Joan is ready for her screen close-up

I PREDICT fireworks when Holyrood’s culture committee publishes its full report on Thursday about efforts to boost the screen sector in Scotland, in order to grab a bigger slice of the billions at present being spent on film and TV worldwide.

An interim report in May came under fire for criticising current Scottish Government and Creative Scotland proposals.

In remarkably strong terms, the crossparty committee said there was ‘no guarantee’ that Government-backed plans to establish a screen unit within the existing arts body Creative Scotland could make a difference to our current underperformance. Creative Scotland, which normally moves like syrup off a spoon, was lightning-fast to respond to criticism.

Iain Munro, the organisation’s deputy chief executive, called the committee disruptive. Culture Secretary poobah Fiona Hyslop was even more dismissive, telling MSPs to ‘get behind’ her clunkily-constructed and unnecessarily bureaucratic new screen unit.

However, while quango fans and ministers might not like hearing the culture committee’s unpalatable truths, grunts and chiefs working in film have been impressed.

Film industry figures have been invited in and quizzed in a manner that suggests the committee has been paying close attention to important movie issues. In particular, Nationalist MSP Joan McAlpine has won admirers among film’s movers and shakers, who have praised her for mastering a complex situation – unlike Miss Hyslop.

Presumably, Joan sees the ridiculousness of creating a Scottish screen agency that has to report to the lumbering Creative Scotland, and hamstringing it with another layer of needless bureaucracy that the rest of us pay for.

So why is Creative Scotland so keen to keep the new screen agency under its wing? Could it be that the agency’s sizeable film budget allows Creative Scotland bosses to justify their own substantial salaries?