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The Promised Land

Nations and Regions Conference

Salford January 11 th 2006.

Report for Glasgow Film Office

Although containing similarities to the broadcast conference, held in the same city late last year, the one day nations and regions get together was a more formal affair. With opening remarks from James Purnell MP, the minister for Creative Industries and Tourism, the conference seemed very much directed towards deconstructing the latest Ofcom report, to ascertain not only its brute strength, but whether its’ recommendations were ever likely to be put into practice.

Less about programming and more about policy, the conference attempted to get under the skin of the current obsession with making the media less London centric, and to see what opportunities were available to those outside the M25 in terms of genuinely sustainable programme ideas and company development.

While the presentations covered a lot of ground for one day, with sessions entitled ‘Opportunity Knocks’, ‘Commissioning and how to crack it’ , ‘New technology: New markets’, etc, the key issues that drove the conference were the sustainability of traditional broadcast platforms in the digital and new media age.

Slickly presented by the media department of the University of Salford, the key note speakers were top notch, and included Pat Loughrey, Clive Jones, the ubiquitous Stuart Cosgrove amongst many others, who all seemed to express a genuine desire to see programming originate and be produced from all over the UK.

But often it’s the questions from the floor that indicate the true state of policy implementation and thus whether the alleged quotas are in fact any more realistic than the programme ideas on offer. A question from a representative of the SMG group to the head of ITV regions indicated that OFCOM had suggested a quota of programming from Scotland that did not fall below 8%. In the last two years, the accepted output from Caledonia has been 2%. The ITV response is that they are in the business of commissioning quality, not quotas.

In as much as this appears a direct condemnation of the lacklustre output from the Scottish regionals over the years, as an Independent, I only see it as a positive thing. Everyone should be judged on the quality of their product, not whether they make it in Salford or Somalia.

In summary, it was an effective conference in terms of looking at the obstacles faced by all regions in the UK, when competing against preferred suppliers and a notion of inferior product the further north you go. Whether the London centic emphasis will ever lose hold, remains to be seen. I certainly had my eyes opened.

Karen Smyth, 2006.

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