Modern TV is rubbish! Scotland can and should do better

I was watching a couple of TV dramas the other night by Dennis Potter and it occurs to me that if TV ever had a Golden age it is well over.

There are no challenging dramas today that come even close to the brilliance of Potter. It's all reality TV, news programmes (usually pretty biased and leading) or bad cop shows, bad hospital shows and shitty soap operas.

If we had control over our own broadcasting (as Labour and Lib Dems recommended in the Scottish Constitutional Convention for devolution!) we could make programmes here by local authors that reflect our people's reality here in Scotland. I don't want to watch news about mad plans to put a curfew on kids in England, I want to see strong stimulating educational interesting TV dramas, relevant documentaries and news from Scotland and I want an international perspective that nonetheless puts Scotland and Scotland's interests front and centre.

We can do a lot better. The new Scottish licence fee and a proper set of guidelines for the proper TV channels could bring our broadcasting back to the educational innovative standard that at one time the BBC and ITV were famous for.

We can definitely do better, we can't possibly do worse. When talented artistic individuals like the great John Byrne are being refused commissions by BBC Scotland to make distinctive Scottish drama it shows that something is deeply wrong. Going our own way can only make sense when British TV is so absolutely and utterly awful.