The Fear Factor: ‘Mean Scotland Syndrome’
Scared at the prospect of running your own country? Terrified about what the future holds? Haunted by nightmarish visions of deep uncertainty? The Fear Factor is a series of short films looking at why Scottish people are afraid, very afraid, about what’s in store for their poor wee country…
Sorry, patronising. How many doubters is this going to convince? None, I suspect.
To have any chance of changing hearts and minds one has to entertain the possibility that your target audience may have good reasons for their viewpoint, and aren’t just hard of thinking.
Hi Jim
If you found this film to be patronising please accept my apologies. This was not our intention at all. Our aim was to highlight how poorly served Scottish people are in terms of television news and that this is partly due to the nature of broadcasting and partly the neither semi-regional/semi-national status of BBC Scotland and STV. We look at this in the context of research that shows the fairly well-known fact that watching MSM leads to a more negative world view. I can’t think of any examples in this film, or in fact this series, in which we take a patronising tone towards our viewers. If you do think this is the case I’d be grateful if you could bring any examples with this series to my attention. Our genuine aim, far from patronising anyone was the opposite: to show that if an real debate is held, people can be trusted to make up their own minds.
If (as I suspect) you’re referring to the blurb above and not the film itself: it was intended to be tongue in cheek and references the language used by the official No Campaign.
Ach maybe I’m out of my depth here, I don’t normally argue with creatives and I don’t even know what MSM is. I actually made my comments after watching the first film in the series. I couldn’t put my finger on particular phrases being condescending, I think it was the entire excercise. Whether it’s patronising or not depends on who you think the audience is.
If you’re doing a fine excercise in irony to a sympathetic pro-independence audience then it’s a grand movie, and I quite enjoyed it on that level. But I’m getting a bit manic about 18/9/14 and I want everybody who wants independence to start acting like a politician for the next year (obviously I’m not asking you to go as far as pogling your expenses) and target the floating voters like mad. I imagine my brother watching this – he remembers that the Nats gave us Thatcher, and he doesn’t have a femtosecond for the body of shortbreid, flag-waving drivel coming from the Yes campaign – and you would have got his goat fairly shortly just by the levity of your treatment, which he would take as, yes, broad-brush patronisation of anyone who hasn’t gone all Braveheart yet.
With the seriousness of the issue, maybe I’ve just completely lost my sense of humour.
Despite being a fervent Yes supporter I entirely understand those in our country who are scared to vote Yes. After all the Scots should know full well what a belligerent Westminster government is likely to do. The people we are standing against are those whose ancestors gave the world it’s first concentration camps in Africa,they’re now the people who invade countries whose leaders they disapprove of apparently on the spurious grounds of looking for non-existent weapons of mass destruction whilst at the same studiously ignoring countries who DO have weapons of mass destruction i.e. Israel
They’re the people who have no compunction in slaughtering whole industries like the coal and steel industries knowing full well the misery and despair this would cause to whole communities.
they’re the people who gave us anti trade union laws; they’re the people who robbed school weans of free school milk;
The british ruling class is such a venomous and selfish parcel o rogues that we owe it to our children to end our association with them whatever the cost. To be scared before one enters a fight with enemies like these is wise not to join the fight is cowardice.
TamB