Andrew Tickell: The consequences of axing River City are not trivial

The National

27-04-2025

Having mastered the art of keeping still and turning the right shade of green, ­juvenile artistes became credible ­candidates for your actual vertical and breathing roles as one of the long-running series' suspects and perpetrators. Speaking parts as stabber rather than stabbee sometimes followed.
But even if you had to do it with a ­mortuary tag around your big toe, that first big on-screen credit got your foot in the door (and sometimes other parts of your anatomy). Sometimes it also helped you reach a very large audience.
I've a vivid but decidedly strange ­memory of turning on the TV in Germany some time in the early 2000s, only to be greeted by Mark McManus's sour puss and Maggie Bell's No Mean City soundtrack creaking out over the iconic aerial shots panning out over the Glasgow skyline from the Campsies.
There might as well be a statutory ­requirement to describe the show as '­gritty'. It certainly projected a ­particular version of Scotland's largest city to the world, but one that usually managed to blend that ­characteristically Scottish ­combination of jaundice, pathos, and ­mordant good ­humour. Even with our ­dramatically declining murder rate, we're still swithering about what version of ourselves to give the world.
READ MORE: River City star 'overwhelmed' as Holyrood debates iconic soap's future
A significant number of Hollywood ­careers kicked off for young actors who ­began their working lives as suspects under investigation by Maryhill CID, including Dougray Scott, Billy Boyd, Ashley Jensen and Alan Cumming – to pick out just a handful of the Scottish actors who put in a turn in the series over the eventful 40-year period it ran on STV.
It's a reminder that everyone needs to start somewhere. For many Scottish ­actors, these indigenous opportunities to gain experience, demonstrate their talent, and catch a casting agent's eye have made all the difference between a long-running career reaching international audiences and ending up as an almost-made-it, saw-it-briefly-in-the-distance, or a never-was. Not everybody made it off the forensic slab – but many did.
It's also a reminder that creative opportunities all have a material basis. Can I do my job where I live, or are all the opportunities reserved for people somewhere else? Do I need to change my life in order to pursue these ambitions? And if all the money and the opportunities end up being concentrated elsewhere, why is this the case? Who decided it should be so?
There's an awful tendency to look at all this as an accident of economic demands and costs. But as is so often the case in the UK, the fight for what we quaintly describe as 'regional investment and ­recognition' strains against the many and varied centrifugal forces trying to drag every penny towards the south of ­England at the expense of ­everywhere else.
Just over a month ago, BBC Scotland announced it would be scrapping its ­flagship soap River City in the autumn of 2026. Filmed in Dumbarton and first ­premiered in 2002, the soap opera is set in the ­fictional Shieldinch distinct of Glasgow and has provided solid work and local opportunities not only for local character actors, but for emerging generations of writers, directors and other ­freelancers, drafted in over the years to keep this longstanding soap on the air.
Over the years, it has blended ­serious storylines on tricky topics ­including ­stalking and domestic abuse with ­humorous character work in the best Scottish tradition. Old theatre hands have done a dramatic turn in it during their seventh decades, giving their careers an unexpected last act on air. Presumably in response to a shrinking audience, the show has increasingly leaned into boring and basically undramatic preoccupation with gangsters.
Like almost all Scottish broadcasting, its depiction of any colourably middle-class character is palpably ludicrous, ­extravagant, and unrecognisable.
But within these constraints, it is clear it has created real opportunities and material benefits for the sector. Last week in Holyrood, MSPs ventilated concerns that the decision 'will have a disproportionately negative impact on ­performers in Scotland', uprooting established ­training resources and opportunities for budding creatives in front of and behind the camera to test their wares. Others have described the decision as 'cultural vandalism.'
It was reported this week that over the last couple of years, more than 20 ­Scottish screenwriters got their first on-screen credit thanks to River City. Quite a few of them are graduates, taught by my colleagues in Glasgow Caledonian University's Media and Journalism department.
READ MORE: BBC Scotland accused of 'snobbery and classism' over River City axing
Behind the camera, the show has ­become a pipeline opportunity for ­budding directors, cutting their teeth on the show's half-hour episodes, able to go out to market with this experience ­under their belts.
This isn't just true of the talent in front of the cameras, but all the invisible hands, drafting the dialogue, cutting the scripts, and directing the cameras behind the scenes. In a risk-averse commercial broadcasting culture with an oversupply of ­content and limited opportunities to stick it on telly and online, nobody is ­going to blow millions commissioning an untried and untested first script by an unknown quantity with no track record and no ­history of success.
Try knocking together a 28-minute script, show us that you can work within the established forms and create drama from pre-existing characters by finding their voices and using the limited sets and settings to tell new stories – that's the kind of byline a budding new writer can realistically aspire to, and if it goes well, parlay into future credibility and work.
Justifying the decision to close the show next year, a BBC Scotland spokesperson said: 'As viewing patterns change and competition intensifies, this is the right time to invest in the next generation of high-impact drama series from across Scotland showcasing storytelling across the UK. Our goal is to grow Scotland further on the global drama map – with a slate of world-class productions that set the standard not just here but internationally too.'
You may not, I suppose, find it particularly encouraging that the people tasked with assessing dramatic work talk and think in what might as well be AI-generated gobbledegook like this.
But you can understand the sector's scepticism in the face of these amorphous and unstructured kinds of ambitions.
'Always keep tight hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse' isn't always a bad motto. Cancellations are ­always concrete. Promises of future ­investment are speculative and unrealised. You know what you're losing. You can't be sure what you might gain.
READ MORE: 'Hammer blow': River City editor issues warning for Scotland as BBC axes show
Fire up BBC iPlayer, and BBC Scotland's output is currently made up of odds and sods of news programmes. ­Cultural programming might as well not exist. Food and drink are scantily covered. Original drama is at best episodic and ­occasional.
In the last decade, the intellectual level of news coverage has appreciably fallen. Presenters without an intellectual ­hinterland increasingly predominate. The landing page on BBC Scotland News feels increasingly static, often spotlighting ­stories of breathtaking triviality.
The potential consequences of this are not trivial. What is the consequence of never seeing the life you live dramatically represented? What does it do to your sense of self, that the sounds and cadences of your everyday life are almost never captured or encountered in any kind of art and drama? What does it do to people, to be allowed only to live imaginatively in a whole series of elsewheres, as if life is only dramatic when it doesn't resemble your life, and nobody who is depicted in it looks or sounds remotely like anyone you know?