Born to fail?

No one should be surprised at the low viewing figures for the new BBC Scotland channel (Dennis Forbes Grattan, Letters, 14 May) as it has a budget of £32 million – one tenth of what licence fee payers in Scotland contribute to the BBC –compared to the £84 ma year spent by S4C, the Welsh language channel.

It was always designed to be a fringe low-budget affair, with its main 9pm news up against the most popular TV output, rather than an autonomous Scottish channel in place of the existing BBC 1, with Scottish news, and world and UK coverage from a Scottish perspective at 6pm and 10pm, but opting into the most popular programmes, such as Strictly Come Dancing.

The new channel does not get around Scotland’ s democratic deficit that exists in all UK TV news and political coverage – the SNP, the third largest grouping at Westminster, is routinely ignored and the Greens might as well not exist, while Nigel Far age is given wall-to-wall coverage.

BB C1’s Question Time has become completely foreign to Scotland. It is worth watching the new Debate Night programme on BBC Scotland, ably handled by Stephen Jar dine, to a pp reciate the difference in audience contributions and the panel lists’ considered responses, which are far superior to the bombastic outpourings on Question Time.

MARY THOMAS Watson Crescent , Edinburgh