Last updated 11:49, Wednesday, 08 October 2008

IT IS not a great place to be, living in an afterthought. But that’s exactly where I am because I’m a native of a county called …and Cumbria.

As it was: Encouraging people to watch Border TV back in 1959

The decision by Ofcom to allow ITV to drop much of its local news coverage leaves Cumbria, or at least the north and west of it without any truly dedicated television news coverage at all.

We already have BBC news and current affairs programming based in Newcastle from where the daily 6.30 Look North programme and short news bulletins are broadcast to the North East and where’s that other place they are supposed to cover? Oh yes… and Cumbria.

What Ofcom has achieved with this decision is to leave a swath of territory from Whitehaven in the west to Hadrian’s Wall in the north and including the Lake District literally in the dark.

What they seem to have failed to have taken into account is that Cumbria is, in theory at least, politically and economically part of the North West region.

Decisions affecting this county will be proposed, discussed and taken but the inhabitants will now have no way of knowing anything about them.

Perhaps that may be no bad thing.

Even in respect of its political geography the county is part of a region made up of Merseyside, Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Cheshire... and Cumbria.

Perhaps we should change the county’s name to Afterthought.

Border Television’s six o’clock news flagship programme Lookaround, it has to be admitted, is no firebrand of cutting edge investigative journalism. It is more a television version of a traditional rural local newspaper of the ‘Turnip Times’ variety but the essential fact is that it is local and it is ours.

Ofcom and ITV have relegated an area which already felt itself to be little more than a neglected outpost, the northern marches of England, to news coverage oblivion.

We have lived off the occasional news scraps the BBC in Newcastle choose to throw our way and now, it seems, we will just have to accept the same from Tyne-Tees and just get used to living in this place called …and Cumbria.

Brian Nicholls

Penrith