Is this crude new podcast really what BBC Scotland should be making?

The Herald Scotland

4 days ago

The series was filmed last year, before the scandal broke. The BBC says it is only fair to contestants to show it. They, after all, did nothing wrong. It will be weird, though. At first, viewers will not quite believe what they are seeing.
I had a similar experience with a new homegrown BBC product, Situationships. It's a podcast hosted by author and nurse Sophie Gravia and author and television personality Christine McGuinness. Made at BBC Scotland's Pacific Quay HQ, each new half-hour episode is available on BBC Sounds and 'fully visualised' on the [[BBC Scotland]] channel and BBC iPlayer.
Gravia and McGuinness are agony aunts, advising viewers on everything from flirty text messages to friendships gone stale. And I do mean everything. I refer those interested to the story about the first date and the poppered body suit.
The opening titles are done in the soft focus style of those adverts for adult stations you'd see in the early days of multi-channel television. It's all in keeping with the show's up-for-a-laugh attitude as the duo help viewers navigate 'the toughest, most outrageous and downright weird scenarios that life can serve up'.
Now at this point I could say something snarky involving the phrase 'Reithian values', but let's be grown-ups here. Situationships could have been precision-engineered to have the likes of me collapsing on the fainting couch we keep in the front parlour for such occasions. As McGuinness says, 'on this pod anything goes', and that includes F-bombs.
Adding to its defence, [[BBC Scotland]] is only doing what everyone else is and jumping on the podcast bandwagon. Why not? We cannot get enough of them. What was at first a form of cheap radio has migrated to television and online, and now it's coming to an auditorium near you. If you want to see Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart in The Rest is Politics at the SEC Armadillo in Glasgow in November, for example, a full price ticket was being advertised yesterday at close to £90.
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As for the swearing on Situationships, you hear similar on Miss Me? Lily Allen and Miquita Oliver's podcast, and they are up for a British Podcast Award.
To recap, podcasts are of the moment, potentially lucrative, suit the changing ways viewers and listeners consume content, and swearing on radio and TV is nothing new. You can even hear the US president doing it on the news.
Put it like that, and BBC Scotland should be congratulated on taking the initiative with Situationships. It was, after all, its producers who went to Gravia with the idea.
Put it like that, and people like me ought to wind our necks in. It's just one show after all, and the BBC is a broad church that caters for many different tastes.
Moreover, having watched every episode so far, I can say Gravia and McGuinness are a likeable, funny duo and good luck to them for earning a crust, any crust, in this media landscape.
Having said all that, why does this feel like a canary in the coal mine moment for BBC Scotland?
Let's start with the swearing. Not cool, particularly on screen. Swearing is fine, if not to everyone's taste, if it's a drama or comedy. In some programmes, The Thick of It/Succession, it has been raised to an art form. But most people would flinch if someone swore loudly in a supermarket or another public place. The same applies to broadcasting. Two people sitting in a studio swearing is ugly, jarring, and unnecessary.
More depressing than the swearing is what Situationships says about BBC Scotland's direction of travel, and what it thinks audiences want.
Peter Capaldi in The Thick of It (Image: mikehogan.biz) This is a channel, remember, that asked for and received permission from Ofcom to make deep cuts in its peak-time news provision. Out went the hour-long and well-regarded The Nine, in came a half-hour news reheat show at 7pm on BBC Scotland, and the Scotcast podcast. The BBC said the changes would 'play to our strengths as an innovative broadcaster that delivers high-quality journalism to audiences across all our platforms'. How's that working out, then?
One growth area is true crime podcasts, which admittedly BBC Scotland does well. But there are quite a few now, among them a recently announced six-part series on the late heroin dealer, Mags Haney. Any more true crime and it will be back to the tired old days when the west of Scotland was known for nothing more than gangs and violence.
BBC Scotland is also the channel that swung the axe on River City. When viewers complained, they were told this was all to the good. BBC Scotland was keeping up with the changes in the industry; no one wanted long-running series any more. The money would be going instead on short-run, Netflix-style, high-quality - there's that phrase again - dramas. And anyway, River City wasn't making the numbers and did not offer 'value for money'.
I asked BBC Scotland for viewing and listening figures for Situationships, without success. Since it looks like it costs about fifty pence to make, the show probably ticks the box marked value for money. And so a precedent is set. Cheap is in. Cheap is doable. Cheap is good.
No one benefits from such an approach. Least of all fans of River City, many of them elderly, or the many working-class youngsters who might have got a precious start in the industry via the soap. But never mind the losses, let's have a chortle at Situationships instead, because that's what BBC Scotland thinks we want.
Funny thing is, I don't know who Situationships is for, and I'd bet BBC Scotland doesn't have a clue either. The Holy Grail 18-25 cohort would find it laughable. It's just another ill-considered leap into an already crowded market, one that risks dragging standards down further at a time when they have never been more important - to audiences and the BBC. Whatever future was imagined when the BBC Scotland channel was launched, it was surely not this.
Alison Rowat is a Herald feature writer and columnist