STV

Audiences flock to the BBC during moments of national importance. That’s the received wisdom, anyway. Think World Cup finals, the Queen’s Speech or big news days. After a career in commercial TV, I’d become resigned to this. Until I moved to Scotland, that is.

It’s different here. Partly, that’s because Scots watch more TV than anyone else in the UK, an average of 25 more minutes per day last year, to be precise (thanks for asking).

They included Sedona May Tubbs and Kieran Howe, who were part of the team from the Royal Conservatoire Scotland who won the Drama category with their film What Separates Us From the Beast.

Sedona said, “any students thinking about submitting their work should not be afraid and just submit and keep submitting”.

A similar message was echoed by Marco Di Gioia from the University of Stirling’s team that produced the Factual category winner, The Bad Guy.

Cosgrove, who led the Scotland team that campaigned successfully to bring one of the Channel 4 hubs to Glasgow, is the latest recipient of the prestigious RTS Scotland Award.

The inaugural Writer award went to Lorna Martin, who adapted her best-selling book, Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, for television. Women on the Verge, a Merman/House Productions series, aired on UKTV channel W and RTÉ2.

I was sweltering in the heat of a classroom inside the fortress that serves as the headquarters of Vietnam’s state news broadcaster when my phone vibrated with a call from Scotland. I’d been flirting with STV News regarding a move for a few months.

Aside from my translator, none of the 20 journalists I was teaching (digital skills for broadcast journalists, since you ask) could speak English. I didn’t have to step out of the room when I fibbed and said, of course, it would be easy for me to visit Glasgow in a few days’ time for an interview for the head of news job.

ENTRY DEADLINE NOW EXTENDED TO 31 OCTOBER 2018

On Wednesday 3^rd October Simon Pitts, STV CEO announced his company’s sponsorship of the RTS Scotland Student Television Awards and said: “We are big fans of the RTS awards here at STV and want to work with the best emerging talent in Scotland.”

STV’s new drama The Victim, a legal thriller set in Scotland and made for BBC One, is told through the eyes of both plaintiff and accused. All stories have two sides to them. The narrative concerning the changes going on in Scottish broadcasting is no different.

Glasgow-based STV has a new Chief Executive, Simon Pitts, formerly ITV’s director of transformation and strategy. His new strategy has gone down well in the city and with some producers, but less so with certain journalists and politicians.

Is the glass half full or half empty? That classic question, or cliché, is actually a really useful way to look at the production industry in Scotland. On the surface, all appears rosy. 

The BBC has survived largely intact from the Charter renewal process. Whatever emerges from the scrapping of the in-house guarantee and the establishment of BBC Studios, the corporation’s spending commitment in the nations and regions of the UK remains undamaged.  

The discussion took place at STV’s studios in Glasgow and was chaired by Angus Simpson, who will produce the The Fountainbridge Show on the new channel in Edinburgh. STV was awarded city television licences in January 2013 to operate city television channels in Scotland’s two largest cities.

If you were to believe the headlines, you might think that local television – dismis­sed by some as "Jeremy Hunt’s pipe dream" – was dead in the water. The former Culture Secretary’s vision, scorned by most broadcasters, was bulldozed on to the statute book four years ago and the first channels are now 18 months old.

Hunt thought it wrong that Birmingham, Alabama, had eight local-TV ­stations while Birmingham, UK, had none, and secured some funding and the Channel 8 slot on Freeview (in England, at least) to help the new stations get established.