In relation to the Scotland-wide picture, a lot of positives came through in terms of how we serve audiences, which is a tribute to those involved. Right at the point of lockdown, we went out to the creative sector to launch a request for new programming, which we saw come on air within weeks.
Susan Calman did a programme from her garden called “Socially Distant”, which was made during the tightest of lockdown restrictions and which went down very well with our audiences. That was partly a way of giving creative workers, musicians, comedians and others a pay cheque during that time.
We saw Covid editions of “The People’s News” and we saw new religious programming as churches, temples, mosques and synagogues closed. Again, within a week, we were doing special religious programming—such as “Reflections at the Quay”—in Covid-safe ways, and individual faiths were having services broadcast on the new channel. That is on-going. In fact, “Reflections at the Quay” has been recommissioned and will come back, because people of faith are still challenged in relation to how they can go to churches, temples, synagogues and mosques.
We put a whole raft of new things on air. I pay particular tribute to our BBC bitesize education team. Within days of schools closing in Scotland—which took place, as the committee will remember, slightly earlier than it did in the other four nations—that team had a daily BBC bitesize TV offering for Scotland on air in the morning. That was a full month ahead of the network service. A raft of new programming was put in and we found new ways of doing our core programming, from “Good Morning Scotland” in the morning right the way through to “Lunchtime Live”, “Drivetime”, “Reporting Scotland” and “The Nine”, which are core information services.
Much production activity continued, and new production activity started. However, productions such as “River City” had to go dark at that point. As has been said, some extra costs are involved in that, which we will work through and support the companies with. We continue to commission regularly—commissions for BBC Three, BBC Scotland and Screen Scotland were announced today.
However, we simply cannot make some productions that we would have liked to this year. I am thinking of a very successful show on the channel called “Mirror Mirror”, which is set in hair salons all around Scotland. Although we will recommission it, it simply cannot be made at the moment, while people are wearing masks.
Levels of production spend at BBC Scotland and elsewhere have been affected—[Inaudible.]
I simply want to pay tribute to the many people who worked incredibly hard to work out safe ways of keeping our services going.