Television Magazine

Scottish TV newsrooms have faced unprecedented challenges in the past two years. The fallout from Brexit, Black Lives Matter, Holyrood elections, Cop26 and the pandemic have tested journalists as never before.  

Raise the Roof Productions head of production Sandy Robertson defined the role: ‘The production management team ensures that a production gets made safely, on budget and on time.… Usually it’s office-based, as opposed to on location. 

‘Every industry has admin roles but, within television and the creative sector, it’s just so much more fun. It’s enriching… so, although you are doing what is often kind of seen as quite a dull, uninspiring, logistical, admin role, it’s fun.’ 

NEWS CAMERA 

Mark Davey is a camera operator at ITN. Presenting the news camera masterclass, he told the RTS audience that sound journalistic skills, the ability to form good relationships and a keen logistical sense were all essential for his job. Davey, ITN reporter Robert Moore and producer Sophie Alexander were the only news crew to film inside the US Capitol in January 2021, when pro-Trump insurrectionists stormed the building claiming that the presidential election had been stolen from them.  

The year 2021 is likely to be seen in future as the point when UK broadcasters and producers finally got serious about mitigating their impact on climate change.  

From practical steps to shift production on to a sustainable footing to ­weaving environmental issues into storytelling and helping audiences to understand what’s at stake – all formalised in the Climate Content Pledge announced at Cop26 – TV’s green ambitions have never been more apparent.  

Liverpool. The global port that Carl Gustav Jung dubbed the “pool of life”. The UK’s most-filmed location outside the capital. From Lita Roza’s No 1 hit How Much Is That Doggy in the Window? through to the Beatles; football dominance; comedy, both singular and sitcom; the backdrop for socially realistic drama, from Days of Hope and Z Cars through Blackstuff, Brookside and Hollyoaks to the BBC’s Time and Channel 4’s Help, with its Rose D’Or drama award, keeping the flame lit. 

News­readers are necessarily calm and rarely ruffled. Until, in the case of ITV News heavyweight Julie Etchingham, they get to interview their teen hero, Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran. “I was so flummoxed – I’d been such a teenage fan that I couldn’t actually get a sentence out. I made a complete fool of myself,” she admitted.  

Etchingham, who was talking at an RTS Devon and Cornwall event in November, went on to identify general election leaders’ debates as her most terrifying on-screen experiences. The worst was her first, the unprecedented seven-way debate in 2015.  

In Things Fell Apart, he excavates the battlegrounds of the American culture wars to find their origin stories, and explains how, exactly, things fell apart and left the country so fractured and polarised. Abortion, homosexuality, cancel culture, Satanism – he picks the biggest and most violent battles. But the episodes start in such obscure places and take such unexpected turns that each one is a revelatory listen. 

Speak to anyone who has worked in the same post for 32 years and you might find them struggling to muster much gusto. Yet Jon Snow still speaks of his daily routine at Channel 4 News with the boyish enthusiasm of one who has just landed their dream job. 

JANUARY 

It’s 6:00pm in London and I’m watching CNN. In Washington, before Trump has finished an insane, incendiary speech about election fraud, his supporters have moved off and started assaulting the Capitol building. This is an extraordinary, deranged Bastille moment. I’m WhatsApping my American friends in the US and UK. They’re already viewing. But US media are outside the building… what’s going on inside?  

In two months’ time, almost six years to the day that BBC Three became a solely internet network in order to save money, the service is returning as a linear channel. Arguably, it’s not a moment too soon. For, along with every other traditional broadcaster, the BBC is grappling with how to attract younger audiences and compete effectively with the streamers.