Next Year's News
A few months ago I asked listeners to tell me what programmes they would like to hear on Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Radio Scotland. The response was terrific and the notion of actually asking the audience for their views was deemed unusual enough to be newsworthy, according to my colleagues in the media. That says something in itself.
So we've been considering all those suggestions and matching them against the programme offers we received from different departments and independent production companies.
One big theme was the call for more news/debate style programmes and so we're hoping that Lesley Riddoch will provide that very thing. There was also a call for more investigative journalism. That's why I was so happy when our monthly Investigation series recently won a major U.K award. We'll be doing more with that series in the coming year and developing our Action Scotland format to reflect more in-depth stories from communities across Scotland.
I was really pleased there was such as demand for history and biography. We've been developing plans to provide a regular place in the schedule for this kind of programming, supported, we hope, by a broandband portal that could allow listeners access to the archive of programmes we've made about Scotland's history.
We'll also have regular drama on Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Radio Scotland. We want to launch a 'play of the month' slot for straight drama and that will be augmented with lots more comedy/drama and situation comedy. It seems many listeners think we do too many sketch shows.
Our big project for next year will be Scotland's Music 07. John Purser will return to the airwaves with a 52 part series telling the history of Scotland's music and this will be supported by dozens of live events and live music sessions across the country.
This is just for starters - we also have a brilliant line-up of features, documentaries and conversation formats - and I'll be giving you lots more detail in the months ahead.
