The editor of Scottish Review current affairs website, Kenneth Roy, has sharply criticised some BBC Scotland broadcasters for “coarseness”.

Roy has hit out in Scottish Review after sharing an after-dinner speaking platform with a well-known Scottish sportsman, whom he does not name.

Roy, a frequent speaker on the after-dinner circuit, said he had warmed to the sportsman - 'amiable, unassuming, almost diffident, and he talked frankly about the unhappy state of Scottish football’.
“It was obvious from the outset that the speaker everyone was looking forward to hearing was the sportsman...

“Well, there were no dirty jokes. But, to my amazement, the speech was heavily peppered with the f-word. It seemed that no sporting anecdote – and the speech consisted of a flow of such anecdotes – could be brought to a satisfactory conclusion without it.

“Nothing had prepared me for this. In the pleasant hour I had spent with him over dinner, he had used this word not once.

“I use it too, often under my breath as I edit this magazine or read some of the correspondence it provokes. But I prefer not to use it in speeches.

“Its liberal use here, by this nice, civilised, middle-aged man, was unsettling. Why did he feel the need? Of all the many stories he told, only one was enhanced by the inclusion of the word.

“Its discriminating use would have produced a shock wave, and probably an explosion of nervous laughter, but its routine employment became boring.

“But then I looked around the room at a sea of contented faces and realised that I was worrying unnecessarily about the speech's impact on this mixed company.

“The more he uttered the word, the more they seemed to approve. It finally occurred to me that coarseness is what is expected of entertainers after dinner, late on a Friday night in a Scottish hotel.

“My fellow speaker was merely playing to a convivial crowd with its own fixed view of the language of such rituals and perhaps of the language of Scotland as a whole.

“Later, I looked up a variety of internet reviews of the after-dinner speeches of people associated with Scottish football and discovered that the one I had just heard was relatively mild.

“The same names kept cropping up – the blue joke specialists or the speakers who test the edges on sectarianism and sexism – and it was noticeable that they included familiar names at BBC Scotland.

“I wonder if the management is aware of the extreme out-of-hours reputation of these people and, if it is, why they are tolerated.

“The fact that public service broadcasters are among the worst offenders may be symptomatic of a more general coarseness in Scottish public life, particularly in the male culture of urban Scotland.

“On one of the few occasions I forced myself to read the transcript of a Holyrood committee meeting, I was taken aback by the machismo of its chairman – I expect he would have called it banter.

“Happily this man is no longer in public life, but it is easy to imagine him making something of a name for himself, even a living of sorts, in front of a succession of sportsmen's dinners.

“The spectacle of the week – one to make the toughest angels weep – has been the spat between Scotland's two main political parties over aggressive, allegedly threatening, remarks by a Scottish Labour MP to an SNP opponent.

“As we stagger in our emotionally stunted fashion to a referendum on self-determination – Westminster's or Alex Salmond's, it matters little – is this really the best we can manage?

“After a while, every dinner feels the same. But, with depressing circularity, so does every Scottish political row.

“We are still a long way from anything resembling civilization. We could try a little tenderness.”

Roy is very familiar with the BBC Scotland culture. After, at 19, becoming one of the youngest reporters ever employed by The [Glasgow] Herald, he was presenting Reporting Scotland on BBC TV Scotland by the age of 27.

For nine years he presented political and religious as well as current affairs programmes on both television and radio.

He left the BBC to establish a new independent local radio station in south-west Scotland, and was West Sound’s first managing director.

In 1983 he founded Carrick Media which publishes Who’s Who in Scotland and other reference titles. He established Scottish Review magazine in 1994.

He resumed his journalistic career — abandoned 21 years earlier — as a weekly columnist with the launch edition of Scotland on Sunday, in 1988. Later he wrote a weekly column for The Herald (as it now was), a daily column for The Scotsman, and a weekly column for The Observer.

He was twice Critic of the Year in Scotland and in 1994 he was named Columnist of the Year in the annual UK Press Gazette awards.

In 2000, he founded the Institute of Contemporary Scotland.