If you live in the Scottish Borders or Dumfries and Galloway are you superserved by ITV?
The south of Scotland is a rural area with several medium-sized towns but nowhere of real size.
The largest town, Dumfries, has a population of 33,000.
The area itself can feel overshadowed by the densely populated Central Belt of Scotland.
And local residents may sometimes feel their interests are not as well served as they could be by the Scottish national media.
BBC Scotland, of course, provides a national news service for Scotland on TV which includes stories from the south but purely local stories are not in the remit of Reporting Scotland.
The BBC does however provide opt-out radio bulletins in the area and plenty of stories from there feature on the BBC website.
Commercial radio though has all but disappeared.
Radio Borders, once one of the most successful independent local radio stations in Britain and an important part of the local community, was replaced by Greatest Hits Radio last year.
So was Westsound in Dumfries. It is thought their remaining local news bulletins are compiled and presented from centralised hubs.
The area has many well-established local weekly papers but, just as everywhere else, they have suffered as sales have fallen and advertisers have gone online.
So it is reasonable to argue this is an area of the country which can sometimes be overlooked by the Scottish national media and where the local media is fragile.
Except when it comes to ITV. Here the very opposite is true and the company carries an unfair burden.
In 2013, Ofcom decreed that ITV should reinstate a full news service for the Border TV region which includes Cumbria as well as the south of Scotland. A few years earlier the station was effectively merged with Tyne Tees.
It also decreed that additional local programmes would need to be provided for the Scottish part of the region.
Typically 2 hours a week are provided – a magazine programme Border Life and a thrice-weekly political programme Representing Border.
Ratings are not publicly available but the viewing figures for Representing Border are thought to be modest.
It is easy to ask the obvious question: why not simply change the TV regions and give the south of Scotland to STV?
Apparently Ofcom cannot do this. Either STV and ITV would need to agree this themselves or a new licence for a revised “region” covering all of Scotland would need to be awarded from scratch.
But surely that does not mean that a bit of sensible cooperation between STV and ITV should not be possible?
STV produces a well-regarded current affairs programme called Scotland Tonight, shown 4 times a week. Politics is an important part of the programme but it covers a broader range of topics.
On Monday night, there will be a special programme devoted to the Scottish Conservative leadership election. This will also be shown on Border.
Surely this offers a way forward?
ITV and STV could work together to coproduce Scotland Tonight and other non-news regional output. These programmes would be shown on both STV and ITV Border.
Separately the existing news arrangements on Channel 3 in Scotland – including Lookaround for Border viewers – should continue.
It seems ridiculous that a sparsely populated part of Scotland should get a level of local output unseen anywhere else.
STV programmes outside of news cover both the Central Belt and former Grampian TV region. English regional output apart from the news is virtually dead.
The Scottish part of the Border region is, in effect, given parity with Wales, Northern Ireland and what is in effect STV’s Scottish national service.
Instead STV and ITV should cooperate so that STV’s non-news output can be seen by viewers in the whole of Scotland. Obviously the programmes would need to be modified slightly to take account of this. Issues of particular interest to the Border area could be included within Scotland Tonight on merit.
But the current Border Scotland burden seems completely disproportionate to the size of the area.
Time to bang some heads together.
Acknowledgements
PICTURED: ITV News Lookaround opening titles. COPYRIGHT: ITV plc.