Stuart Cosgrove: The Nine is condemning BBC Scotland to failure

This year will be a challenging one for public broadcasting. With a preening and confident Conservative government in place the spectre of privatising Channel 4 will re-emerge and the BBC will be put through the mill.

Perhaps the over-arching issue that the BBC has to face up to is the future of the licence fee, the bedrock of public service television in the UK. In an era when people are accustomed to subscription, particularly for sport, movies and the new streaming services such as Netflix, it will be doggedly difficult to argue for a payment system that is in effect a tax on household entertainment. The BBC will appeal to the goodwill of more than 41 million iPlayer users but angry licence fee refuseniks are growing daily as BBC’s news directorate struggles to cope with a surge in alienated viewers.

I remain a defender of the licence fee system but my faith in a battered system does not blind me to widespread disenchantment about the quality and fairness of news and current affairs in an asymmetrical UK, where money, decision making and managerial strategy is powerfully weighted to London.

But in all moments of change there are opportunities as well as threats. So how should BBC Scotland be preparing for the interregnum that will mark Lord Hall’s departure?

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There is certainly much to do. One immediate move would be to assume greater sovereignty. There is a tendency within Pacific Quay to have strategy handed down from on high and for Scotland to defer to London. I can understand why. It is in Broadcasting House where power resides. That is where the board of governors, senior management, network schedulers and budget allocation is centred. Institutionally, London rules and it is difficult for any nation or region to chart its own path but surely that cannot continue in its present form. One obvious opportunity comes in the personality of Lord Hall himself. Tony Hall was raised in Birkenhead, the son of a bank manger, and graduated from Oxford University before joining a fast-track management scheme at the BBC and became manager of the Nine O’ Clock News aged 35.

In a career in which he played a leading role in the launch of BBC Parliament, Radio 5 Live and BBC News 24, Hall lived through the debates about the so-called Scottish Six, a shibboleth of the era of devolution, that both irritated and worried BBC strategists in London.

Concerned that a stand-alone Scottish news service at 6pm would disrupt the traditional and Unionist map of the BBC, Hall and other newsroom panjandrums argued vociferously against change. Then, as the heat was turned up with successive SNP governments and an independence referendum, a plan was hatched to give Scotland its own channel and confine the debate about the Scottish Six into the dustbin of history. Increased digital spectrum provided an opportune answer to a festering question.

But old habits die hard and rather than entirely devolve the new channel and give BBC Scotland its autonomy, a master schedule was calibrated to fit neatly into the grid of news services across the UK. This centralised thinking led to the birth of a news hour at 9pm, now known as The Nine.

The idea of a dedicated Scottish channel was a masterstroke, which took many people by surprise, but the BBC’s control-freakery and the need to place conditions on it at birth has proven to be a disaster.

The editorial team of BBC Scotland's The Nine

The key to building the success of any new channel is predicated on a single word – inheritance. In the building blocks of a nightly schedule it is essential that every show has a strong inheritance from the programme that proceeds it.

Currently, that cannot be achieved by the BBC Scotland channel in its current form. No matter how popular the individual shows and no matter how well planned the schedule is, the news hour condemns the channel to failure.

Let me clear, this is not a cheap shot about viewing figures nor a back door argument for less news, it is simply a point of logic. There is much to admire about The Nine ... its informality, its willingness to blend the local and the global, its new generation of presenting talent and its design ethic, which uses the scale of Pacific Quay to replicate a smart, modern and post-industrial studio setting. But none of these things taken either individually or collectively is powerful enough to overcome the roadblock that sits in the way of success, a full hour at 9pm, which has limited audience appeal and which cannot reasonably be expected to be a building block in a night of popular viewing.

We know this to be true. The BBC told us so. In 2000, the BBC broke with a 30-year tradition and moved its 9pm news programme later to 10pm, head-to-head with ITN’s News at Ten, arguing that viewing patterns had changed and scheduling had become hyper-competitive. A news junction at 9pm was no longer sustainable they argued.

Yet within a decade all their past arguments about competitiveness and the needs of new consumers were abandoned and they placed the same weighty anchor of a 9pm bulletin round the neck of a newly launched Scottish channel. In order to give Steve Carson and his commissioning team at BBC Scotland a fair chance to build a schedule that reaches out to many more Scots, the Nine needs to be scrapped or moved.

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A SHOW attracting such a small number of viewers, sometimes in the low thousands, runs the serious risk of defining the entire channel as a failure. That would be catastrophic for Scotland and its wafer-thin media plurality and so the senior management at Pacific Quay need to open conversations with Ofcom as a matter of urgency to reshape their schedule. Doing nothing is not an option. A compromise position might be to bring The Nine forward to 7pm where it would have to compete with Channel 4 news but would avoid clashing with other BBC news services.

Or The Nine could be re-imagined as a late night news review show at 11pm, drawing on the many successful hybrid shows that exist around the world. Jon Stewart’s original show on MTV and the subsequent success of The Daily Show demonstrates that late night news can take on a different tone. For example, at Channel 4, I commissioned The Last Leg, now a general entertainment show but back then a news round-up of the days events at the London Paralympics. It too had a different tone and brought disability to the fore.

Another challenge that has been handed down to the BBC Scotland channel is the pursuit of younger viewers, part of an overall BBC strategy to bring teenagers back to the habit of watching television. Admirable as it may be as a corporate objective, I suspect that there has been an over-correction at BBC Scotland, where web-only shorts, young presenters and underwhelming youth-skewing shows have failed to find sizable audiences.

This is a tricky dilemma and not easily rectified but a great lesson can be learnt from the BBC’s own history. One of the shows with the best track record of attracting young people is the charmingly ancient One Foot in the Grave, which at its height reached audiences of more than 17m. A simple arithmetic kicked in and consequently a proportion of those mass viewers were young and they easily outnumbered the lower number of teenagers drawn to highly targeted youth shows of the time.

The simplest way to attract young viewers is to improve reach and ratings across all shows and that is best done with a schedule ruthlessly focussed on success.

BBC Scotland does not currently enjoy that luxury and it should do.