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0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Aug 12, 2007

Norwegian plan for Scottish radio falters

THE consultant touting a Norwegian radio tower to transmit a new Scottish national radio station has conceded he will probably fail amid rumours that Emap's Scottish radio assets could soon go on the market.

Paul Graham, who has been offering the lease of the tower, located off the Norwegian mainland, on behalf of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), has failed to find any takers over the past few months.

The only party that appears to have shown any real interest in the idea has been New Wave Media, which is fronted by former Radio Forth managing director Adam Findlay. He decided not to go ahead after meeting several times with Graham.

There were also suggestions that Norman Quirk, the former managing director of Glasgow's Saga Radio was interested, but he was quick to reject them.

Radio executives have been saying privately that the transmitter is unattractive because it is restricted to AM and would require a massive marketing outlay to build a national brand.

Graham conceded that the same difficulties discouraged NRK from using the transmitter, and said that if Emap puts its Scottish stations on the block it would be even harder to generate interest.

Emap effectively put itself up for sale last week by making the announcement that its entire business has now been put up for review.

TV drama on how gay sex was legalised

THE story of the decriminalisation of homosexuality is the subject of a new drama on BBC4. Made by Lion Television Scotland, which has never made a drama before, Consenting Adults tells the story of Jack Wolfenden, the university vicechancellor who headed the Home Office committee that eventually recommended decriminalisation in spite of the fact that he saw homosexuality as an "abomination".

It stars Phantom Of The Opera star Charles Dance as Wolfenden and newcomer Sean Biggerstaff as his son Jeremy.

It asks whether Wolfenden's controversial proposals were influenced by Jeremy, an Oxford undergraduate who turns out to be gay himself, or whether he was swayed by evidence from experts such as sex therapist Dr Alfred Kinsey and Lord Chief Justice Goddard.

The 80-minute drama, to be broadcast on September 5, is being shown to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Wolfenden report's publication in 1957. It led to homosexuality being decriminalised 10 years later.

Colin Cameron, the managing director of Lion Television Scotland, said his developers followed up the story while they were looking for anniversaries that would make interesting documentary subjects.

The idea was originally pitched to BBC4 as a docu-drama, but the channel said it would commission a drama instead.

Metro goes north as part of major expansion

METRO is set to launch in Dundee and Perth in the next few weeks as part of a major expansion around the UK. In its biggest push forward in recent years, the total daily distribution of the free paper is set to rise from 1.1 million to 1.35m copies as every UK edition is beefed up.

The news is likely to be disturbing for paid-for newspaper publishers, who have been hit hard since Metro's arrival in 1999.

Managing director Steve Auckland said: "We are putting in more copies where we think we can get more growth. We are not saturated and we won't be saturated once we've done this expansion.

"We could either have increased by a series of smaller amounts or made one big jump, and having talked to the [media buying] agencies, we feel we can go for the big jump."

Auckland said the increases were likely to take place in late August or early September. He stressed, however, that the final plan had not been signed off and that it could yet be postponed.

The total Scottish print run is to be extended by between 8000 and 10,000 copies from its current level of around 120,000, but Auckland insisted no final decision had been taken on whether to aim north of the central belt for the first time.

This depends on a recommendation of local publishing partner Trinity Mirror, which he has not yet received - but the Sunday Herald understands that the firm's sights are set on Tayside and Perthshire.

There will also be copies sent to Glasgow Airport, but it is unclear whether Edinburgh and Dundee airports are included.

The move northwards will put extra pressure on DC Thomson, which dominates Tayside and Perthshire and has already had to weather the launch of the Daily Record PM edition in Dundee this year.

In London, where the print run is to rise from 550,000 to 760,000, the focus will be on more copies for tube and railway stations close to central London, and a push into more distant commuter areas such as Stevenage and Welwyn Garden City.

"We are trying to push out a little further, " said Auckland. "We want more people to get the paper at the start of their commuter journey."

There will also be smaller distribution increases of the nine other English and Welsh editions.