Breaking Stories Watching Ourselves: 60 Years of TV in Scotland

We first got television in Scotland in 1952. 1952!

That's the year the Queen became, well, Queen,

Prime Minister Winston Churchill scrapped identity cards,

the first ever passenger jet flew across the Atlantic,

the Americans set off the first H... Wait, 1952?

All right, 26 years after Helensburgh boy John Logie Baird

gave television to the world, the world finally gives it back.

Yeah, yeah, that's big of you. Oh, aye, thanks very much.

Here's the first TV mast in Scotland.

Duck and cover guys, you've no idea what's coming your way.

-Mr McCellan, will you be getting television here?

-I hope to.

With you away at the fishing, will your wife be listening in?

-Will your wife be listening in?

-If she had a set she would.

-Do you have a television set in the house?

-No.

-You're not going to get one?

-Yes.

-You all going to get one?

-No.

-Why not?

We haven't got electric light.

Yeah, well, I guess you've got to walk before you can run.

Those kids must be in their 70s now

and television has been with them every step of the way.

Think what they'll have seen - 12 Prime Ministers, 15 World Cups,

the first home computer, the first man on the moon,

the discovery of North Sea Oil and the coming of Devolution.

Tonight we're looking at television journalism,

how television has brought us breaking stories,

uncovered scandals, and just occasionally made things better.

So, hold the front page!

Now when you say journalism,

most people think newspapers, not television.

This is the Glasgow Herald back in the days when journalists needed a cigarette

as much as they needed a notebook. Possibly more.

Tip off from India.

Print journalism had a long and glorious history in Scotland.

As someone once said,

these guys are from the school they tore down to build the old school.

Being in journalism in Scotland wasn't seen as some seedy,

grubby occupation, but was all part of a whole spirit of inquiry,

and calling people to account and more of an egalitarian atmosphere

in Scotland that was all to the good and I think that has served us well.

Television journalism in Scotland benefited from this tradition.

Lots of journalists started off on newspapers and crossed over into TV,

including this gentleman, Fyfe Robertson,

who began his career as a journalist on the Glasgow Herald.

Your clients have changed too, haven't they?

The clients have changed.

Are there still men so wealthy that they can afford

to rent a shooting season simply for their guests?

Very, very few, I would say.

Now Fyfe Robertson had... he had everything!

He was almost like a character from another era.

You imagined him falling from the pages of, kind of,

Robert Louis Stevenson novels. He had this big beard.

He had this tweed gear that he had and all the rest of it.

And he had a wonderful broadcaster's sensibility -

the ability to communicate to people his enthusiasm for the subject he was talking about.

And Fyfe Robertson was probably one of the first, and greatest, Scottish broadcasters.

Even the Land Rover has its limits, but this I'm told can go anywhere.

'He was somebody that made you smile and made you sit back

'and wonder both at the same time.'

Highland Lairds are having a harder time than they used to

so if you've got £1,000 to spare,

why not come up on the 12th for a fortnight grouse shooting?

It's going to be a good 12th they tell me.

And now come on, Mark, you and I'll get home. Stables in half an hour.

That's wicked, That's the coolest thing I've ever seen.

How come Fyfe Roberson gets to do a piece to camera on a horse? I want to do that. Can I do that?

Of course most of the stories TV journalists cover are a lot grimmer than this.

'Helen Puttock, a short, sturdy woman, five feet four in height,

'was wearing an imitation coat over a black sleeveless dress which had gold buttons down the front.'

A year after Helen Puttock was murdered,

the BBC made this documentary following the hunt for her killer.

It was the biggest police murder enquiry there had ever been in Britain.

The Bible John murders are still unsolved.

Police then tried something new, something entirely new in Scotland -

photo fit.

In this system, for example, there are more than 100 types of mouth.

In all there are more than 5,400 million variations

of the human face.

Photo fit came up with this representation.

Well, I was just shown the picture and talking to my wife,

then the wee chap came up and he must have got hold

of the picture, cos he came up and started, "Oh, Daddy, Daddy."

-He thought the identikit picture was you?

-Mm-hm.

Quite a job pulling in all the gingers -

that's half of Scotland.

What happened after that after you were finally asked to go to the police station?

The way I was going to take it was, "Where were you

"such and such a night?" That didnae happen.

He was quite good about it, clever about it, and he said,

"Well, I'm satisfied it's no you,

"but you're the best likeness that I've seen."

Steady on! Should they not ask him where he was that night?

I've watched Taggart!

In the '70s, '80s and '90s current affairs programmes

like Current Account, Frontline, Cause For Concern and The Reid Report

brought important Scottish stories to light.

This is a Current Account about glue sniffing.

That's an interesting one there.

Edward, why did you start sniffing glue?

Probably cos all of the friends I had started to.

What's the attraction?

I leathered him

when I heard he was taking it,

and when the police brought him home,

I leathered him again in front of them.

Hmm. No-one seems too worried about the wee boy being battered.

Some things in Scotland have changed for the better.

This is Margo Macdonald's programme about people who were shut up

in mental hospitals for no good reason. It's heartbreaking.

It was, was my dad put me, what put me in there.

Because you were difficult or what?

No, I wasn't difficult, Margo, no.

No, I wouldn't say myself I was.

What age were you?

I was 25 past when I went into Lennox Castle.

No, some nights I wouldn't be home till 12 o'clock,

-or maybe a wee bit after 12...

-That's really wicked(!)

..and he'd get really angry at that, you know.

So you were signed in because your father felt you were out

with his control because you came in at that time at night?

Mm-hm. That seemed to be all there was to it.

Ann spent 38 years shut in Lennox Castle.

In 1986 Duncan Campbell was commissioned by the BBC

to make six programmes about Britain's Secret Society.

Duncan Campbell was an investigative journalist who'd already been

prosecuted for breaking the Official Secrets Act on another story,

so the BBC must have been hoping he'd create a stir.

Sometimes you should be careful what you wish for.

'I think that BBC Scotland, at every level,'

and we as Scots, which we all were,

have a sense of our own independence and ability

and need to take a different line from London.

When you're further away from the cauldrons of power in London,

then it's easier to be more radical.

All the data from the east coast radar stations was gathered together

at the Post Office towers in London

and fed through underground telephone cables to West Drayton.

The cables came down this west London street,

but there was one major security flaw -

the cables came underneath this Post Office manhole cover in Bayswater where,

as was later to be drawn to the attention of the Royal Air Force,

they were positioned almost directly underneath the Embassy of the Soviet Union,

vulnerable either to a telephone tapping company

or a swift act of sabotage in time of crisis or war.

The Secret society was an attempt to look at

some of the very hidden areas of Government

and how they undermined democracy because of the secrecy.

This is my favourite bit - when it turns out the Government

is spending gazillions to protect us from low-flying lorries.

'Nimrod failed because its computers didn't work properly.

'The most problem occurred when the radar looked down on Britain itself.

'Suddenly the screen's swarming with activity -

'hundreds of low, slow unidentified targets are all over Britain.

'They veer out to zero feet, speed, 60 to 90 mph.

I always thought Eddie Stobart was a Russian-sounding name.

You can see why Duncan Campbell got up the establishment's nose.

He's brilliant!

But his sixth programme was where the trouble really started.

The Zircon Affair was about the secret funding of Britain's spy satellite.

That's not secret as in secret from the Russians,

or even secret from the man in the street,

but secret from the parliamentary committee that's supposed to sign off on big spending on spy stuff!

'Britain's first ever spy satellite will be soon be going into space.

'The new British spy satellite has been a bigger secret than the nuclear programme.

'Until today, few people have been aloud to know its special codename,

-'Zircon.'

-It's all very Thunderbirds are go.

Satellites are very, very expensive.

British intelligence simply can't afford a price tag like that

on its own, so the bill for Zircon has been secretly passed over here,

to the Ministry of Defence.

I've been told by those who worked here

that Zircon will cost around 5% of what the Trident nuclear programme is costing -

that's between £400 and £500 million.

One of the problems we had with this incredibly sensitive subject

was that we had no documents,

we had sources, but we couldn't possibly refer to them

given the vulnerability and the sensitivity, so how do you, apart from trust,

tell people this is a real story and we haven't made it all up?

What we did was to arrange an interview with the retired

Chief Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Defence.

We didn't pre-warn him that we were going to ask him about THE satellite,

that he would be hearing a name that no-one was supposed to know.

What difference to the situation for Britain and NATO

will be made by the Zircon satellite?

I can't talk to you about that, I'm afraid.

You're saying that everything about Zircon is classified?

Yes, I'm sorry about that.

'It's an extraordinary visual moment in documentary television'

to a watching audience, the point at which you saw his jaw drop,

knowing who he was, "I can't talk about that",

means, "the story is spot on, "we're exactly right, it exists,"

I'm watching the rest of the programme.

Under pressure from the government, the BBC shelved the programme.

By the weekend of 24th January,

Special Branch showed headquarters up here at the BBC in Queen Margaret Drive

and raided the place, looking for evidence of a breach of the Official Secrets Act.

In the end, neither the BBC nor Duncan Campbell were prosecuted,

but it was two years before the Zircon programme was shown,

and another episode, about Secret Cabinet committees, has still never been seen.

Good evening. For the first time in 40 years, a director general of the BBC has resigned his post.

Alistair Milne left the corporation at lunchtime today.

The Zircon affair became the Governor's excuse

for summarily dismissing Mr Milne.

Which very much satisfied the government until the next incumbency

proved to be just about as troublesome.

As they should have been.

When something terrible happens in the world today

we might go online, but back in the '80s and '90s,

we relied on television to tell us what was happening.

Huge disasters took us to our televisions,

waiting on the latest pictures, the latest news.

Between 1988 and 1996

three events gripped the Scottish audience, and beyond them, the world -

Piper Alpha, Lockerbie and Dunblane.

'Since we've come on the air reports have started to come through'

of a major rescue in the North Sea.

It seems there has been a fire and explosion on an oil rig

with 200 men on board and a major rescue operation is now underway.

The Piper Alpha rig, owned by the Occidental...

'This was right at the beginning of live news broadcasting.'

We weren't used to being on air live,

we weren't used to round-the-clock coverage of tragedies like that.

But I hope that on the line now is our reporter Jane Frankie,

-from Aberdeen. Jane, can you hear me?

-'Yes, Donald, I can.'

You normally go into a community,

you normally go to the scene of the disaster, and in this case

the scene of the disaster was hundreds of miles offshore in the North Sea.

So the focus for our reporting

was the hospital in Aberdeen where some of the casualties were taken.

'Aberdeen Royal Infirmary early this morning as helicopters landed with the first of the survivors.'

And then at one particular moment in the story, it became obvious

that the people in the hospital could be stood down because

there were not going to be any casualties, because 167 people had died.

It was the newsroom Christmas party

when we heard about the Lockerbie disaster and everyone was merry

and I know a number of people were going on to another party.

The word came through on the news desk that this terrible accident,

as we thought, a plane had come down at Lockerbie

and I remember that the controller was still in the building

and he just gave us the car and actually I went straightaway.

The one thing that will always stay with me is how eerily quiet it was.

At moments like these, television has a big responsibility.

This is as near to the reality as most of us will come.

These are the pictures we will remember.

There was a sense right from the beginning that Lockerbie

would never, ever be the same again, and that the name of Lockerbie

would be forever changed because of this dreadful, dreadful atrocity.

Lockerbie came to a complete standstill this afternoon.

The heartbreak caused by Britain's worst air disaster was

there for all to see.

Those that had lost their loved ones, their neighbours,

their friends, were united in grief.

In a sense, if you look at the other events, oil rigs do blow up,

and planes do crash out of the sky, but children don't get shot

in primary schools in Scotland.

That was the difference with this story - people found it really, really hard to believe.

For Dunblane's primary one pupils, Wednesday March 13th started just like any other day.

16 of them never got home,

murdered at the hands of a gunman who then killed himself.

As parents gathered on hearing the news, reports emerged from the school of carnage in the gym

where the primary ones had gathered for the first class of the day.

We had one reporter whose son was supposed to go

to the school at Dunblane that afternoon for his familiarisation

before attending the primary school the following year,

so this wasn't a case of people going off to a foreign country

and covering a disaster there,

this was a story that was right in the heart of the journalistic community who were covering it.

After a few days of covering this story, there was certainly

a view in the newsroom that something should be done

to leave the people of Dunblane alone to grieve in peace

and to allow the funerals to take place without media intrusion.

Usually, television journalism tells you about the world as it is.

But all investigative journalists hope that finding out

the truth might help change things for the better.

And sometimes it does.

In 1987, STV made two brilliant documentaries about Nazi war crimes.

They're a great watch, they uncovered a story that most people didn't know

AND they forced the British government to change the law.

The man who discovered that Gecas was alive and well

and living in Edinburgh

is top American Nazi war crimes prosecutor Eli Rosenbaum.

He accuses successive British governments of providing sanctuary for Nazi war criminals

through a secret policy agreed in 1948.

The fact that these crimes had been covered up

by the British government, I just felt, was disgusting.

How could my government have done this? Great Britain, Rule Britannia, were covering up Nazi war criminals.

Mr Gecas is accused of mass murder. he lives in Edinburgh,

He is a mining engineer and we have the documentation.

Bob Tomlinson went to interview Gekas in his Edinburgh home.

We watched the house until some lights went on, then we thought, "Right, we'll move now."

I had some coins... I put some coins in a handkerchief.

It looked as if I was cold. It was a sort of... It wasn't a nasty trick, but I suppose it was.

I pulled it out as if I was going to blow my nose and let the coins fall in the house.

One thing that people will never stop you doing in Scotland

is pick up your own money,

so the money was in the house and that therefore meant

I was in the house and there was your man standing right in front of me.

Were you aware that in protecting the Germans,

you were helping them shoot and murder innocent people?

Yes, I was aware, but what could we do about it?

That was a war.

The shootings go inside when you start. They go into a forest or a village.

Start shootings? No, you don't know what's happening.

I had to find out how many people actually did Gecas kill.

And Gecas... The lowest number I could get that

Gecas had been directly involved in the murders of,

was 34,143 people.

TRANSLATION: The people were usually standing in the pits.

They stood in rows and the soldiers would shoot into their backs.

BELL TOLLS

TRANSLATION: I recognised my husband by his clothes.

How else could I have recognised him?

His face was covered in blood and he was all holes and blood.

BELL TOLLS

TRANSLATION: He used his pistol, which he took out from his holster

and finished off the victims who were still alive.

BELL TOLLS

Bob Tomlinson's documentary put pressure on the government,

and in 1991 they passed the War Crimes Bill.

This means British courts can try Nazi criminals.

Astonishingly, only one case has been successfully tried

under the act and Gecas himself was never brought to court.

He died in Edinburgh, peacefully, being cared for by the National Health Service,

unlike the 34,143 people he murdered in cold blood, many of whom were children.

So far we've been talking about investigative journalism, and news.

But there's a lot of great political journalists in Scotland.

The best known is probably this one.

We couldn't make this programme without showing you a clip of her finest hour.

Prime Minister, you have always said you didn't enter politics in order to be popular, but why are you

so unpopular in Scotland?

I don't think I'm necessarily the right person to answer that,

but I wouldn't say it's entirely true.

Whenever I'm here people say, "Come back soon come back more often."

Last evening we had a marvellous reception

and a very large dinner so I wouldn't necessarily accept that.

Bernard Ingham tried to stop this interview happening.

He said he wouldn't let the Prime Minister be questioned by a woman.

The BBC hung tough and said it's Kirsty or nothing.

She was obviously deeply angry at having to do an interview

with me and not a man, deeply angry.

I think she felt it was something

she wasn't comfortable about doing, but she knew she had to do it.

The growth is coming up fast

and it looks as if from the latest figures as if we in Scotland

are going to have higher growth than the people further south.

She started talking about, "We in Scotland".

The first time she said it I thought, "That's a bit odd,"

cos I knew she was desperate to reconnect.

We in Scotland hadn't quite had

the full benefit of the increasing number of jobs there were,

it seemed more difficult to get it for us here.

We had brainstormed the interview, so from that point of view I was keyed up, but I'd done my homework.

But also very few people knew - just my husband Alan and I knew - I was pregnant.

I was determined that I was not going to get really upset

by doing this interview because it was more important to be calm

for my future child than it was to be calm for the Prime Minister.

Your own backbenchers are saying that the community charge is

a political cyanide pill and it will cause deep hatred and division.

These are your own backbenchers.

I have never heard the expression you have used before.

-Tony Marlow and Hugh Dykes respectively.

-Er...

I did not hear what was said at the 22 committee,

but if that is so, I don't believe that their judgment is correct.

I remember the interview finished, and she just...

"You interrupted me too much, that was terrible...da, da, da..."

I could see Malcolm Rifkind going, "Oh, dear, dear,

"this is just not going well at all." He sort of backed off.

Even Michael Forsyth... Her response was disproportionate to the event.

It had not been a comfortable interview for her.

The biggest political issue facing Scotland in the last quarter of the 20th century was Devolution.

In 1979, only 40% of us voted for it - by 1997, it was 74%.

That's a increase of... It's a huge change.

OK, so 18 years of Thatcherism might have had something

to do with it, but so did programmes like this.

The notion that Scotland gets more than it's fair share

of public spending in fact is nothing but a myth,

but it's one that is widely held particularly in

the south of England. What this programme sets out to explode that

myth by revealing that when it comes to guzzling the taxpayers' cash,

no-one does it better than London and the South East.

The public reaction was one of amazement.

The political reaction was almost like a battle charge

back across the border to say, "See!

"It's not the way you said it was."

This fixation with London produces some absurd situations.

The Department for Energy, for example, supervises Britain's

vital North Sea oil industries, but 856 of its 1,036 civil servants

are based in the West End of London. There are only 23 in Aberdeen...

the oil capital of Europe.

The programme is as resonant today as it was all those years ago.

We're still getting the same arguments, aren't we?

In recent years, new technology has given television journalists

another way of uncovering important stories.

Our second undercover researcher, Arifa Farooq, is in Glasgow where

our research is leading us to one of Scotland largest care providers.

BBC Scotland's Investigation Unit used tiny hidden cameras

and undercover reporters to expose mistreatment of the elderly.

Arifa knows there's something wrong in a client's house by the smell

as she enters the front door.

I have just found excrement all over

her floor and it seems to have been there for some time now - it seems hard and dried in.

It seems as though no-one has bothered to clean it up.

It is so disgusting.

The purpose of investigative journalism is to shed light in places

that people don't want light to be shed and bring about change.

And that kind of investigative journalism did it.

Andy allowed the BBC to fit hidden cameras throughout his house

so he knows he's being filmed here, but his carer doesn't.

He's unsure whether she's talking to him or down the phone.

This kind of programme making is absolutely vital for the BBC

to do and absolutely vital for wider society.

We need to keep poking our noses in, we need to keep exposing wrongdoing.

I wouldn't normally make any great claims about TV making

the world a better place.

But some of the stuff we've seen tonight - calling war criminals to account,

exposing secret deals between MI5 and the Ministry of Defence, telling us fast and accurately

about the big news stories, keeping tabs on the people who govern us -

well, it matters, and we're a better country for it.

Walk on.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd