The Writing on the Wall
Last weekend our neighbour caught some teenage girls spraying graffiti on our garden wall. When challenged the girls reasoned that they weren’t doing much harm because the paint would “wash off dead easy”. My neighbour asked them to consider undertaking this work themselves and the girls gave this a nanosecond of thought before declining. Apparently they had more urgent business to attend to, such as texting their boyfriends and planning an undercover (and underage) operation to obtain alcopops.
So there I was, bright and early this morning, rubbing the brickwork with sheet after sheet of coarse sandpaper. I felt a bit like Tom Sawyer whitewashing his Aunt’s fence, because passing strangers would pause and ask me about the graffiti and then share their own horror stories of local vandalism and petty crime. It’s a great way to gather the local gossip.
This weekend chore must have been in my mind yesterday afternoon when I was asked to meet three new members of the Broadcasting Council for Scotland. The BCS is there to represent the views of BBC listeners, viewers and online users. I was expecting a friendly chat, maybe the offer of a glass of wine at the end of a busy week. Take a load of your feet, Jeff, and have a chocolate. That kind of thing.
Instead they gave me a pretty good grilling about Radio Scotland and, in particular, wanted to know my thoughts on phone-in programmes. That’s an issue we’ve been discussing a lot recently, so I was happy to talk it through. As I’ve said before, I think the phone-in is at its best when the audience can actually benefit from the experience of other listeners.
“Imagine the politicians are talking about vandalism” I said, “and our listeners call in with their own experiences of graffiti and the how long it took the police to respond. That’s hard information we can put to the Minister, we can ask for answers on behalf of the audience. That’s the value of a phone-in.”
I’m not sure they agreed, with everything I said, but the new BCS members seem to be enthusiastic about radio and I enjoyed hearing their views.
Meanwhile, the sandpaper hasn’t quite done the trick. Anyone got any better ideas?
