I've really enjoyed listening to Susan Calman present the MacAulay & Co show this week. She's witty, clever, warm and seems to have a natural talent for radio. I tell you, if I were commissioning programmes on BBC Radio Scotland I would snap her up and offer her a regular gig. Oh, hang on...those nice folk in BBC contracts hate me talking out loud about that kind of stuff. Sorry.

Susan was on top form this morning as she interviewed comedy pal Ed Byrne and got to talking about that new book in which celebrities have written a letter to their sixteen year old selves. Most of the advice was about not worrying about silly stuff like how you look and how you dress (something that has never given me a single fret - obviously) and about how every experience in life can turn out to be useful.

Susan, who qualified to practise law, said she has never regretted that course of study, even though she eventually gave it all up to become a stand-up comedian. She's been on the comedy scene for a good wee while but this past year she seems to be in demand from all sorts of people. I was discussing this with Comedy Unit producer Gus Beattie recently and I suggested that Susan would be on my list of top ten Scottish comedians guaranteed to be even more successful in 2010. Kevin Bridges is another.

I've seen Susan in a live sketch show in Glasgow and she's a brilliant visual perfomer as well as being a great writer and teller of funny stories. Her blogs entries on Facebook are just a treat to read. Recently she came up with the brilliantly funny idea of shortening horror films by ensuring the central characters don't make those cliched stupid mistakes early on in the story. You know, don't explore the old ruined house, don't go back for a handbag etc.

The photograph below shows Susan taking command of BBC Radio Scotland's Topical & Events team. She's the one at the front.

Martin Stepek clearly recalls the moment when he realised he was a bit Polish.

It was at a Scotland-Poland international at Hampden. He'd been invited to the match alongside a group of his father's friends and many of them were old soldiers or sailors.

"A few of them were wearing their military medals, " Martin explains, "and they stood to attention as the Polish national anthem was played. Some had tears in their eyes."

It made Martin think of the families - brothers, sisters, parents - that many of them had left behind during the Second World War. He remembered one man describing how he had buried his dead brother in shallow earth in a Siberian labour camp.

"Until then I had always thought of myself as completely Scottish...but that was the blip."

Martin came in to see me tonight at Pacific Quay and told me how he had spent the last eight years researching his own family history. He produced a huge lever-arch file stuffed with old photographs, letters, maps and postcards...many dating back to the early years of the twentieth century. There were documents too. We tend to think of wartime Europe as a place of chaos and yet the bureaucracy of governments functioned well enough to record the movement of entire populations - even those being sent to their deaths.

The story of Martin's father is remarkably similar to my own father's experiences. As young men, both were imprisoned in Siberia until the Soviet Union sided with the Allies and allowed the Poles to join the free army or navy. Both joined the navy and both settled in Scotland after the war after marrying Scottish girls.

Mister Stepek Snr. started a chain of electrical stores that were well known in Lanarkshire and the east end of Glasgow. Martin now runs the Scottish Family Business Association and lectures on the strengths and weaknesses of such business models.

But our meeting tonight was like encountering a kindred spirit. We discovered we both wish we could speak fluent Polish. We talked about that slight sense of feeling like an 'outsider' when people talk about Scottish ancestry, although both our mothers were of Scots-Irish descent.

And I discovered we had one more thing in common. We both have blogs...and here is the link to Martin's.

One year ago I embarked on this plan to take a photograph of Inverness from exactly the same spot every month. Well, another November has come around and, as you can see, not much has changed although the weather is a lot milder today than it was twelve months ago. Not much colour on the trees and no snow on the hills either.

Luckily we're not experiencing anything like the rain and flooding that they've been enduring along the Moray coast and Aberdeenshire.

I'll take one more photograph next month and then I might (finally) get around to that moving slideshow I promised.

Here's the photograph from last November.

This month sees the return of Scotland's History, BBC Scotland's landmark project which involves television, radio, online, the BBC SSO and live events.

Neil Oliver presents the television series - A History of Scotland - and he's also fronting the new series of audio walks - Walking Through History - which we produce in partnership with the Open University. The walks can be heard on BBC Radio Scotland on Monday morning at 1130 (starting next week) and are also available to download on to your MP3 player.

On Thursday morning our biography series - In The Footsteps.. also returns and each programme will focus on a character that features in the television series.

There's a logic behind all of this and it involves the research we conducted after the first few months of Scotland's History at the start of the year. Viewers and listeners told us that they wanted programmes that offered more information about the events described in the TV series. Previously the radio programmes had offered tales and information about aspects of Scottish history that hadn't been mentioned in the TV programmes.

On Sunday 29th Novemember there's an added treat as we broadcast the History of Scotland concert from the Usher Hall in Edinburgh. The BBC SSO will be performing music from the series and Eddie Reader will be among a great line up of guests. Tickets are now available.

Then on Monday 7th December there will be a special debate on Scottish History in the Investigation slot.

Meanwhile we have other history programmes which aren't part of the official season.

Look out for Billy Kay's programme The Dundee Ripper next Friday morning and the The Spies Who Knew Too Much a week later and in December Susan Morrison explore the history of Edinburgh prostitution in The Ladies of Pleasure.

Allk that plus our History Zone available on the BBC Radio Scotland website 24 hours a day and via the BBC iPlayer

Phew. Who knew history could be so exciting?

Of course, not everyone thinks its so much fun. When the skull & crossbones briefly replaced the Saltire on the Townhouse flagpole, some people thought this was in poor taste and it was removed.

Others, I know, feel there is enough horror on the High Street most Saturday nights as the drunks spill out of the pubs and clubs.

But the young 'uns seem to love it, including the young Zeds. They were out 'guisin' as usual and came home with a good haul of chocolate, crisps, sweets and satsumas.

Satsumas?

If you ask me, some parents are taking this healthy eating lark just too far!

I'm rarely in Glasgow on a Friday but being at Pacific Quay today meant I was able to watch Brian Taylor's Big Debate programme as it went out live. Today he had an all-female panel of guests and an audience of opinionated adults and rather more shy schoolchildren.

We're getting a great response to this programme from listeners and, when the programme comes live from Pacific Quay, lots of BBC Scotland staff lean over the balconies to see and hear what's happening. Today, for example, I was rubbing shoulders with John Beattie and Annie McGuire while the programme Editor, John Boothman, was whispering in my ear and telling me about his plans to have outside broadcasts around the country. Dundee next week, he said.

All of which made it difficult to listen to the actual debate. I'm surprised Brian didn't stop the programme and tell the four of us to stop chatting.

The programme's on the BBC iPlayer, of course.

As it was tonight when I met the management team from Radio Caley - the student-run radio station at Glasgow Caledonian University. They hit me with questions about marketing, audience profiles, comedy scripting, news-gathering, social networking, technical infrastructure.

I had to call a half-time break so we could have coffee and a breather. Then it was off into the Get It On studio where they asked Bryan Burnett about his playout system and the method of ingesting music into the conputer system.

Phew. I must remember to do more of these tours in the daytime, when I'm still capable of stringing sentences together.

But I don't just worry about newspapers; I worry about the future of news itself. It's one of my favourite conversation topics. Just get me started on this and I can clear a room within ten minutes. I'm not kidding.

I first performed this vanishing act many moons ago during a BBC Review Board. These are meetings where we gather to discuss and dissect recent output. People come from different departments and with different points of view. Sometimes I suspected they had colluded before those Review Boards and agreed to say nice things about each other's programmes. A non-hostility pact, if you like. At other times the meetings could descend into mutually assured destruction as estranged colleagues settled old scores.

That doesn't happen anymore. Well, not often.

But it was at one of those Review Boards, when I was voicing some criticism of Radio Scotland's news output, that the programme editor defended himself with the following question.

"But what do you think we missed?"

I didn't quite understand what he meant, so he elaborated.

"I mean, was there anything in the newspapers that morning that we didn't cover on the radio. Did we miss any stories?"

Well, the discussion went on for a bit. Some people made their excuses and left. Others were so numb that they couldn't think of an excuse and just threw themselves out of a window. Finally I had to accept that we hadn't, in that sense, "missed a story" but it confirmed my view that news journalism can drift too easily into information-processing. One journalist gets a story and everyone else transforms it into a radio or television piece, a magazine column, an online article, a blog and so on. The next morning that story is "taken on" by seeking reaction from a relevant person or organisation.
When I worked in commercial radio every political story had to be followed up by reaction from other politicians and then the CBI and STUC. Always riveting stuff, of course.

Journalists ought to be defined by their ability to find or cover that original story. To be first with the news, in fact. To tell people things they don't already know. To ask the right questions.

And that's what worries me about the demise of newspapers. Fewer journalists will mean fewer original stories.

I imagine that, around the world, there are newsrooms full of dedicated, intelligent staff who are working very long hours processing a very small number of stories...and that news agenda seems to be getting narrower all the time.

More than a year ago, at the Radio Festival, I found myself making headlines because I dared to state the obvious and point out that news was becoming dominated by stories about celebrities like Amy Winehouse and her trips to rehab. I went as far as to say that there were plenty of young women in Scotland whose lives were also being ruined by drugs and that we, as journalists, should find ways of putting their stories at the top of our bulletins.

News, I said, is what we say it is and we don't all have to say the same thing. It's why, on BBC Radio Scotland, we created the fortnightly Investigation programme...and why we have programmes like Give Me a Voice where real people - not professional journalists - get the chance to tell their own stories and demand answers from the authorities.

But maybe I'm wrong. Arrogant, even. Overweight too. Sober, though.

Maybe news should only be about what sells newspapers or bumps up listening and viewing figures.

So you tell me...what should be in the news?

And if you would like to read a more eloquent view of modern journalism, please look at this piece from the Nieman Foundation for Journalsim at Harvard.

Great presenters too.

Having said all that, when I first heard about the plans to remove every BBC radio station from Freeview so that BBC Alba could find a home there I was, shall we say, a bit put out.
I'm afraid to say I was responding with the kind of gut instinct that leads some of us in radio to think of ourselves as Cinderella. I'm not going to name the ugly sisters.

But when I started to look at the facts and figures, the idea began to make more sense.

For starters, only about one percent of all radio listening happens through Freeview. And of that one percent very few people have no other alernative, be it FM, DAB, Online or Satellite TV.

At the same time, attempts to promote digital radio listening have been a bit messy because there are so many platforms available. Most of the marketing spend has centred on DAB while internet listening (my own favourite) rarely gets mentioned - except on the radio stations' own idents.

But there's a plan -outlined in the U.K. Government's Digital Britain report - to switch off most FM radio as early as 2015. Most people in the industry regard that target as "ambitious".

For BBC Radio Scotland there are a number of complicating factors around that. We currently offer a split service of FM/MW programmes most weekday evenings. We also split FM transmission geographically to offer localised news and sport in areas such as the Highlands and the Borders.

Currently we cant do either of those things on DAB - which is something many DAB listeners complain about. It needs a technical solution. There is one, but it comes at a cost.

Add to that the long-standing transmission blackspots around Scotland, such as the A9 corridor, and you can see that our issues go way beyond the decision to keep radio on Freeview or not.

But you can have your say on that. The BBC Trust has just launched a consultation exercise and there's a online survey you can complete by clicking here.

This is a first for the Radio Cafe team. The California-based actor and performance artist Mihkail Tank has written to The Queen telling her how much he enjoyed being interviewed on BBC Radio Scotland. Her Majesty was clearly a little too busy to send him a personal reply, but a Lady-in-Waiting has written to Mikhail to tell him how pleased she was to hear that.

Mikhail was interviewed by Janice Forsyth at the tail-end of this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He'd created an online virtual fringe show which, he said, was all about "creating restore points in your soul".

The show could be seen by anyone, anywhere in the world, who had the correct password. I'm not entirely clear why, in that case, it was an Edinburgh Fringe event, but there you go.

I wonder how many letters the Queen gets.

You can connect to Mikhail Tank's official website here and hear that original interview with Janice.

"I've only given up drinking alcohol," I tell them. Otherwise I would have dehydrated to the point where you could scoop me in glass jars and sell me as crystals of dried fat. Yet the questions continue and this worries me. It suggests that my friends and colleagues feel unsettled unless they see me holding a pint glass and wiping a blob of froth from my chin. Especially at breakfast time.

When I insist that I'm not really missing the booze, no one seems quite satisfied with that. So I tell them about the first few days of my abstinence when I was having those biting headaches and bad dreams.

"Ah...that's the toxins making themselves known," said one know-it-all. Who knew that toxins were such attention-seekers?

Anyway, I've realised I need to come up with some better answers if only to keep others amused. Allow me to test the following on you and invite you to suggest better alternatives if you feel so inclined. Mind you, if you're so inclined, you've probably had one too many yourself.

Q. I hear you've given up the booze...how's that going?

A. Just fine. No problem at all. I mean, sucking the alcohol out of thermometers doesn't really count, does it?

Q. So what made you give up drinking anyway?

A. Well you know those crazy programme ideas you're always trying to pitch to me in the pub. Lately I started to believe they were actually good.

Q. I'm told you're off the sauce. Are you going to be a bore about it?

A. Not at all, but last night I was visited by the Holy Spirit and he told me you had better stop drinking too or risk eternal damnation. You going to eat those chips or what?

Q. You've gone almost a month without a drink. Do you feel better for it?

A. Are you kidding? I've never felt better. It's like my mind is really clear for the first time in years. The last thing I remember is going into the Student Union to have my first legal pint and now it's twenty-eight years later, I have a wife and two kids and they tell me I'm running a radio station. How did that happen?

My son was mucking about with a camera and a laptop this afternoon while we listened to Sportsound. It inspired him to make this epic promotional video which, I'm sure you'll agree, is an accurate picture life at BBC Radio Scotland.

Except, maybe we're not quite as animated as he imagines.

Tony Currie - my BBC Scotland colleague - has written a short memoir about the early days of Radio Clyde. It's lavishly illustrated with photographs of the station's first presenters, the backroom staff and even some of the technical equipment that was used. For us radio anoraks it's a must read, but in truth the early chapters are like an adventure story. You get a real insight into the birth-pangs of legitimate commercial radio in Scotland and you find yourself wondering if those pioneers are actually going to pull it off.

They do, of course, and the rest is history.

Leafing through the book first thing this morning brought back all sorts of memories for me...mainly as a listener. I was a schoolboy in Glasgow when Clyde came on air, but I well remember listening to Tiger Tim Stevens, Dr Dick's Midnight Surgery with Richard Park and Brian Ford's punk and new wave programme Stick it in Your Ear - which has got to be one of the best ever names for a radio show.

Tony includes a chapter on the station's ill-fated listing newspaper Clyde Guide. I remember buying it on the way to school and showing it to my geography teacher who ridiculed the content before turning his attention to me. He was a BBC Radio 3 listener and he told me that local radio was a waste of time and that my time would be better spent listening to Beethoven and joining his chess club.

Well, he was right about Clyde Guide. It closed after a year.

I worked for Radio Clyde as a news reporter but didn't join the station until 1990. Many many of the legendary names were still there at that time. Tiger Tim once praised my "professionalism" because I always wrote my name -phonetically - on a piece of paper and handed it to him in the studio just before he had to introduce the news bulletin.

Jeff Ziz-in-ski.

I wasn't expecting to be mentioned in the book, but there on page 114 is a photograph of me in a line-up of newsroom staff preparing to cover a General Election. I even get a mention in the index...under 'Z' of course.

Tony's book is called Not Quite Altogether Now! and I must take my copy to Glasgow next week and get it signed.

I'm always encouraging our programme-makers to meet our audiences. Today, on the High Steet in Inverness, I came face-to-face with one of the biggest listeners in the city. Mind you, I'm not exactly sure that huge mobile puppets are included in the official Rajar figures.

This one - the Sky Trumpet - is on the streets as part of the Highland Homecoming celebrations. Its being trundled along by a three person team of assistants who call out to small children and invite them to whisper their wishes into the extendable ears. Those wishes are then recorded and re-broadcast to passers-by.

I was prepared to elbow a few toddlers out of the way so that I could get my own wishes into the system, but by the time I had finished scribbling out my list, the puppeteers had wheeled off into the distance.

Next time.

Two hundred and fifty years after his birth and Robert Burns has secured us a nomination in the Scottish BAFTAS. I thank you, Sir. Pity you're not able to make it for the big night.

Now, I have to confess that when those BAFTA nominations came out the other day I didn't pay very close attention. They're primarly concerned with the film and television industry and, despite my oft-stated claim that the pictures are better on radio, we don't tend to get a look-in.

What I hadn't realised, of course, was that there is an award category for websites and BBC Scotland's Robert Burns site is up there among the contenders. It's the home of the huge online archive project we launched at the start of this year. Every poem and song written by Burns will eventually find its way there, performed by some of Scotland's best actors as well as some other famous voices. They're heard first on BBC Radio Scotland, then made available on our twice-weekly podcast before being added to the Burns website.

Radio producers Dave Batchelor and Esme Kennedy have provided that element of the site's content, while our online colleagues - led by Tom Hodgkinson - have been managing the actual site itself, linking it to other Burns-related content and making it easily searchable by theme, title or the performer.

And there we are, up for a BAFTA and up against stiff competition that also includes another BBC Scotland production - the brilliant China Stories website.