PK in The National: River City is scrapped but Scots can set bar much higher
I've graced the streets of Shieldinch myself but this decision by BBC doesn't have to spell end of television industry in our nation
This is a fully-research-linked, mildly updated version of my weekly column in The National, published Saturday, 22nd March, 2025s
IT was a pleasant festival day in Shieldinch … until the car bomb exploded.
My musical brother and I were in the opening minutes of this October 2015 episode of River City, tinkling away on a bunting-wreathed tent, gracefully introduced by the elegant Eileen Donachie (played by Deirdre Davis). While we were there, we enjoyed tea, biscuitry and pleasantness.
But by the end of the episode, it was chaos, carnage and cake-stands in flames. The car bomb was meant for scowling gangster Lenny Murdoch (an entirely jovial Frank Gallagher, on set). Indeed, the carnage has been unrelenting, over the past few decades, in this douce simulation of Maryhill.
There’s been deaths by knockdowns, assassinations, fireplace pokers. Someone even got chucked off a cliff.
Which is part of the overall story about the Scottish soap opera’s cancellation by BBC Scotland after nearly 23 years. These shows are intended to be an answer to our yearning for community and neighbourly relations.
Yet it’s also, in UK soapworld, a savage war of all-against-all. This week’s copy of the exuberant TV Choice illustrates this.
Its Coronation Street roundup shows a still of a bloodied man, pointing a gun across a breakfast table. In Emmerdale, Ella the ex-murderer is accused of drugging a neighbour. Eastenders’ Avani has a bag of pills dropped next to her by a local dealer, and is strip-searched by the police.
Even this week’s generally couthy River City show has a dark brooding debt collector prowling Montego Street, grimly impoverishing the already poor, under pain of his own death (“floating face down in the Clyde”).
Honestly, how much disruption can one permanently built outdoor television street set actually contain?
Digging into it, the viewing numbers for soaps overall on these islands are worse than I’d expected – the low millions, as opposed to the high tens of millions 20 years ago.
The factors involved are as you’d expect. The sumptuous menus of the streaming services, where high-budget, tightly contained series are in plentiful supply, for your binging pleasure. The way that our appetite for gossip about known characters has shifted to social media on our phones.
And those characters now come from reality TV shows, where the fun arises from the conjecture they might really be feeling and doing the chaos, rather than just acting it out. (Though given that we generally know how scripted reality TV is, this may be even odder. We’re enjoying watching non-actors struggling to enact their scripts, just as we struggle to enact those given to us in our own service and knowledge jobs.)
When the BBC Scotland executives say what kind of specific drama series they’re going to spend the cancelled River City budgets on, the zeitgeist call is easily made. Would you like to cower with your cuppa at home, while a violent, criminal and uncontrollable world of narratives keeps you pinned to your couch?
Easy: BBC Scotland will provide. On my count of the shows they’ve mentioned, there’s three police procedurals (Granite Harbour, Shetland, Vigil), two new shows about criminality in families and communities (The Young Team and Grams), and another “new” show in the long tradition of Scottish lawyers on TV, titled Counsels.
Does anything science-fictional or surreal, or even faintly weird, ever happen in Scotland? Is there anything David Lynchian, or Boots Rileyesque, or Wes Andersonish about us? Where is the Scottish conceptual artist that moves their sensibility to TV and film, like London’s Steve McQueen?
Is quirkiness, dwelling on eccentricity or creativity in everyday life just banned from Scottish televisual output? Does it all have to be the dour mechanics of crime and punishment?
There’s an amazing example of corporate speak from Louise Thornton, head of commissioning at BBC Scotland. Apparently, these post-River-City commissions “reflect the increasing shift in audience demand for series rooted in Scotland which play to audiences across the UK … and beyond.”
There’s an implicit dig here. It insinuates that there’s a reduction in demand for series rooted in Scotland which might play to Scottish audiences, as an authentic and powerful reflection of their lives and cultures.
And by means of that intensity and commitment, attract audiences “across the UK and beyond” to their unique character. Not just how well they fit to the most conventional formulae of genre and topic. I resist this claim.
It’s where I also have to take a little distance from the alarum that the end of River City implies disaster for the TV (and film) production sector.
Someone has to explain to me why making pabulum and cliche is worth the effort. Is it just to maintain enough creative capacity that real TV visionaries and auteurs might eventually take advantage of it? When does that far-off day come?
That was certainly the early hope for River City. Its multi-million-pound investment would make it a “star factory”, producing Scottish television talent at every level. I can’t assess whether that’s happened – though the three new series are written by Scots that have come through various talent labs and writing schemes.
The original audience research that was done to prepare for River City, conducted in 2001, had ambitions to put Glasgow on the map with the other big soap cities – Manchester, London, Liverpool (in the days of Brookside). Viewers liked the idea, as the academic Lynne Hibberd reports, that they could have “a drama about contemporary life in urban Scotland, with a defining style and wit of its own”.
Hibberd also relates that there was “real antagonism” in the focus groups “towards the prospect of a rural setting, with Take The High Road (a classic 1980s Scottish soap) being cited as a stereotypical and irrelevant view of Scottish life.”
I wonder whether that prejudice against the rural, in the narration and representation of modern Scotland, has changed since the early 2000s.
The acceleration of our awareness of the climate meltdown has surely meshed with our appreciation of the natural bounty of Scotland. More and more of us know how restorative and healing is the Scottish landscape, as we escape from our cities on free days and weekends.
The recent movie that stays in my head, as a possible new departure point for Scottish audio-visual storytelling, is last year’s The Outrun [see previous blog here]. Its drama is the clash between techno-hedonism in the metropolis, the damage that causes, and what gets healed by being immersed in the rich demands of Orcadian rural life.
But what you really glory in with The Outrun is the filmic artistry involved (from the German director Nora Fingscheidt). There’s clever and subtle editing, in sound and vision, between the two halves of Rona’s broken life. The film is a steady, patient gaze at a young woman’s condition, as she unravels and re-ravels again.
Scotland here is the answer to big, existential questions – about balance, pleasure, the power of nature, the power of technology. We’re not just serving the easy gratifications of police and criminal conventions, that keep you trembling indoors. Modern Scotland as merely another locale for the big scary Outside.
Yes, Scotland contributes 11% of the overall budget for the BBC’s total operation – and yes, that amount should be entirely within the control of Scottish broadcasters, aimed at the creation of Scottish-based production companies. I’ll be straightforwardly nationalist about that.
But please, can that autonomy and support open up some genuine creative vision for Scottish TV? “Ye canna Scotland see what yet/Canna see the infinite/And Scotland in true scale to it” (Hugh MacDiarmid).
Can we nail that statement to the broken front door of The Tall Ship, please?
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