McIver too.
Bryan Burnett is ‘inimitable’, says Teddy (Image: BBC)
But I can’t be the only listener who finds the station hard to listen to at times. The brief seems to be “make it light, make it interactive and, most of all, make it chatty.” From Radio Scotland Breakfast in the morning to Up Late at night, the station has a serious case of chat-itis. You’re never more than five minutes away from some banter. Add that to a playlist that is frankly very safe and predictable and you’re left with a radio station that too often lurches towards inconsequentiality.
In the end there must be more to radio than ratings, surely, especially if you are a public service broadcaster. Scotland’s travails in the upcoming World Cup will be followed on Radio Scotland in granular detail, and yet the nation has world-class artists, writers, poets, architects, scientists, chefs and academics who rarely feature on the nation’s radio station. Or if they do it will be a quick chat with Stott between Deacon Blue and Crowded House. In Ireland RTE radio can manage an hour-long arts programme, Arena, that only plays music if it’s relevant to the show.
We will all have our own idea of what a national radio station should be. But surely it wouldn’t be too much to ask for a more substantial platform for the arts in Scotland year-round (rather than just in August for the Festivals), and one for Scottish science, Scottish food and drink, even Scottish conversations that are more than just political soundbites?
It’s okay to take some risks now and then, to break away from the rigidity of the format to try something different. At the moment it’s not something I expect from Radio Scotland. But then I’m not sure I ever have.
Listen Out For: England’s Identity Crisis, Radio 4, Sunday, June 7, 1.30pm
Meanwhile down south … Not so much a recommendation (though it does sound interesting), but just a note to say this documentary by Newsnight’s Nick Watts is the second Radio 4 programme looking at English identity through the lens of football in as many weeks (see also David Baddiel passim). As yet there’s no Radio 4 programme looking at Scottish identity through the lens of football. Just saying. Paging Radio Scotland …