Fully Booked
The final three-month run of Cover Stories ended on a high note this morning when presenter Richard Holloway broke into song for a rendition of My Way. Afterwards I called the producer Dawn Munro who told me she was almost in tears listening to that. She meant it in a nice way.
Richard decided to call it a day with Cover Stories because he's now so busy with the and the body that will replace it. This prompted us to review our coverage of books and publishing and so, next year, we'll create a weekly Book Cafe programme so that we can do justice to this subject all year round. At the same time we're developing a new biography series and, as I've metioned before, a monthly slot for drama.
Of course schedule changes like this don't please everyone and today I took a call from Tim Cornwell, the Arts Correspondent at . He'd heard rumours that we were planning to reduce our coverage of events such as the Edinburgh Book Festival. In fact, the weekly Book Cafe should allow us to cover many more book festivals around the country.
Meanwhile, in Inverness today, I was talking through plans for our weekly Highland Cafe programme which we'll launch in January. It's there to cover the year-long festival of culture and we'll have a variety of new voices present editions of the programme over those twelve months.
The Highland Cafe is also part of a community education project which will link us with secondary schools throughout the north of Scotland. This month, in fact, I'm joining producer Deirdre Leitch as she begins some of the classroom training sessions for pupils.
In a few weeks we'll have dozens of teenage arts critics, armed with digital recorders, ready to review anything that moves over the next year.
More critics. Yes, that's all I need.
