Chips with everything

Especially the English

WHAT'S got into the Scots? You might think they would be feeling rather self-confident these days, since not only do they now have their own parliament and executive but they also seem to run the rest of the Untied Kingdom. Tony Blair (prime minister), Gordon Brown (chancellor), Helen Liddell (Scotland), Robin Cook (leader of the House of Commons), Derry Irvine (Lord Chancellor) and John Reid (Northern Ire­land) are all Scots. Even so, the Scots are not happy.

The problem, apparently, is the Eng­lish. A rising sense of nationalism has been accompanied in recent years by a growing feeling of antipathy to the neighbours south of the border. During the World Cup, many Scots, egged on by their biggest-selling paper, the Daily Re­cord, cheered all England's opponents to the echo. More sinisterly, incidents of bullying English children at school rose sharply, with ChildLine Scotland report­ing a sudden increase in calls from de­spairing English children.

Now an outsider has dared to join in. Digby Jones, head of the Confederation of British Industry, seeking to explain why Scotland's economy is not doing too well, suggests that the Scots' failure to welcome English investors is partly to blame. "Scots seem to have an enormous chip on their shoulder."

He is right. But the odd thing is why they should have acquired it, or chosen to display it, so recently. Plenty of other peoples revel in the injustices done to them over the centuries: the Irish and Quebeckers have only recently emerged from aeons of resentment about their sufferings at the hands of others, (i. e., the British), and the Serbs have yet to follow. But their sufferings were at least real. The Scots have no good reason to feel espe­cially hard done by. Their victimhood is an invention – like, it has to be said – much of the rest of what passes for his­tory in Scotland, from the romantic myths about kilts and tartan to the fatu­ous film "Braveheart".

Andrew Wilson, a Scottish Nationalist member of the Scottish Parliament, says Scotland must lose its national chip if it is to rise above "mediocrity". But Ross Finnie, a Liberal Demo­crat minister, shows that may be hard. Rising to Mr Jones's bait like a finnan haddie, his bold rejoinder was to call the CBI chief an "English prat". Oh, flower of Scotland! Had he not then followed an order to apologise, he might have found a place in the Scottish pantheon along with bravehearted Mel Gibson.

Текст 2

Absolutely frightful

The BBC is doing very well. So why is British television so bad?

BBC, whose job is to be the guardian of quality in British television, is in triumphant form these days. This week, it secured for the first time a £350 m ($550m) borrowing limit from the Treasury spe­cially to develop its commercial arm. This autumn, it will expand its digital empire with the launch of "Freeview", a free multi-channel terrestrial service, on the licence it scooped up after the collapse of itv Digital. Odd then that the British tv in­dustry is suffering unprecedented angst about the quality of the stuff it makes.

"The idea that British television is teem­ing with...creative risk is a joke," declared Mark Thompson, the new boss of Channel Four and ex-head of television at the BBC, at last month's television festival in Edin­burgh, where tv types traditionally gather to celebrate their triumphs: "so much of it just feels dull, mechanical and samey." To­day's programming, added Tim Gardam, Channel Four's director of programming, was plagued by "formulaic conformity".

Particular venom is reserved for the BBC. Mr Gardam accused it of "machis­mo", arguing that its relentless quest for ratings under Greg Dyke, the director-gen­eral, had led it to lose its sense of what it believes in—"besides believing in the BBC". Mr Dyke, claimed David Liddiment, outgoing head of programming at itv, Britain's biggest commercial broadcaster, was "providing a terrible disservice to range and quality and cultural values in Britain." Paul Bolt, head of the Broadcast­ing Standards Commission, a watchdog, described popular BBC dramas as "hum­drum, over-familiar and formulaic".

Some of this can be put down to cor­porate rivalry. itv has been battered by both the advertising slump and the failure of itv Digital, its disastrous experiment with pay-TV. It has also been losing view­ers to the bbc. While in 2001 ITV still led BBC1 in the ratings, this year it has been trailing behind the BBC's flagship channel, with 24% of viewers to 26%. Even Channel Four is losing money for the first time in years. All the while, the BBC sits snugly on lop of the £2.5 billion it collects each year from owners of TV-sets.

Yet the whingers have a point. The occa­sional gem that the BBC still produces, such as "The Blue Planet", a nature pro­gramme ritually rolled out as a counter to these charges, serves chiefly to highlight the mediocrity of the rest of its schedule. British drama is a poor shadow of its American counterpart, where original, intelligent output – from HIO’s "Six Feet Under" to Fox's "24"—is thriving.

The BBC itself remains apparently untroubled by any of this. That BBC1 has swept the news from its prime-time schedule to make way for more soap and failed American reality shows such as John McEnroe's "The Chair", that even BBC2 now fills its prime-time with new game-shows such as "Liar", is a matter of pride, not shame, within the organisation. Yet there is a danger in the focus on ratings. As Mr Gardam puts it: "If [the BBC] exploits its current strength in purely market terms... it may jeopardise its reason for being."

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