WHEN news of the Dunblane massacre came through, I was standing in my school playground. My friends and I were huddled against the cold when Laura broke into the circle to say there had been a shooting at a Scottish primary school.

I don’t know how she heard of this so quickly. It was an age before Twitter, smartphones and rolling news, so I assume she had had to take a message to the school office and perhaps a secretary had a portable telly flickering away in the back room where they kept the kettle and the digestives.

So she ran to us with the terrible story and I remember wondering if it’d be on “the main news” tonight when we got home. Would we have to sit through the “main news” and wait till Reporting Scotland came trundling around before we could know what had happened?

Of course, the tragedy at Dunblane was a worldwide story, but my daft teenage self assumed Scottish things were automatically relegated to the wee news show tagged on at the end of the big one.

It was likewise with Lockerbie, another wintry horror. I was kneeling in front of the Calor gas fire when the newsflash came in, and my eight-year old head was troubled at seeing Scotland suddenly all over the “main news”, because Scotland’s news was usually small and familiar.

It was about Labour and the council and the roads. It was about ribbons being cut and cats being rescued. So why was there suddenly talk of explosions and bodies falling from the sky? Horror seemed very close, and anything was possible.

There’s no point in pretending London isn’t the financial and cultural centre of Britain. People often need to move there to get a leg-up. It sucks in money and attention. It makes news and it broadcasts that same news, and any journalist who tries to cut it out of the story will make themselves a joke.

We can’t pretend it’s not there and that it’s not vastly important, and that seems to have been the main stumbling block to a “Scottish Six”: people were understandably troubled by how they could create a news show which was “Scottish” when the great, dazzling London was looming over it. London would overwhelm the show!

We can’t ignore London, but including it will dilute the Scottish element!

A Scottish Six needs London but might be swamped by it!

But if the news omits or skims over whatever’s coming from London then aren’t we left with the sad old story of Scottish news being all about motorway diversions and cats up trees?

And won’t that simply reinforce the idea that we’re too wee to tackle the big stuff? London: can’t live with it and can’t live without it! The BBC has been struggling endlessly with how to create a news programme which is distinctly Scottish but still able to tackle UK and international news, however, it looks like STV has cracked the case. STV News Tonight (STV2, weeknights) launched this week and made it all seem so easy.

What’s the big problem, they seemed to chuckle? Instead of worrying about how to keep big, bustling London from leaving its prints all over the show, just confidently blend everything together.

Some might say Scotland and London are not equal partners, and neither are STV and ITV, so they can never sit together comfortably in a news programme. One side will need to retreat, but which should it be? STV2 has boldly ignored that and happily mixed both elements.

Let’s take Thursday night’s show: a Scottish presenter in a Scottish studio on a Scottish channel can effortlessly hand over to an ITV correspondent on the pavements of Westminster and it doesn’t result in howls that Scotland is being sidelined or that Scottish concerns are being overlooked.

The ITV journalist hands back to STV who then sends us back out to North Korea. We return to Scotland to look at Brexit from a Scottish perspective.

Then we leave Scotland and London, indeed we leave the Earth, because this show is keen to stress it won’t be constrained by geography and so it gives us a story about the very rings of Saturn! Saturn, eh? Nicely done, STV2.

So we now have a news show which has gladly shoved off the parochial elements – no cats, no motorways – and isn’t afraid to blend with the London boys at ITV if the story demands it, and neither does it feel the need to stick a big tartan badge on everything.

It’s not ashamed to report from Westminster if that’s where the big stories of the moment are, and it can do so without compromising its Scottish identity.

It seems we can have UK and international news from a Scottish perspective, then, and this is a poke in the eye to the moaners who imagined such a show would have to be broadcast from a cottage in the Highlands with the presenter struggling to be heard over the peat crackling in the fire and the clacking of Granny MacTavish’s knitting needles.