[interestednovice]

I'll never understand why they persisted with 9pm and didn't try another slot much sooner.

I wonder if this will be the end of its separate studio and they'll do an ITV London on the Reporting Scotland set? That separate set must be a substantial cost when they've got an unused standing set in the same building.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the set is mothballed or ends up being used only for Newsnight’s occasional visits to Scotland!

The 9pm start was purely for resource-related reasons. It was the time of the day when the BBC had the least demand on reporters, as network news was not on air and the 9pm hour has long been a simulcast between BBC World News & the BBC News Channel (even prior to the new channel). It’s also always been part of either Outside Source or The Context. Both of those programmes are not reporter-led, so the idea was that flagship editors and reporters would/could appear on The Nine. This was because, other than BBC World News’ aforementioned non-reporter heavy programming, no other BBC output was live at the time.

In the beginning, they made a lot of effort with this and people like the North America Editor used to appear live. Later on, the BBC appeared to effectively give up on the Nine and this happened less and less. The same sort of resourcing issues and difficulties with scheduling and sharing live feeds etc would be massive issues for a would-be “Scottish Six” to overcome.