Buckinghamshire macro news: Get ready for local TV

You stay classy, High Wycombe: Get ready for local TV

Are you all excited about the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s plans to introduce local TV? It’s a story that’s been making headlines since the idea was first mooted back a the start of 2011. More recently, the proposals have been fleshed out with Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt announcing this autumn that a sixth terrestrial TV channel could be launched before the end of 2012; it will be broadcast nationally but there will be heavy localised content specific to different regions too. A further ten to 15 local services are hoped to launch before 2015.

In the department’s proposal, Hunt begins with a forward that states: “The absence of sustainable local TV in the UK has been a long-standing problem.” Now, I’m all for retaining and fostering regional identity, especially in the increasingly homogenised south-east of England where High Wycombe and Luton are effectively considered a part of the London overspill (they aren’t and they shouldn’t be).

But, how viable is the project? The original plans have already changed: while it was first put forward that local news consortia would run the show, it was later revealed that money from newspaper groups would finance the project. Vested interests, anyone? There has been no shortage of criticism, for both the concept and the notion of it being sustainable. The DCMS has said that £25m local TV infrastructure costs and £5m for local content acquisition will be taken from the BBC licence fee annually for three years. Are you in favour of licence fee payers footing the bill for news and cultural items that may be of little interest?

Johnston Press chief executive John Fry has voiced concerns, arguing that the project is unlikely to prove financially lucrative enough to continually generate high-quality content. There are also a number of  technical difficulties: with local TV set to initially launch on digital terrestrial television, due to reception issues there are certain big cities and large rural areas that are unable to receive adequate coverage and will therefore miss out. The Government is confident that IPTV (internet TV) will be able to fulfil the needs of towns and cities such as Coventry, Hull and Durham, areas that will not initially be catered for owing to the restrictions of Freeview.

It’s easy to mock the idea. While reading reviews of Dick Whittington, currently on at the Waterside Theatre, Aylesbury, I stumbled across Bucks TV, a site catering towards macro-news and specifically local issues and events in the county. As an example, the offering for Gerrards Cross was one video from August 2008; it featured a GCSE student from the town who had just found out he’d achieved 13 A* grades and was promptly burning all of his written notes. Illuminating stuff.

Still, I don’t think anyone wants the UK to adopt the American model of local TV news and analysis, a format that used to rely on live-feeds from the scene of traffic accidents and police chases to attract high ratings for commercial advertising gain. Also, the US is a vast country with marked regional differences and owing to its size, a more insular perspective. People in one state don’t necessary want to know what’s going on in a neighbouring one, they want local news to reflect their immediate surroundings.

That’s not to say that focussing on local issues and providing a platform for them to be debated and make sense of the incongruous couldn’t be useful. I don’t want to sound like ubiquitous Bucks Free Press blogger and serial moaner ‘Ivor’; however, there are a number of stories involving high levels of violence that appear to frequently permeate the newspaper’s content. Yesterday’s collection included the headlines “Man punched and kicked on train after group boarded at Princes Risborough” and “Man attacked with batons in his garden.”

A Buckinghamshire local news channel wouldn’t have to feature a dark studio with cardboard cut-outs of a cityscape, glasses of untouched crystal clear water and an Alan Partridge style talk show anchor; though it might be beneficial to examine the underlying issues that could be contributing to disorder and open up a public dialogue with community groups and the police.