News coverage by BBC appropriate

If viewers in the UK were given the same local news coverage on a per capita basis, it would mean virtually every town and city of any reasonable size being given its own nightly programme similar to BBC CI News. BBC South alone, for example, covers Southampton, Winchester, Salisbury, Portsmouth, Chichester, Crawley and Gatwick, Brighton, & Hove, Reading, Basingstoke, Bournemouth, Poole – all serviced by one programme, South Today.

Where I do agree wholeheartedly with Mr Ruthven, however, is the completely non-sensical switching on weekdays to the local programme coming from BBC South West in Plymouth – a city and surrounding area that most islanders will never have had cause to visit or even think about – and then only news about the West Country in weekend bulletins.

As a Guernseyman working for the BBC in Southampton in the 1970s, I was asked by Maurice Ennals, a senior BBC manager, to make a written case for the Channel Islands to come under the wing of BBC South.

Although they accepted my thesis that Channel Island viewers had little or no affinity with Devon and Cornwall but very real connections with Hampshire, Dorset and West Sussex (air and boat links, cultural, medical, sporting, education and religious connections and shopping, even), the decision went in favour of the islands remaining in the Plymouth BBC South West area.

Two reasons were given to me. The first was that it would have cost, then, a difficult-to-justify £300,000 to alter the transmitters (Rowridge, IOW, signal interference with France, I gather, was a consideration).

Secondly, apparently, BBC managers in the sparsely-populated South and West rather liked having the CI population on their books, to say nothing of their occasional overnight forays to the islands to make films and cover big events such as the Battle of Flowers.

Technology has moved on, however. I don’t know what the cost would be but I fancy, almost at the flick of a switch, a much better local TV service to the islands could be provided today by BBC South hosting the Channel Islands rather than BBC South West. Perhaps it’s time for appropriate States members and BBC CI managers, whose CI viewing figures would appreciate considerably, to lobby in this direction.

BRUCE PARKER

BBC South 1967-2002