UR TV CAST

“There are a number of reasons, but the primary one is a fanatical attachment to sport – particularly football,” says Barbara Moyses, of the Edinburgh-based media buying agency, Feather Brooksbank. “On Sundays and Mondays Scottish men often buy more than one paper to get different views of their teams.”Ms Moyses also points out that Scotland is “not one culture and the broadsheets here have always reflected that. “It’s a cultural thing and has been for as long as I can remember.”Jim Seaton, the former editor of the Edinburgh-based Scotsman, suspects it is to do with the enduring Scottish faith in education; others say that a better education system has produced a more literate population and one with a greater interest in politics than the others that make up the UK.Scottish media analysts are less romantic. “People just read more,” says Alf Young, deputy editor of the Glasgow-based Herald, soon to launch a sister Sunday. While 61 per cent of British people buy a Sunday paper, the Scottish figure is 76 per cent. For dailies the figures are 55 per cent for the UK and 65 per cent for Scotland.Views differ as to why Scots continue to buy more papers. The Sun and those who followed it north wanted a slice of the UK’s only booming media market.

The question now is whether the new investments – particularly the substantial sums being sunk into the Sunday Herald by the Scottish Media Group – will bear fruit.The early investments were less risky. And now the temperature is set to rise again with the coming of Scotland’s own parliament in May, the launch of a new home-grown newspaper – the Sunday Herald – and the beefing-up of the Scottish operations of English-based papers, including The Telegraph, Times, Guardian and Independent as well as the tabloids.These are dizzy, breathless times. There was no end to The Sun’s zeal in its battle to win Scottish hearts. This brave defender of British sovereignty against an evil Europe even came out for Scottish independence just before the country’s devolution vote.The Daily Mail, Express and Mirror have all followed The Sun north to exploit a marketplace which, strangely, continues to flourish while sales of newspapers south of the border shrivel. Relations between it and the Scottish Daily Record – whose virtual monopoly of the marketplace had made it fat and complacent – quickly turned ugly.Rival editors traded insults; The Sun even had its logo projected on to the wall of the Record’s headquarters. In recent years that cut-throat sense of competition has returned to the Scottish media scene, hostilities between rival titles deteriorating virtually into all-out war.
Things began to hot up in the mid-Eighties when The Sun became the first London-based paper to set up a separate operation in Glasgow. In the good old Fifties, as myth now has it, competition between newspapers in Scotland was so keen that rival reporters would slash each others tyres to steal a yard in the pursuit of a hot story or to ensure that they were first back to the office with their copy.

“Trial and Error has been used as a base to make the company strong.”. But the admiration for Jessel and his team is tinged with jealousy: “They have the best people because the Trial and Error contract allows them to keep them,” says the rival. “When Dispatches was cut back to half an hour and Dorothy Byrne was brought in from The Big Story there were worries that the programme would go down-market,” says a rival producer. “If 20/20, who do The Big Story for Carlton, had won that contract, it would have been a bad sign.”Just Television is a very solid, respectable face for Channel 4. Just Television has already branched out into other current affairs topics – including the Monica Lewinsky case and, this week, an examination of the evidence in the Lockerbie bombing.Some in the industry see Just Television’s Dispatches and Channel 4 News contracts as evidence that the production company is a kind of conscience for Channel 4. Once on Rough Justice he realised he had found his niche: “There is definitely a selfish sort of satisfaction attached to the job.

Better journalists than us reveal huge famines or corruption, whereas we focus on just one tragedy, although it is a heightened tragedy because being imprisoned for something you haven’t done is like being tortured for information you don’t have.”Jessel believes that the research skills perfected on Trial and Error – “We have our homework marked by the Court of Appeal, so it has to be pretty good” – won them the Channel 4 contracts. The walk-out was not just because of lack of work: “You can’t very well say to people, sorry you have to stew in jail another year to fit in with the BBC’s scheduling plans,” Jessel points out.Jessel had joined Rough Justice in 1985 after a career mainly in BBC radio and on the precursor to Newsnight, 24 Hours. So, we are taking it to judicial review, but we’ve not made a programme about him.Jessel, Phelps and Haywood walked out of the BBC as a group to join Channel 4 when the BBC was refusing to make more than a few episodes of Rough Justice a year. Now, we haven’t made a programme about him, but we have disagreed with the Criminal Cases Review Commission’s decision to reject his case. For example, there is the case now of Tony Dickinson, a alcoholic who was convicted of setting fire to a house in which two people died. Last month one of Trial and Error’s key campaigns was vindicated when Danny McNamee had his appeal against conviction for the IRA Hyde Park bombing upheld. Since setting up in 1992, Just Television has managed to get 20 convictions quashed.David Jessel denies that he and his partners, Stephen Phelps and Steve Haywood, are making a killing from miscarriages of justice: “The contracts from Channel 4 allow us to support on-going investigations and we have what you could call our pro bono arm.

This follows a deal Just Television signed with Dispatches in September to become its in-house investigative team. Dispatches is made by a large number of production companies on contracts that rarely last more than three months; getting a long-term deal to uncover stories is a coup that has made the world of investigative television journalism quite green with envy.
But the company’s position as Channel 4’s favourite bloodhounds would seem to be deserved. BEING A good guy can be good for you. Just Television, the investigative production company set up by David Jessel and the old Rough Justice team in 1992, has had the kind of 1998 that most other independents can only dream of.