Last week Ofcom gave ITV the go-ahead to cut regional output by 50%. Today ITV have duly gone and cut 1,000 jobs, almost half of which will come from regional news. ITV plc looks set to reduce the number of its regional news areas from 17 to nine.

It does make you wonder about the future of regional television, if it even exists. I have personally never been a fan of regional television, and I say that even having lived all my life in a very distinctive part of the UK. I might be the wrong person to ask though. I’m no fan of the “idiot box”. Next year, when F1 finally goes back to the BBC where it belongs, I will probably be able to say that I do not watch commercial television at all.

But regional television, it is fair to say, is not exactly pain-free viewing. More often that not, you can tell the programmes were made on a minuscule budget, and they are generally pretty naff.

Of course, back in the day, most ITV programmes were “regional” in the sense that they were made by one of the ITV franchisees. But the best programmes went out on the network and were therefore aimed at a national audience, with UK-sized aspirations and UK-sized budgets. As such, programmes that were aimed to serve a particular area were, almost by definition, sub-standard. I do wonder quite what the point of such programmes is.

It is slightly different for regional news. I can understand the appeal of having a separate bulletin dedicated to the news in a particular area. But the thing is that the regions are always too big for the bulletins to have a truly ‘local’ feel.

The ITV region I live in, STV Central, stretches from approximately where I live to Fort William while encompassing the massive populations of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Strathclyde. Watching the bulletin, you would get the impression that hardly anything ever happens outside of Glasgow apart from the politics stuff which happens in Edinburgh. Even many of the political programmes, both on STV and BBC Scotland, are made in Glasgow rather than Edinburgh. If you live anywhere else, it can feel pretty alienating.

The BBC has never even attempted to split Scotland up into regions and Reporting Scotland essentially aspires to be a national news bulletin. The problem with even this is that there either isn’t enough news to report or there isn’t enough budget. Even Scotland, with its large area and separate institutions — most importantly, the Parliament — apparently doesn’t have enough going on to properly justify taking up 30 minutes of the schedule.

Whenever I watch Reporting Scotland, they seem to spend about five minutes per programme trailing what’s coming up later in the programme. Around five minutes into the programme, they are already talking about sport. And then they are normally only talking about football. Jimmy McPhee is in the airport today ready to depart for his meaningless match. Big whoop!

Another problem with regional news — especially on ITV — is the fact that the regions do not seem to be very logical. I’ve already talked about the huge area covered by STV Central. At some arbitrary point in Glenrothes, probably depending on how far behind the hill you are, you stop receiving STV Central and start receiving STV North / the old Grampian. Why is that then? Is Glenrothes more relevant to Aberdeen than to Glasgow? That’s not clear to me. Bearing in mind the fact that much of the population of Glenrothes is or was Glasgow overspill, it doesn’t seem quite right.

Of course, that is nothing compared to the abominable “Border” region which straddles England and Scotland and takes in the Isle of Man for good measure. That is an anachronism if ever there was one. You can tell the ITV regions were originally drawn up about sixty years ago because that would never wash today. I am no nationalist, though I am a little bit of a conspiracy theorist, and one has to wonder if it was a deliberate choice to have one ITV region that took in these three political entities — a 1960s equivalent of saying “North Britain”.

It is probably wrong for me speak for residents of the ITV Border region when I don’t live there, and I can well believe that there are many people who, having grown up with Lookaround, feel very attached to it. But for me, if I lived in the south of Scotland, with legislation affecting my life being made in Edinburgh, I think I would prefer to get my news from a Scottish city rather than Carlisle.

Of course, as Cllr Fraser Macpherson points out, that situation will be even worse under ITV’s new proposals. If ITV get their way, the Border and Tyne Tees regions will be merged. So Scots living in the Borders will not be getting their news from Carlisle — they’ll be getting their news from Gateshead.

The problems of the ITV Border region are recognised, with the existence of a ‘Border Scotland’ opt-out. From what I gather, this incorporates a news segment dedicated to Scotland and editions of Scotsport. What a faff that is though. Would it not just be more sensible to go the whole hog and recognise Scotland as a distinct entity? Every so often SMG express an interest in buying the Scottish bit of the ITV Border franchise. I kind of think they ought to get on with it, particularly if it’s only going to merge with Tyne Tees otherwise.

There are two big reasons why the situation is such a mess. One is geography. I am sure there are bureaucrats somewhere or other whose dream is for the ITV regions to be transformed so that they match the government office regions of the UK. At least that would be neater, and at least that way Scotland would have its own ITV region.

The problem is, those pesky hills get in the way. There is a clever map of the ITV regions on Wikipedia, and as you can see you can’t actually draw many meaningful borders between regions. The map looks like a mess.

The big reason, though, is of course money. Maybe back in the 1960s and 1970s owning an ITV franchise was a license to print money. Today, ITV leaks money like a sieve. Richard Havers traces the change back to the introduction of satellite television. This sucked advertising revenue away from ITV and spread it thinly across hundreds of smaller channels.

Since then, the ITV companies have merged and merged and merged until they became CarltonAndGranada before becoming the ITV plc we all love to hate. Scotland was not immune either as Scottish Television swallowed up Grampian to become SMG (now STV Group) and subsequently almost merged with UTV.

It now no longer makes financial sense for ITV companies to pour money into making news programmes. Economies of scale dictate that the regions will become fewer and bigger until they cease to be regional at all (and as I argue above, perhaps that has already happened).

I think it is time to give up on the idea of regional news programmes, at least on ITV (though Scotland can probably sustain it thanks to its status as a nation, relatively large population and separate political system). But if regional news must stay on television, perhaps it would be better to think of it as a public service that the BBC alone should carry out. I know that ITV is a PSB too, but they are considering giving that up because they think it costs them too much now. The writing is on the wall.

Besides, if I want to know the local news, where do I go? I certainly don’t watch Scotland Today if I want to find out what’s going on locally. I would buy The Fife Free Press or just visit a local news website. These options are probably far more cost-effective way to get local news.

Apart from that, dare I say that local news might be one arena where people turn more and more towards citizen journalists?

Ofcom has said that it is thinking about letting television stations broadcast more adverts. Ofcom are considering allowing nine minutes of advertising per hour. Currently an average of seven minutes per hour is allowed, although a maximum of twelve minutes in any one clock hour is permitted.

Longrider is a libertarian but reacts with horror to the news. Meanwhile, Craig is worried about the impact on coverage of Formula 1.

I am no fan of television adverts, but I have to say that I feel sorry for broadcasters in this respect. The comments on the article from Times Online are mostly negative, perhaps encapsulated by this one by Harry Taylor.

Surely not! Is there not too much advertising already, mostly purile, repetitive and often misleading?…

With all its faults give me the BBC.

Of course, if Times Online were to write an article about a proposed increase in the License Fee, everybody would be saying the opposite. But, as they say, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Commercial broadcasters are expected to pull excellent programmes out of thin air with the minimum of advertisements. And as we’ve seen this year, another major form of revenue for broadcasters — premium-rate phone-lines — has become a bit of a taboo. People must accept that adverts are a necessary evil — but a balance must be struck.

But for all of their (supposedly) good intentions, a lot of Ofcom’s advertising regulations work against the viewer. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than Formula 1. F1 has the dubious honour of being the only sport event to be broadcast in the UK where adverts are showing during the action. And football fans complain about adverts during half time! Think about how F1 fans must feel!

Once again, it has to be accepted that adverts in F1 are a necessary evil. F1 is almost unique in that a Grand Prix can last anything from 90 minutes to two hours with no break in the action. (The only other sports I can think of that go on for so long with no breaks are long-distance running and cycling, which are usually not shown live by a commercial broadcaster.) Seemingly, this is just too long for ITV to go without showing an advert. This means that they can’t bunch them up at either side of the action as they do with football.

But does it have to be this way? Many F1 fans would be willing to see some form of compromise, but the solutions put forward are currently prohibited by Ofcom (PDF). The main culprit is pesky article 3.1:

Television advertising must be readily recognisable as such and kept quite separate from other parts of the programme service. Breaks containing advertising spots of any kind, including teleshopping spots, must be identified in vision and/or sound, for example station identifications going in and out of breaks.

This means that any way of ITV simultaneously showing both adverts and programming is prohibited. A split-screen solution is often proposed. One part of the screen contains the race action, perhaps as an inset in an advert. But it’s not allowed. Sky Sports News can do it because it is permitted as long as only text is displayed. But even a scrolling text service in this style would not be allowed on ITV, because the rules are stricter for ITV, Channel 4 and Channel Five.

Other reasonable compromises are also prohibited. For instance, ITV would not be allowed to broadcast audio advertisements while race pictures take up the screen. ITV could not even overlay text adverts on top of the race pictures.

All of this is not allowed by Ofcom, probably for noble reasons. But most F1 fans would love to have any one of these solutions over the current situation — where ITV interrupt the race completely and broadcast commercial breaks that last minutes.

Also working against F1 fans is the requirement that ITV must display an ident going in and out of commercial breaks. This prolongs the commerical break for yet more crucial seconds.

Indeed, if you are an F1 fan you might be tempted to suspect that Ofcom’s regulations were specifically designed to get in the way of F1 the most. Because, despite the constant references to how commercials should only appear at “natural breaks” of the programming, one paragraph — which was included specifically with ITV’s F1 coverage in mind — proves that this is all just for show.

In live coverage of long continuous events breaks may be taken at points where the focus of coverage shifts from one point to another of the event for example after a resume of the current placings in a race and before refocusing on a particular section of the race.

So even though there are no “natural breaks” in an F1 race, ITV may show adverts just by giving a run-down of the positions in the race before going to a break, and saying what lap the drivers are on when the adverts are finished.

I also reckon that the rules surrounding the amount and length of commercial breaks also works against F1 viewers. It also works against viewers of football, films, or any other long programme.

Now, my memory of what I am about to say is sketchy. It must have been almost a decade ago and I was still rather young. But I am sure that while I was on holiday in France I watched a commercial break that lasted several minutes. It felt like about fifteen, but it might have been ten minutes. I don’t know. But what I do know is that I would never have seen a commercial break last that long in the UK.

But these breaks were not included willy-nilly in the middle of programmes. The obscenely long commercial break was, in fact, placed out of harm’s way at the end of a football match (or a film, I can’t remember). It was there to make up for the lack of adverts during the programme.* So, while at first a commercial break lasting ten minutes may seem obscenely long, would not most of us prefer this kind of solution? One where the adverts were tucked away where we don’t have to see them?

As such, I would support a liberalisation — or at least a fundamental re-think — of advertising regulations. This is not only for the reasons I have outlined above, but for another reason which is the drive of my liberal view on most things.

Insiders at the regulator are keen to emphasise that they want to avoid coming close to US advert levels, which they believe would be unpalatable to British audiences.

If they were so unpalatable, broadcasters would of course not want to do this for fear of making viewers switch off. No regulations necessary — broadcasters will find the “correct” level of advertising naturally.

I suspect that a few years down the line we won’t have to worry about this at all. Due to the increasing prevalence of PVRs, soon enough we will all be able to record the programmes then fast-forward through the adverts. (I usually already do this when I watch Grands Prix because I am not in a position to watch the races live.)

Advertisers will have to find more and more creative ways to reach viewers. Product placement might be harder to regulate. And soon enough we probably won’t always even realise when we are watching adverts.

* I might actually be completely wrong about this, and the long commercial break may have been caused by some kind of technical mishap or something else. I did not know because I could not speak French, but the scenario I described seems most likely to me.

So the attractive-but-punchable one from Big Brother, Emily, has been booted out and will now be known as the attractive-but-racist one. I can’t help thinking that Channel 4 have overreacted a bit. But I suppose that’s the sort of thing that happens when Ofcom are in charge.

Even though she was easily the best eye-candy in the house, she was intensely annoying right from the very start. Her introduction video was almost painful to watch.

AAAAAAAAAARRHRHHGHRUYAGSSKJSUgd}) p(oluj[omrgklsdv ,.xco=-

There are so many bad bits in this video, but the absolute worst is this:

There's a new music that's taking over this country and it's called indie.

That one sentence alone was enough to send me bouncing round the room with rage when I saw it. It was almost enough to have me lapsing back into the state I was in when I was 15, when I was turned off by indie music and everything it stood for. It took me years to even accept it when an indie band did make good music.

I might have to brace myself, because whenever I criticise any music on this blog, some poor soul feels like he's been violated and launches into personal attacks in the comments. But I will do this anyway.

Here is my list of things I hate(d) about indie music and why Emily personifies its problems:

1. This generation does not have its own sound. Emily says "There's a new music", but if there is then indie is not it. It might not have been called indie since the start, but the approach and the style of music have been around since at least the late 1970s. Not much has changed since then. A lot of youths think that this is their sound, but it is the same sound that their dads were listening to. Shame on our generation for being the first since at least the 1950s not to have its own scene!
2. Indie is not as gritty as its listeners would like to think. Many indie fans see the music as raw, gritty, rebellius and working-class. But over the past five or ten years, indie music has become as bland and commercialised as the pop and R&B that its fans deride. But many indie bands are made up of middle-class people pretending to be working class. The Kooks are the worst example. Kaiser Chiefs might predict a riot, but it is the politest, most middle-class riot you will ever see.

   Of course, there is nothing wrong with rich people forming a band. But Emily is deluded. She acts embarrassed about her wealth while simultaneously flaunting it. "I'm not a rich bitch," she says, before describing how she owns hundreds of handbags and shoes. Davina McCall then reveals that Emily's teeth cost £4,000.

3. Indie is not as radical as its listeners would like to think. At least Emily does not suffer from this, as she is open about the fact that she considers herself to be right-wing, and intends to vote Conservative in the next election. While this information on its own shouldn't make her a villain, there is something wrong with a 19-year-old complaining about "the youth of today" for not embracing education. And now we have the racism issue to top it off.
4. Indie music thinks it's superior to your music. This is an all-too-common thing to hear from an indie fan: "the music I listen to is smarter and more intelligent than [dance / hip-hop (delete as appropriate)]. Clever people like me listen to it. Stupid people like you listen to [dance / hip-hop].” Emily clearly thinks she is at the top of the tree. At one point she asks, rhetorically, “Isn’t it time you put some intelligent women on the show?” Davina McCall also reveals that Emily gives herself 10 out of 10 for intelligence. Not that we saw much evidence of this intelligence while she was in the house.
5. Indie heros are wankers. Emily hoped that the house would contain “dirty kind of Pete Docherty kind of rocker boys.” Need I say more?

Good news — the BBC Trust has thrown its weight behind iPlayer. But every silver lining has a cloud, as Ryan Morrison points out.

The iPlayer that has been given the go-ahead will have a few changes to what has been proposed before. The changes are quite minor really. Infact, one of them — about taking a platform-independent approach — is very good indeed. But there is still the odd moment where I have to slap my palm on my forehead and ask, “WHY?”

Genres included in non-DRM audio downloads: Audio-books and classical music should be excluded from the non-DRM downloads.

In other words, audio books and classical music — two very worthy genres that ring the right public service bells — will be locked up and more difficult to access than other genres. So if the next generation grows up with absolutely no taste in books or classical music, you’ll know what’s to blame.

The public value to be created is not, in the Trust’s view, sufficient to justify the potential market impact of allowing downloads of these genres.

This is horseshit. This is about the greedy commercial music industry maximising its profits; not about maximising public value. When the BBC offered all of Beethoven’s symphonies for free download, it was a massive success and everybody loved it — apart from those greedy bastards who want to lock music away unless you pay their high prices. Because the music industry reacted so violently against it, the BBC has promised never to do anything similar again — despite the fact that it was a huge success. The same is now happening to iPlayer.

Yesterday Ofcom criticised the BBC’s hugely promising project to get its content online and accessible on demand for free. According to Ofcom, project like BBC iPlayer “would not be in the long-term public interest”. Not too long ago a similar attack was made against the BBC’s use of podcasts.

This is the BBC using modern technology to make content more available to everybody. These are programmes that have already been paid for, being made available to more people in a much more convenient format. You would be able to watch or listen to programmes whenever it suits you. Unquestionably, license fee payers would be getting more value for money.

But apparently, the BBC doing great things like this hurts the commercial sector. I think not! Does the BBC’s iPlayer prevent ITV from creating their own similar service? Hardly. In fact, Channel 4 are already out of the blocks with their 4oD service.

The fact that more commercial broadcasters haven’t taken the same step, though, is rather telling. The problem with commercial broadcasters is that they all just roll around moaning about the license fee instead of actually thinking about what the audience wants. As the boss of (commerical) Radio Pembrokeshire said last year,

…If only other small commercial stations would stop whining about the [BBC] and offer engaging content, like us, then the commercial sector would be in less of a sorry state.

The commercial broadcasters churn out their samey middle-of-the-road rubbish and refuse to take advantage of the new technology that threatens the very existence of television as we know it. The BBC, meanwhile, is taking all of the innovative steps that are dragging the mainstream media into the 21^st century.

If the commercial sector is in trouble, they ought to take a good look at themselves rather than just pointing at the BBC. As things stand, the greatest argument in favour of the license fee is not the quality of the BBC. It is the shoddy state of commercial broadcasters, with their utter disregard for viewers.

Meanwhile, Ofcom should be embarrassed. To criticise the BBC’s ambitions to drag television into the modern world and benefit viewers as a whole makes them just look completely out of touch, particularly as they claim that such a scheme would not be in the public interest!

All the while, Ofcom turn a blind eye to — if not positively encourage — phone-in quiz shows that pollute commercial television stations. These are genuine dangers to the public interest. They don’t serve the viewers one iota (apart from the relatively decent Quizmania, which has been axed), and they downright swindle the poor people who phone in.

See also Ryan Morrison’s post. Meanwhile, Mike Power puts it more succinctly.