WLTM...

I’ve never been so desperate that I’ve tried speed dating, not even for a laugh.

The basic problem I think is living in Paisley. Not that your chances improve much in Glasgow, where most of the guys you meet are either dumb or too busy acting dumb, usually because they’re hiding a wife and three weans. To balance it, there are a lot of females out there doing pretty much the same thing. Don’t believe me? Get your arse down to Union Street at half two on a weekend night (or any night) and, like the remote police camera vans now blocking the corner of Union Street, you too can witness the hordes of drunk lassies at the taxi rank clutching heels in one hand while smoking a Mayfair with a Mulberry handbag in the other. In other words, your average BBC 1 audience.

I get the feeling that this kind of semi-comedic social realism is exactly what BBC Scotland, together with their pals at Scottish Screen, want to encourage. The deadline’s just passed for a drama scheme called The Singles which on paper looks like a brave attempt at getting homegrown writers/filmmakers on the bottom rung of the biz. The budget - £450,000 may look like a useful amount of money, but it’s not. Not according to somebody I went to Uni with a few years back who knows somebody who knows that the average per-hour cost of network TV drama is calculated at around £750,000.

But like everything else about the BBC – and there’s plenty to slag but I won’t slag SS here because they never got round to Fast Forward Features (see archive) – the problem is a) London, b) London and c) London. Apart from River City – and it doesn’t take a genius to know that particular show will never go network, no matter what anybody says. Personally I think it’s gone downhill again lately, but I live in hope.

I expect when it comes down to it, London will beat BBC Scotland into submission and before you can say opt-out – the budget for The Singles will be instantly halved and the whole scheme will languish in purgatorial development. How do I know this? I don’t. The other day I googled ‘BBC Scotland Drama’ which took me to the BBC Scotland Drama site from where the only drama I could find was River City. No mention of any other show – one-offs or series.

Hmmm… I thought, unless RC’s the only gig in town, then either BBC Scotland Drama is worse off than I thought or they’re not telling us something. I’ll take a punt on the latter. Seems to me that virtually all the drama commissioned out of BBC Drama Scotland comes out of England anyway. Scratching round online, you find companies like Sony Productions credited for ‘Sea of Souls’ Not that anybody gives a toss about where the money comes from – or goes – so long as the programmes don’t insult the intelligence of the average settee tattie.

While Alex Salmond rants about a drop in overall UK spend on TV production in Scotland and when you’ve got the likes of Mark Thompson, ex C4, now top BBC axe-wielder, telling us that there’s not enough talent or ideas here, well – you have to wonder if The Singles will ever happen. Or if they do go ahead, can these dramas be trusted to such untalented locals?

Now I don’t know what any other writer has submitted for The Singles, but you can bet cash-strapped indies from down south have spent the last few months pouncing on anybody remotely Scottish to milk them for ideas, just as every writer on River City will have chucked a treatment in, no matter how comfy their current gig. And no doubt a few ambitious shorts filmmakers will hope TV will buy into their quirky ‘loosely-based-on-my-childhood’ stories.
No doubt other ideas will include mid life crisis domestics featuring downtrodden-but-fiesty 40-something females taking on men, say in a crap football team where they’re suddenly championed to victory by some unreconstituted old fart who thinks they should be nailed to the kitchen floor.

Maybe Thompson’s got a point after all… but I live in hope.