Dick, I think you are being unfair to the programme.

Firstly, It was of its time and you need to look at it in that light.

Secondly, Colin Irwin was not denigrating folk music with his comment about fingers in the ear and 90 verse Scottish Ballads. He was describing other peoples' perceptions and how folk music was all too often represented in the mainstream media which is something entirely different. The point of his remarks is that the programme was intended to go some way to dispelling this image and give a flavour of what actually went on in Folk Clubs and I thought it did a pretty good job in that respect. Of course it was contrived, but that is the nature of the beast. You have 30 minutes of TV time to show a "typical" evening in a folk club, then you have a very difficult task and a great deal of TV is contrived in this respect. My wife watches the antique auction programmes which are on at lunch time and most of the "look what I've found" moments as clearly contrived. However it doesn't make the programmes any less enjoyable or interesting.

Of course you can argue that some things could have been done differently; we all can, but Ian Anderson got to make the programme so the choices were his and rightly so.

Overall the music and the performers were very good and would probably have given a good impression of what folk music was like to someone who was not familiar with what went on in folk clubs. The OP states that EFDSS got 500 enquiries asking about local folk clubs. Pretty good for a minority programme which almost certainly would only have attracted a small audience by TV standards and what sounds to me like a positive outcome.

Geoff