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Thought for the Day is a short monologue delivered at 7.20 in the morning as part of the Good Morning Scotland programme. As such it comes under the News & Current Affairs section of the BBC, who have ultimate responsibility for the content as opposed to Radio Religion, which means that scripts must conform to News & Current Affairs guidelines (avoiding anything that can be interpreted as too politically inflammatory, for example). Although viewed from a personal religious perspective, the subject for each two minute slot (originally two and a half minutes) is expected to be drawn from news items being dealt with in that morning's programme. This means agreeing the subject matter during the previous afternoon, then writing a piece to read to the producer for approval a few hours later, then hoping that events overnight don't make the content seem petty, irrelevant, distasteful, or even so offensive it needs to be discarded and re-written in the minutes before airing. These pieces were written and performed between 1992 and 2003, so a little repetition in the way of homilies is perhaps to be expected. And let's face it, the subjects reported in each days news show a sad regularity of reoccurrence over time, variations of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, I'm afraid.
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