BBC Scotland needs to make more dramas with international appeal to take on streaming giants rather than soaps for a local audience, its new director has said.
Hayley Valentine claims the bar has been set so high by the likes of Netflix and Disney+ that it is no longer enough ‘just to set something in Scotland anymore’.
She said streamers have ‘upped their game’ and the ‘quality of drama that people expect has got higher’ so they also ‘need to be in that game’.
Ms Valentine believed it was still important to tell Scottish stories but that more shows require ‘universal appeal’ to attract audiences across the UK, Europe and the United States.
Her remarks come just months after announcing a major shake-up that will see Scots soap River City scrapped from next year after 24 years on the air.
She told the Herald: ‘People still want really good quality content.
‘They want brilliant comedy, engaging drama and world-class news. I don’t think those things have massively changed.
‘For BBC Scotland, it is about having the ability to offer something distinctive and being distinctively Scottish.
Ashley Jensen as DI Ruth Calder in Shetland
Richard Rankin in the role of Detective Sergeant John Rebus in Rebus
‘We try to get content and storytelling from across the whole of Scotland so that whether it’s Shetland, Granite Harbour in Aberdeen, Rebus in Edinburgh and Fife, or Only Child in Forres there is a sense that you are getting something that reflects your life.’
But she added: ‘One thing that has changed massively in recent years is that the rest of the BBC is now really conscious of the need to reflect the whole of the UK. We are now playing a really active part in that.’
New BBC Scotland director Hayley Valentine says ‘quality of drama that people expect has got higher’
Ms Valentine said she had ‘real confidence’ in three new drama series which have been commissioned and hoped they would attract ‘much bigger’ audiences than River City, which is reported to average at around 200,000 viewers an episode.
Instead the soap’s £9million annual budget is being re-invested in legal drama Counsels, dark comic crime thriller Grams, and an adaptation of The Young Team, based on the debut novel of writer Graeme Armstrong, which was inspired by his experience of gang culture in Lanarkshire.
Ms Valentine said: ‘Everything costs more to make now.
‘The streamers have upped the game. The quality of drama that people expect has got higher. We need to be in that game.
‘There used to be a gap between films and TV drama. That gap has more or less gone now.’
She said she still ‘primarily’ wants to serve Scottish audiences ‘really, really well’. But she stressed her ‘mantra’ to staff was that ‘everything we do should be network quality. There should be no gap.’
The director added: ‘We are looking for stories that are local, that are absolutely grounded and set in a specific place, but are also universal, so they will travel.
‘We need to make sure that what we’re commissioning is distinctive. It’s so competitive now and the quality bar is so high that the point of distinction needs to be really clear.
‘It’s not enough just to set something in Scotland anymore. We need to be more ambitious than that.’
