The state of British TV

I love television. Really love it. Nowadays I watch maybe 10-15 hours a week of it. That’s not a lot. Whilst I would like to tell you that I don’t have time because I spend every waking hour writing, I cannot - it would be a lie. The fact is I no longer watch TV because there is never anything I want to watch on. I want to love every new British drama – I wanted to love Bonekickers last night, OK the trailer looked pish but I was there rooting for it. Again I was left disappointed – for all I know it got really good in the last half hour, I don’t know, I turned it off.

Ratings for British TV have been dropping for the last decade. Experts say that this is because we have other alternatives, multi channels and the Internet. All of this may be true in part but the bigger reality is that people are deserting them because British TV is not very good. The success of soaps over the years shows not that the British public love soap but that they love drama. The networks have tried to satiate this need by just giving us more episodes of what we already have to the point that schedules are now packed with soap operas.

There is good drama on TV, occasionally it’s British, mostly it’s not. House, The West Wing, Battlestar Gallactica, Mad Men, the Sopranos, CSI – the list goes on, all brilliant, all American. It didn’t always used to be like this. I spent the 80s and 90s deriding the awfulness of American television, was it as bad as I thought it was – probably not, was it as good as it is now - defiantly not. What was the main factor in the improvement of American television, I am not sure I know, but certainly a big factor was HBO. HBO raised the bar. They produced great quality, intelligent, brilliantly written drama. Audiences loved it and the quality of the programmes, along with the usual 22 week run, meant that large extra incomes could be generated by DVD sales. The networks saw what was happening and upped their game – they didn’t have a choice.

Where is the British HBO to raise the bar. The answer should be where it has always been, the BBC. The licence fee is designed so that the organisation does not have to chase commercial revenue, it does not have to worry about advertisers and so is placed to take a few risks. Why doesn’t it? If you were to look at the BBC schedules they are not dissimilar to the commercial channels – safe, generic, reality based, lowest common denominator crap. You can see the fear inherent in the decision making process just by looking at the Radio Times. It doesn’t have to be this way it really doesn’t.

I hope that these past few years have been the low point in British TV. My fear is that they are not.