I have a problem with the novel I’m reading just now.

It’s nothing to do with the subject matter, nor the writing.

It’s the title, Jack Glass.

For a Scot my age those two words conjure up mostly an image of a rabid Presbyterian preacher with black hair and goatee beard, rejoicing (I use the word advisedly) in the title of Pastor Jack Glass. Even when he came to wide public notice (late 1960s? early 1970s?) that Pastor tag seemed impossibly archaic.

Due to his anti-Catholic stance Glass was regarded as Scotland’s answer to Ian Paisley. He vehemently opposed the then Pope’s visit to Scotland in 1982. Given Paisley’s later taking part in government along with Sinn Fein in the Northern Ireland Assembly Glass would perhaps have looked on Paisley as some sort of apostate (if he would ever have allowed such a Latinate word to describe any of his attitudes.) Glass, though, died ten years ago. So it goes.

None of this is likely to have impinged on the author of Jack Glass the novel, as he, Adam Roberts, was born in Croydon. I doubt if even his time studying English at the University of Aberdeen would have been troubled by knowledge or thoughts of the pastor, who, as far as I am aware, was never a household name south of the border. It is, though, a reminder of how cultural specificities can alter perspectives.

I watched the first episode of The Stuarts on BBC 2 tonight.

It seemed, like on its first showing on BBC 2 Scotland earlier this year, an odd decision to start with James VI (or James I if you prefer.) There were no less than eight Stuart monarchs before him. In the year of the Scottish Independence Referendum that could be interpreted as a slight, another piece of English ignorance/dismissal of Scottish History.

That the first episode dwelt on James’s desire to unite the two kingdoms as Great Britain might also seem like a dark Better Together plot as the Guardian noted today.

Yet (some, though not all, of) James’s ancestors were spoken of in the programme so the ignorance/dismissal angle can on those grounds be discounted. And the differences between the two countries that then existed (of religion principally,) and in some respects still do, were not glossed over but I was left wondering who on Earth thought broadcasting this was a good idea now. It can only lead to accusations of bias

I had another such disjointed TV experience with the BBC recently. Janina Ramirez in her otherwise excellent Chivalry and Betrayal: The Hundred Years War – on BBC 4 last week, this (and next) but also a programme that has been screened before – kept on emphasising how the events she was describing played a large part in how the country “we” live in now came to be as it is. (Note also the “us” on Dr Ramirez’s web page about the programme.)

Yet that country was/is England. Ramirez seemed totally unaware that her programme was to be broadcast not on an England only channel but one which is UK-wide. Indeed that the country all the BBC’s principal audience lives in is not England, but the UK. [Except for powers devolved to the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh and Northern Irish Assemblies legislation at Westminster is for the whole of the UK. No English elected body oversees the equivalent powers to those devolved elsewhere (arguably there ought to be one;) it is the UK Parliament that performs that function.]

Two parts of the UK share none of the history Dr Ramirez was outlining. Wales (having been incorporated earlier) was involved directly in the Hundred Years War but neither Scotland nor Ireland were. Yet she spoke as if that circumstance didn’t exist.

This sort of thing does contribute to a feeling among many Scots (and I suspect Welsh and Northern Irish viewers too) that the BBC is a broadcaster with a mind for England only and too often forgets the three other constituent parts of the UK.