Quality | 2009.12.22
Christmas TV schedules a dumping ground for expensive drama
Anyone who has been in a coma or a Eurostar tunnel for the last couple of years will emerge to find the ITV schedules looking familiar. High-profile dramas fill the peak-time slots: John Hurt\'s return to his award-winning role as the gay pioneer Quentin Crisp in An Englishman in New York is screened next Monday, with the erotic thriller Sleep With Me following on New Year\'s Eve.
But this blizzard of quality fiction is not quite what it seems. Sleep With Me, a story of bisexual infidelity based on Joanna Briscoe\'s novel, was completed in the summer of 2008 and has been waiting for transmission since then, while An Englishman in New York, a sequel to the 1975 film The Naked Civil Servant, was first expected to be screened at least a year ago.
Nor is transmission over the holiday season necessarily the accolade it immediately seems. ITV traditionally concedes the late December schedules to the BBC because advertisers are expected to have spent the bulk of their budgets in the run-up to the festivities. And so, in commercial TV terms, these dramas are being dumped like corpses in the middle of the night.
The reason for these late showings is partly financial: drama is expensive and, under television accounting practices, a project\'s full costs are not usually entered on the debit ledger until the piece is screened.
An artistic shift, though, is the main reason for these shows remaining on the shelf. With budgets cut by the advertising recession and multi-channel competition, ITV1 has redefined itself as a popular entertainment network, with peak time filled for long stretches of the year by Simon Cowell\'s The X Factor and Britain\'s Got Talent or the jungle slug-munching of I\'m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!
The audience and advertisers drawn by these shows are presumed – perhaps correctly – not to be interested in biopics about dead gay icons or adaptations of literary novels. But even populist drama has suffered: Heartbeat and The Royal have been cancelled and the output of the ITV drama studios in Leeds and Manchester severely reduced.
One of the original justifications for this change of emphasis was that reality TV is cheaper than drama. Given the level of Simon Cowell\'s income from his shows – and the fees demanded by Celebrity contestants such as Katie Price – this rationale is now questionable, but it remains true that wannabe contests are more easily dramatic than dramas.
Whereas a play or serial has to establish its narrative and characters, the structure and storyline of The X Factor or Britain\'s Got Talent are immediately graspable. Russell T Davies, creator of the renewed Doctor Who, said provocatively this year that no writer had managed to develop a drama as compelling as the rise of Susan Boyle on Britain\'s Got Talent.
And actors have been doubly struck by the fashion for amateur celebrities. The nightly spectacle of contestants apparently being themselves – and Susan Boyle was alarmingly unguarded on air – seems to have made some viewers suspicious of the whole idea of pretence. It\'s no coincidence that the biggest new fictional success in TV, the BBC1 family sitcom Outnumbered, features juvenile performances that appear to involve no acting at all and resemble the results of putting hidden cameras in children\'s bedrooms.
The problem for television as it enters the second decade of the 21st century is that the medium seems to be suffering from format freeze. In normal circumstances, it would be expected that an alternative novelty would have come along by now, and that it hasn\'t suggests that successive crises over funding and content have sapped creative energy.
In fact, one form of programming new to Britain – although long common in the US – will debut here in 2010: election leadership debates. The American experiences suggests that the rival camps will make the structure so restrictive that these broadcasts are unlikely to reach a large audience. Although candidate debates are a version of reality TV, most viewers of that genre are unlikely to tune in unless the putative premiers agreed to live together in a mock-up of Downing Street for a week.
But broadcasters, who have been committed to this idea for decades, are certain to give debates the kind of peak-time slots in which plays and serials have traditionally sat. Good drama depends on conflict and the genre itself now faces one: each new format to which the medium turns is a form of drama that is cheaper and easier than fiction.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2[...]mas-tv-schedules-drama-reality
