Apparently there are proposals for BBC Scotland to get its own dedicated television channel after the digital switch-over is complete. I applaud this proposal — because then we could watch proper BBC One, instead of having to deal with BBC Scotland messing around with the schedules and failing to show our favourite programmes.

I think this is why I am no longer a nationalist. Throughout my years growing up I had my favourite programmes taken away by some stranger speaking a foreign language. Regional variations have been the bane of my life. I was especially annoyed at the weekly Gaelic slot that interrupted BBC Two’s pristine schedule at 6 o’clock.

The 6 o’clock slot was finely honed back in the 1990s (by both BBC Two and Channel 4) as a place for youths like myself to watch top-quality programming while our parents were watching the 6 O’Clock News. While BBC Two later slipped into constantly repeating The Fresh Prince of Bel-End in the slot, years ago it was the home of The Simpsons. In other words, top-quality entertainment that couldn’t be matched in its slot.

BBC Scotland butchered the whole plan by depriving viewers north of the border of an episode of The Simpsons to accommodate Dè A-Nis?, or Machair, or some similar rubbish that was of no interest to anyone south-east of Mallaig. Every. Single. Week.

Here is a handy map, provided by Wikipedia, that demonstrates who was thwarted on a weekly basis by a dying language. White and light blue areas wanted to watch The Simpsons, whereas dark blue areas contain some children that might have understood Dè A-Nis? but probably would have preferred to watch The Simpsons.

Lest you think this is just me having a dig at Gaelic, it is not. All regional variations are inexcusable. Don’t think I haven’t forgotten stinkers like McCoist and MacAulay, Caledonia MacBrains or The Karen Dunbar Show. Or River City for that matter. Something tells me there is a reason most of these weren’t shown on the network.

I think Armando Iannucci and I must have a special connection. When I first saw this sketch on television (on Channel 4, a channel free of regional variations, except for those poor Welsh people who don’t get it at all), I was so glad. Somebody else felt the same way about regional variations. I’m sure everyone north of the border must have had a dream like this at least once in their lives.

Tartan Hero, Grant Thoms, has been pondering the prospect of Plaid Cymru entering into a coalition with the Conservatives (and the Lib Dems) in Wales. He wonders about attitudes towards the Conservatives in Scotland.

Interestingly, Plaid doesn’t appear to have a problem entering into a coalition with the Tories, eventhough PC didn’t embrace the business community in the way the SNP has. Has Wales woken up to a new dawn where the Tories aren’t the bogeymen and women they once were? After all that Bliar and Brown have put us through, is Scotland mature enough to have that debate?

A lot is said about how Conservatism (or at least the Conservative Party) is dead in Scotland, even by people who are themselves Conservatives. I think almost all of it is unfair.

Sure, it was embarrassing for them to end the 1997 General Election with no seats in Scotland. But if we are all honest with ourselves, we know that a lot of that was down to the thoroughly perverse First Past the Post system.

Indeed, the Conservatives came third in Scotland in 1997 in terms of the proportion of the vote. And they were closer to the SNP than the Lib Dems were to the Conservatives. More often than not, the Conservatives will finish ahead of the Lib Dems in a national Scottish election. The “boo-hiss everyone hates the Tories” attitude in Scotland is a bit of a barrier to proper debate if you ask me.

One way in which this manifests itself is through the fact that it is against the SNP’s constitution to go into coalition with the Conservatives. I don’t doubt that a lot of the more childish SNP activists get a massive kick out of thumbing their nose at the Tories. But in doing so perhaps they are cutting off their nose to spite their face.

While the SNP refuse to ever negotiate with the Conservatives, it rather undermines the image they have been trying to portray over the past few weeks. They’ve said they were willing to negotiate and were seeking consensus and common ground. They used this as a stick to beat the Lib Dems with, but I’ve not seen the SNP actively seeking any common ground with the Conservatives.

Yet, it is conceivable that the SNP could rely on the Conservatives to get some piece of legislation through in the current Parliament, especially when Labour will be in the mood to block any SNP proposal just because it can. If the SNP really are all for negotiating and seeking consensus, they ought to ditch this pantomime-esque “we will never make a deal with the Tories” stuff.

I can think of a few people that I know who can not easily decide between supporting the SNP or supporting the Conservatives. They want independence on the one hand, but they find traditional Conservative policies appealing on the other hand.

Put it this way. I can’t think of many SNP supporters who would occasionally turn to Labour instead. This must particularly be the case following this year’s Scottish Parliamentary election.

It doesn’t happen very often, but I agree with Grant Thoms here. “Mature” is the right word to use. If I was in the SNP I would think it was time to stop scoring petty points and take a look at the political landscape as it stands today. While I wouldn’t personally advocate the SNP banning pacts with Labour in their constitution, they must be pragmatic enough to realise that yesterday’s enemy may not necessarily be today’s enemy.

I see that STV, Scotland’s only major commercial broadcaster, is not providing coverage of the election on Thursday evening. Quite surprising if you ask me. Most people turn to the BBC for election coverage, granted. But you expect ITV / STV to make an effort nevertheless.

I couldn’t remember, but apparently STV did have a programme in 2003. And ITV will have election coverage for Wales. BBC Scotland does have coverage going on all night.

No doubt STV’s decision is a result of having to look after the pennies. Instead of the election, we will be getting ITV conathon Make Your Play. Interesting that ITV and the BBC aren’t having any bother having local election coverage…

I have another problem with another STV though — the voting system being used for the council elections. In principle, I am a big fan of the Single Transferable Vote, and I was pleased when the voting system was changed from FPTP. But I have to admit to feeling quite underwhelmed by the result.

It seems as though the parties are being conservative. Presumably fearful of splitting the vote, parties are only fielding as many candidates as they can possibly hope to win. In most cases, this is one. And while STV gives voters more choice on paper, this extra choice has actually made me feel a bit suffocated.

In my ward, three councillors will be elected. Labour are fielding two candidates (not too long ago they would have fielded three, I am sure). Meanwhile, the SNP, the Lib Dems, the Conservatives and Solidarity have one candidate each.

So in this three seat ward, only six candidates from five parties are standing. By contrast, last time round, most of the parties would have had a candidate in each of the three old wards.

I have a lot of problems with this. For starters — although I am not suggesting that this is actually the case — it does look as though the parties have already carved the seats up between them.

Labour have two candidates, the Lib Dem will probably get in (although, as I said before, it would have been three Labour councillors not so long ago) and the SNP candidate probably has an outside chance. So where is the ambition from the parties? Why can’t Labour believe that it might win three seats, or even the Lib Dems or SNP believe that they could win two?

If there is some swing in opinion, it won’t be reflected in the ballot box, because neither of the incumbent parties have given themselves any chance of increasing the number of councillors. And none of the other parties have put in anything other than token efforts.

In short, the choice just isn’t there. I have six votes, and there are three seats up for grabs. But if I want to vote for three candidates, or even two, I will have to do a Toynbee and get the nosepegs — and sick bags — out.

Usually I vote for the Liberal Democrats because I think ideologically they are the party that is closest to me. Then it is a process of elimination. Labour are ruled out by default for being Labour. I don’t see myself voting for Solidarity, and I don’t find the Conservatives too appealing either.

So my second vote will probably go to the SNP candidate, which I don’t mind too much, despite my views on independence. But beyond that, it is a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea. And the Judean People’s Front.

I might have been a bit naive. I was imagining massive ballot papers with parties fielding two or three candidates each. Instead, the parties have decided in advance how many seats they are going to win, and have begrudgingly put forward that number of candidates. This poor showing from the parties is a bit bleak, and not the choice I was hoping for.

Still better than First Past the Post though!

I have a confession to make. Last week there was a programme on Channel 4 about Feeder. I found it interesting. Because, whilst today I wouldn’t buy a CD unless it sounded like somebody shoving their laptop through a cheesegrater, back in the day (I can’t remember precisely which day, but it was during 2000) I was a fan of the mundane rock band.

The folly of youth? I don’t know about that. I can’t remember what my first album was, but I think it might have been ‘Octopus’ by The Human League, which in retrospect seems like an odd choice for a boy yet to hit double figures. But anybody who knows me today might think that being interested in electronic music from Sheffield from that early age was amazingly prescient. The first band I truly loved — at the age of nine — was Pulp, a band which I still very much approve of.

Then hair started growing in funny places and I had to go through the process of being a teenager. My taste in music took a bit of a dip as I entered the phase which seems to be mandatory for anybody sitting their Standard Grades (or GCSEs): the GCSE rawk phase. GCSE rawk is the sort of music which kids think will make them the coolest in the playground because it is supposed to be very alternative and underground. But this is a delusion as it is actually pretty banal and mediocre, as the regular airplay on early evening Radio 1 shows.

Most of us have probably been through this phase. And because the GCSE rawk phase hits you at a cruical stage of your development, you can’t ditch it in the same way as I forgot about The Human League. So even though many people my age may have moved on to pastures new in terms of our taste in music, we all have a band that we still follow as a hangover from the GCSE rawk phase. For some people it is Placebo. For others it’s Muse. For me it is Feeder.

And which of those bands have gone on to be the tossiest? Of course it would have to be the one that I liked. This is slightly embarassing for me because many people at school knew I was into Feeder before they had actually become well-known. Feeder weren’t actually bad (honest!) back in the late 1990s. But the moment they started half-heartedly churning out radio-friendly bilge they became pretty big. Most people probably think of Feeder as that pants-wetting band with the awful lyrics. And years after their breakthrough in 2001 I still had people asking me if I still liked Feeder.

One person who I didn’t know at school castigated me when she found Feeder tracks on my MP3 player. She complained: “You like all this weird shit, so why have you got Feeder on there?!” I had difficulty explaining, especially as just minutes ago she found MP3s of the BBC News 24 countdown! My reputation was in tatters.

I found out recently that I still have a soft spot for Feeder though. ‘Polythene’ is not actually a bad album. I was never too keen on heavy rock so at the time I actually preferred their second album, ‘Yesterday Went Too Soon’. In retrospect, it seems more like a stepping stone to the weak style that made them popular.

I look at both albums quite fondly. ‘Yesterday…’ in particular always used to cheer me up if I felt down. The music was fairly good, so you could forgive Grant Nicholas’ sometimes laughable cat-sat-on-the-hat lyrics.

Tangerine
Turning green
Cellophane
Window pane

I swear I did not make that up. Those are the genuine opening lyrics of early fan favourite ‘Tangerine’. Granted, that is a particularly cringeworthy example. But it’s safe to say that Nicholas would not have made it as a poet.

At the time of release, rumour had it that ‘Echo Park’ had to be a success, or Feeder would have lost their record deal. So even though it was quite a weak album with a radio-friendly sheen (yes, you might say that they sold out), some people thought it was just a blip and they would soon be back to their old ways.

Fat chance! That never happens. Feeder are one of those bands where, in the lull between albums, they always claim to be returning to a rockier sound for their next album. They never do. In fact, they are becoming ever more insipid.

Despite the change in direction that their breakthrough single, ‘Buck Rogers’, represents, I actually think it is one of their best songs. I was quite excited when I first heard it, and the video was cool aswell! The album proved to be a disappointment to me, but it brought Feeder commercial success. They had reached a certain status: the sort of band that was popular enough to get invited on to T4, but not popular enough to even think about turning down T4.

A cloud hung over Feeder’s fourth album, ‘Comfort in Sound’. Earlier in the year, drummer Jon Lee had rather mysteriously committed suicide.

Last week’s Channel 4 programme somewhat glossed over this. His death was mentioned, but the fact that it was suicide wasn’t. Instead, they said, “Like fellow Welsh rockers the Manic Street Preachers, they lost a band member to a young age.” I thought the comparison was a bit off. It seemed like a desperate attempt to make Feeder look as good as the Manics. Somehow I get the feeling that rock history will judge Feeder pretty harshly in comparison with the Manics.

Apparently most of ‘Comfort in Sound’ was written before Lee’s death, but it was inevitably going to be viewed in the context of Lee’s death, particularly given the reflective feel of the album. The album confirmed that ‘Echo Park’ was anything but a blip. Feeder had changed musical direction for good, and cemented themselves as one of Britain’s biggest bands in the process, in the medium-term at least.

I was in 6^th year at school at the time, and Feeder was on in the common room a lot, be it on radio or CD. By the end of the year I never even noticed when Feeder was on. I had heard the singles so much it was like white noise. Nevertheless, I still think ‘Comfort in Sound’ is a fine album. Okay, it is over-produced and sickeningly radio-friendly. But although I am thoroughly sick of the singles, a lot of the album tracks are really quite good.

Any of their material after that, though, is just unforgivable. Luckily my brother is now a bigger Feeder fan than I am, so I can hear the music without having to shell out for it. Almost without exception, Feeder’s recent material has been real guff of the highest order. It really has been a bittersweet experience to watch the rise in popularity and decline in quality of this band. Six or seven years ago I would have wished them all the recognition in the world. Now I am an old cynic who thinks there is no justice in the world.

I was in HMV last week, and I realised that I recognised the voice that coming through the speakers. I had listened to too much Feeder not to realise that I was listening to Grant Nicholas, yet most people probably wouldn’t notice — the song was so bland.

These days, most of Feeder’s songs sound much the same, and the bad lyrics can’t even be laughed off now. Somewhere along the line Nicholas must have realised that it doesn’t matter how bad the lyrics are — you can still shift records. So his style went in a more cliched and repetitive direction. I’m sure he has had to “cut the ropes around him” at least three different times in his songs. For their latest album, ‘Pushing the Senses’, the lyrics have become plain gibberish at times:

Forever will be
Tumble and fall

What on earth does that mean?

The music is far too polished as well. It might as well be performed by robots. On the Channel 4 programme Grant Nicholas said, “We didn’t use any tape on our last album, which I felt sad about. But you can do so much on Pro Tools these days!” That just sums it up.

Despite the immense length of this post, I have little interest in Feeder now. I haven’t properly been following them for three or four years now, and it will take something big to get me to take notice again. As my friend said to me in HMV, “At least they’re making lots of money.”

I don’t know why some people get so upset about the fact that some Scottish people don’t like to support England. I find it funny how it has become such a big political issue. Some like to pretend that it shows that the United Kingdom is illegitimate and should be split up into separate nations. What a load of shite.

Here is what Shuggy thinks about it:

Think about it: they tell people from other countries what team they should cheer for and if anyone should disagree, they are accused of racism.

The England Project has a rather dramatic post:

This football kerfuffle is a sorry measure of the health of the Union

…The argument that Scotland is a different country from England and, therefore, there is no reason why Scots. should support an English team is a reasonable one taken in isolation of the British Union. Supporters of the British Union are, in my opinion, on less solid ground. I see it as the duty of British Unionists to support any British team in any sporting competition with their own country naturally taking preference.

That approach is just wrong, as David Farrer pointed out a couple of weeks ago. Scottish, Welsh and (increasingly) English nationalists seem to believe that the rivalry between Scotland and England on the football pitch is a sign that the United Kingdom could not possibly be a single country, and therefore should be scrapped.

So I take it that the rivalry between Rangers and Celtic is evidence that Glasgow is a failed experiment? And a Spurs fan’s resentment of Arsenal means that London should be split up? Nonsense. And if anybody called for the UK to pull out of the EU because of England’s rivalry with Germany, they ought to be laughed out of the planet. There may be legitimate reasons to call for the end of the British Union, but a football match is rather stretching it.

The London-based media probably has a lot to do with the rise of Scottish nationalism in the second half of the 20^th century. That maybe shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. This letter in The Economist illustrates the reason:

Before devolution, the impression was that the English did not really notice Scotland, regarding it at best as a kilted extension of the Lake District.

Last week I suggested that England is shoved down your throat in Scotland. Since then I have seen BBC News 24 (a news channel for crying out loud!) insert various ‘Come on En-ger-land’ messages in its countdown sequences. And now that the World Cup itself has come we have had to endure commentators shoehorning England into everything, every which way they can. For instance, here is what ITV’s commentator said during the Argentina–Ivory Coast game:

Well, Argentina have had 20 years of hurt — they’ve only had half of it.

WHAAAAT? Every single thing has to relate to England, doesn’t it?

I once even heard a commentator — I think it was John Motson — say, at the start of a World Cup final, “Of course, this is the final that England could have been in…” That was very perceptive of him. Of course, it was also the final that every single other team in the world could have been in.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the media likes to concentrate on England, given that at least 80% of the potential audience will be living in England. But by the same token I don’t think anybody should be too shocked if Scots decide to support whoever is playing England just as a reaction against smug commentators. And it is possible to have a strong Scottish identity and still be in favour of the UK — infact, I am sure that the majority of my friends are like this.

FIFA and whoever else ever proposes a British football team ought to remember this aswell. Football has nothing to do with the Union.

Update: Iain Dale asks, Will You Support a European Team Against the Americans?

[In the World Cup today] I will be supporting the Americans without any hesitation. Yet when the Ryder Cup is played later in the year I will be shouting for the Europeans, partly I suppose because there will be British golfers on the European team. But it’s still a total inconsistency on my part. But isn’t that the beauty of sport? There’s no logic to sporting affinity at all.