With the exception of a report about swimmers getting into difficulty on the Northumberland coast and needing to be rescued by Seahouses RNLI (reported on on ITV Tyne Tees) the county has had negligible coverage throughout the week. Both BBC Look North (North East/ Cumbria) and ITV Tyne Tees covered North Yorkshire fairly extensively this last week- even providing some overlap southwards of the ITV Tyne Tees and BBC (North East/ Cumbria) transmission areas- in order that North Yorkshire viewers of ITV Tyne Tees and the North East version of Look North get news- coverage across their own county.
It is all well- and- good for both the North East based Regional Television broadcasters to cover North Yorkshire, but over 300,000 people live in the county of Northumberland (and Northumberland takes up a third of the geographical area of the English North East Region assuming this also includes North Yorkshire.). The majority of those 300,000 people live in rural areas of northern and western Northumberland well away from the main centres of population- and if they are lucky to get just one news- report out of ten or eleven concerning rural Northumberland on nightly Regional News bulletins then that is not really acceptable.
However, the whole issue of coverage of Northumberland- and the Scottish Borders to the north- is actually more serious: Certainly with regards to BBC Regional coverage, this is a vast rural area that hardly gets covered at all. There are strong cultural and historic bonds between Northumberland and the Scottish borders- and the Hard Border that the respective BBC Regions have at the Scottish Border cuts through close communities like the Berlin Wall that separated Berlin prior to 1989. Folk who live in (say) Wooler are interested in what happens just over the Border in Kelso (22 miles away). Likewise, the good people of Chirnside, in the east of the Scottish Borders are likely to travel to Berwick-upon-Tweed in northernmost Northumberland (just ten miles away) to go shopping. The ancient county of Berwickshire (which was the rural hinterland to Berwick-upon-Tweed) mainly extends over the Border into what is now the Scottish Borders. Overlap news- coverage here is not just desirable, but essential for effective local coverage of northernmost Northumberland.
BBC Reporting Scotland, which is received by viewers in the Scottish Borders, provides little coverage of the Scottish Borders (and no overlap into Northumberland), though (at least) this area still receives the Scottish opt-out programming from ITV Border (which does cover southern Scotland well and provides overlap coverage of Berwick-upon-Tweed). Neither ITV Tyne Tees nor BBC Look North (North East/ Cumbria), which is received in all of Northumberland, serve the area well in terms of coverage. Moreover, neither provide overlap coverage into the Scottish Borders- despite the fact that it is possible to get from Berwick-upon-Tweed to Edinburgh on the train within an hour.
So a huge rural area of northern Britain is neglected by both the BBC and ITV in Regional output. This is clearly not good enough for a huge rural area that extends eighty miles from south to north and sixty miles from the mid-Northumberland Coast to the western end of the Scottish Borders, and which is home to over 400,000 people. BBC Look North’s programmers would not dare to overlook their North and West Cumbrian viewers like this (who total just over 300,000- and many Cumbrians still find the North East -flavoured output largely irrelevant at times), so why is Northumberland effectively ignored? Northumberland viewers don’t have the option of switching over to ITV Border like Cumbrian viewers can. Any viewers in Northumberland who feel their entire area is being overlooked would be well- encouraged to write in and make their views felt- in the first instance contacting the programmers directly.
For viewers of BBC Look North the email address is: look.north.comment@bbc.co.uk
For viewer of ITV Tyne Tees in Northumberland email: pamandian@itv.com