It is known as Miserable Monday, when the grind of the new year has set in and festive goodwill has vanished like snow off a dyke.
Good day to launch a brand new news programme, then, on the one channel where news programmes usually make the news for all the wrong reasons.
This one, the grandly-named Reporting Scotland: News at Seven, is the latest attempt by BBC Scotland to reinvent the news cycle after ignominiously axing its more snappily titled, but largely unlamented precursor, The Nine.
Launched just five years ago, the hour-long flagship Scottish news broadcast was finally put out of its misery before Christmas after rarely troubling the viewing charts. Audiences were probably unsure, given there already was a half-hour-long flagship Scottish news broadcast at 6.30pm on BBC One Scotland, what exactly it was for.
Now, undaunted by that abject failure, BBC Scotland bosses have been emboldened to try again – this time, it’s a half-hour show, folks, and two hours earlier in the schedule, so no need to make a pot of cocoa to help stay awake.
Yet, whether this revised format makes any more sense is open to question. Last night’s debut was presented by rising star Amy Irons, 33, who makes up in bounce and sparkle what she may lack in experience.
Her co-anchor, with whom she will alternate, is veteran of The Nine, Laura Maciver, who, at 48, has tasted more news format changes than you’ve had TV dinners. Hopefully, the show will survive long enough for Ms Maciver to make her entrance.
Broadcast from the corporation’s Pacific Quay HQ in Glasgow, its mission is apparently to focus ‘on the people at the heart of communities from Shetland to Selkirk’, whilst also offering ‘more on the big stories of the day through analysis and discussion’.
Amy Irons presents new BBC Scotland flagship news show Reporting Scotland:News at Seven
The show replaces The Nine which was cancelled after viewing figures nosedived
Older viewers may cast their minds back to a similar, magazine-style news digest hugely popular in the Seventies, called Nationwide, which dealt with all life’s diverse preoccupations with equal aplomb – one minute, gut-wrenching, secret-camera reports on the dangers of rough-sleeping on our city streets; the next, a skateboarding duck.
Back in those days, of course, there were no similar shows crowding the schedules. But we already have Reporting Scotland on BBC One at 6.30pm – what’s so different about this stuff?
The set looks suspiciously like RepScot’s conventional news studio which jars slightly with that aim for a more ‘conversational and informal tone’.
The content seemed strangely familiar. It decided weather would be its in-depth story of the day but filched quite a lot of content from the 6.30pm news before tacking on a glorified vox pop from a community centre in Dumfriesshire where the locals all go to get out of the cold and have a hot meal. After that, we were back to the studio where an energy saving expert shared top tips to keep those pesky heating bills down, including closing your curtains at night. How have we all managed until now?
Talking of reheating old ideas, you can’t have a news bulletin with sport or weather, now can you? Even if the first half of the show was all about how bad the weather has been and how it’s unlikely to have changed much since. So we had a weather forecast (again) and a sports section which focused on Premiership football and, particularly, some transfer window soap opera about whether some ex-Celtic player is coming back to Parkhead.
A small feature about a boxing club in Dundee punching above its weight seemed the only concession to focus on communities from Shetland to Selkirk.
And it’s not that any of this wasn’t slickly produced, it just felt like it had run out of ideas. Which may have explained the puff for another BBC show about wildswimming.
Bring back the skateboarding duck – this one is goosed.
