BBC Scotland Executive Report 2007/08

With its unique blend of speech and music programmes, BBC Radio Scotland continued to reach out to a weekly audience in excess of one million listeners, a significant achievement in what is the most fiercely competitive radio market outside of London.

Radio drama stepped up a gear, with 12 new plays appearing – or due to appear – on Radio Scotland in 2008. Written by some of Scotland's leading writers, including Alexander McCall Smith, Liz Lochhead and Ian Finlay MacLeod (whose comedy drama, Frozen, met with wide critical acclaim), they contribute to the 74 hours of drama and readings, produced in-house across the year, for Radio Scotland and for the BBC radio networks.

News and politics programming remain at the heart of the schedules, covering the local, national and international agendas and the political landscapes of Holyrood, Westminster and Brussels. Good Morning Scotland continued to attract the highest number of weekday listeners to the station, the extension of the Morning Extra slot brought greater audience interaction and comment on many of the topics dominating the news agenda and further investment in investigative journalism added a sharper edge to that area of programme output.

Audience participation was also central to the success of programmes such as Write Here, Right Now, in which listeners were encouraged to write their own novels, and the Soundtown initiative, now in its 5th year and currently based in Baldragon Academy in Dundee, also saw the pupils put pen to paper to produce their own book of crime stories.

Work on the multiplatform Scotland's Music culminated in a special concert from the Queen's Hall in Edinburgh for the Burnsong Festival. And the station's commitment to live music remained unrivalled, with more live concerts and recordings broadcast on Radio Scotland than on all of the other commercial stations in Scotland combined.

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