DO we rely too much on TV to define popular culture?

As news circulated this week about Carrie Fisher’s death, I was struck by how little I knew of this much-loved actress, her lifelong fight against mental illness and her straight-shooting honesty about drug use. She lived an unconventional life and hundreds of thousands of fans – maybe millions – loved her for it. Millions more just didn’t know.

I was at school when the original Star Wars came out and Princess Leia evoked such an overtly sexual response amongst the lads that I was somewhat suspicious of the actress. But a million opportunities should have existed since then to get a flavour of the complex woman beneath the earphone hair coils and the white chiffon dress. I should have been able to review my thinking over the intervening 39 years – but I wasn’t.

The woman who died on Tuesday at the age of 60 after a heart attack was worth knowing. But despite her celebrity – indeed maybe because of it – she remained a one-dimensional character until death revealed Carrie Fisher as a three-dimensional personality and a half.

It seems we like our celebrities upstanding and uncomplicated – even though no-one really is. So unpredictable, bipolar, drug-taking Carrie Fisher was edited out – until she happened to die at a quiet time of year for news whilst starring in a blockbusting movie. That’s the trouble with popular culture. It can easily fall into the control of folk who’ve become distanced from their own background and oblivious to other cultures and different life stories around them. Eventually, only material that hits the funny bone of the majority makes the grade. And because majority taste isn’t tested by different material, the public palate becomes ever more restricted and expects easily digested material.

That’s an irritation when it means missing out on a cheerfully outgoing personality like Carrie Fisher. It’s downright disastrous when it means missing stars in our own firmament like Hamish Henderson.

There was a brilliant documentary on the life of the poet on BBC Alba this week, even though I imagine he’s unknown to the average Scot. Likewise, poet Norman McCaig, songwriter and singer Michael Marra plus many of the other “greats” we’ve lost in the last decade. I find myself explaining regularly why these great Scots artists should be remembered when they hardly enjoyed a mainstream minute of TV coverage during their lifetimes.

So well done to BBC Alba for commissioning the documentary on Hamish Henderson, the man whose ballad Freedom Come All Ye was penned for peace marchers on the Clyde in the 1970s but has become an alternative national anthem for many fellow independence supporters. Hamish is still held in high regard by Italians because he fought with the partisans against Mussolini and translated the prison letters of Gramsci into English. They weren’t published for another 30 years – an epic wait that meant Hamish’s pivotal role in introducing Gramsci to the British left was largely overlooked.

The BBC Alba programme also explored the difference between the authentic, unvarnished folk songs and bothy ballads uncovered by Hamish and the more sanitised “folk revival” subsequently served up on the BBC. His biographer Eberhard Bort says Hamish believed folk art was “the manifestation of a rebel underground – an implicit challenge to the ruling-class way of looking at the world.” A very different image to the classic cliched perception of an elderly guy with a finger in one ear, whining on about the old days.

Hamish “discovered” Perthshire traveller and singer Jeannie Robertson in 1953 and brought her to the People’s Festival Ceilidh – a forerunner to the Edinburgh Fringe whose funding was pulled after the Labour Party declared it a “proscribed organisation” because (according to the late Norman Buchan) so many card-carrying communists sat on the organising committee.

All of this constitutes a fascinating snapshot of Scottish life in the post-war period. Yet BBC Scotland knocked the idea back and it was BBC Alba that commissioned two independent filmmakers to make the 90-minute programme. Non-Gaelic-speaking Hamish may not have been core territory for BBC Alba but the heartfelt contributions from friends and family in Gaelic, Scots, German, English and Italian told a story that had to be told, indeed one that should have been told while Hamish was alive and one that doubtless would have been told had he lived and worked in Wales, Ireland or Northern Ireland.

What’s up with BBC Scotland’s commissioning process? Only one man knows because he’s been the sole commissioning editor for almost two decades – a uniquely powerful role held for an exceptionally long period of time. MG Alba by contrast has a panel of four, which makes for greater diversity of outlook during the commissioning process. Maybe BBC Scotland’s new boss Donalda MacKinnon should consider if “one singer, one song” is still the best model for deciding what ideas are developed and rejected on BBC Scotland.

As things stand though, onlookers must conclude that BBC Alba is the repository for serious coverage of all Scots culture – not just Gaelic – allowing BBC Scotland to focus on “mainstream material” with a few scant nods to Scotland’s deep cultural and musical roots.

Now to be clear, I’ve nothing against good mainstream stuff. But I expect BBC Scotland cash to be spent primarily on educating, informing and entertaining Scots – not glossing over distinctive bits of our cultural tradition so there might be a chance of selling the programme to BBC network and entertaining viewers in Surrey. I expect BBC Scotland to be showcasing Scotland in all its diverse glory – not lumping responsibility for “difficult” minority interests onto the poorly financed BBC Alba. But if that is the unwritten policy, then at least BBC Alba should be properly funded for the task – and it certainly isn’t.

BBC Alba is on air from 5pm to midnight but produces just 1.9 hours of new material daily.

Irish Language station TG4 produces more than twice that amount and Welsh S4C broadcasts four times more new material, even though BBC Alba serves a larger population. Is that right?

The Scottish Government has already put its money where its mouth is, contributing £12.8 million annually. That cash goes into the pot along with the BBC’s largely in-kind contribution of news and transmission services, behind-the-scenes support and finance for the award-winning Eorpa. Put bluntly, that’s not enough. Sixty per cent of Alba’s daily output is currently a repeat – no bad thing, since it let viewers like me catch the Hamish Henderson programme, originally broadcast in September. But that’s what the iPlayer does. BBC Alba should be commissioning more original programmes about Scotland’s cultural traditions – and it needs more cash from the BBC to do that.

Of course, Gaels could rightly object that BBC Alba was set up to promote their language and tradition – not to do BBC Scotland’s non-Gaelic cultural programming for them. But currently the most important material about Scotland’s traditions lies in BBC Alba’s archives – not in BBC Scotland’s.

Even in the more accessible arena of music there are complaints. Jools Holland’s programme is one of the few regular, original music outlets on BBC network but its UK audience was pipped by the Transatlantic Sessions screened by BBC Scotland. Maybe BBC Scotland could commission more of these big trad concerts in addition to its Celtic Connections coverage? The forthcoming Robbie Williams specials on BBC network, for example, would probably fund three series of Scottish traditional music. I’m not assuming every Scots licence fee payer would give the thumbs-down to Robbie – but isn’t it time we had a bit of a debate about priorities?

One series that would probably never be commissioned by BBC Scotland is the phenomenally popular Outlander. But there is nothing to stop them trying to buy the broadcast rights now the exclusivity period has expired on the first series on Amazon Prime – nothing, that is, except the very high price Sony is likely to demand and anxieties about the amount of graphic fighting and intimate sex scenes.

Ironically, with Gaelic used throughout, it would be a slam-dunk for BBC Alba – if they had the cash. BBC2 has the money – it must have spent millions buying rights to the dreary Versailles – but has it got the will to screen a provocative and politically challenging bit of TV at a time when the Union is at its weakest?

The point is that broadcasters have options. But currently network BBC north and south of the Border leans far too heavily on predictable, well-known stories told by mainstream stars and expensive formats fronted by celebrities.

So is BBC Alba effectively McBBC2 – Scotland’s cultural channel? If it is, it needs more cash. If it isn’t, BBC Scotland must pull up its socks and give us more challenging programmes – in documentary and drama – about the folk who’ve shaped the culture of Scotland.