Post by Teddy Bear on Apr 29, 2013 19:50:02 GMT
This article shows the success of ITV with its various dramas, putting the BBC into the shade. Considering that the man responsible for this BBC output, Danny Cohen was recently promoted,
BBC One boss who claims 'too many shows are about middle-classes' wins one of the Corporation's top jobs as director of television on a salary of £327,000
It shows that the BBC rewards mediocrity, and as long as they don't have to make it on their own in the real world, nothing is likely to change
BBC One boss who claims 'too many shows are about middle-classes' wins one of the Corporation's top jobs as director of television on a salary of £327,000
It shows that the BBC rewards mediocrity, and as long as they don't have to make it on their own in the real world, nothing is likely to change
A real TV drama: After the success of Downton Abbey and hit show Broadchurch, CHRISTOPHER STEVENS explains how ITV is killing the BBC
By Christopher Stevens
Something odd is happening to Sundays. Television fans can tune in to classic serial drama, starring Britain’s best actors in stories crafted to appeal to all age-groups — the very definition of traditional family viewing. But not on the BBC.
Broadchurch, of course, has been the TV event of the year so far. Such superlative, multi-layered drama is far from unique in recent ITV schedules. Downton Abbey, Mr Selfridge and now Endeavour, the Inspector Morse prequel series, have given us witty writing, intriguing characters and absorbing period detail, without resorting to the shock tactics or blatant sex that can turn off mainstream audiences.
Foyle’s War, starring the masterly Michael Kitchen, returned last month with a pitch-perfect evocation of Britain at the height of post-war austerity.
And all of them are staples of the ITV Sunday evening schedule — a slot not long ago dominated exclusively by the BBC.
It isn’t simply that the Beeb made a serious error of judgment with The Village, the current six-part, peak-time Sunday drama that lost half-a-million viewers between episodes two and three and is now scraping an audience of six million — barely better than Countryfile.
This weekend, BBC1 controller Danny Cohen, 39, recently promoted to be the Corporation’s director of television, should have had the courage to admit the mistake and move this drearily depressing drama to a later slot.
It would have left a gaping hole in the schedules, but it could have been admirably filled with Charles Moore’s compelling documentary about the young Margaret Thatcher, drawing on her unpublished letters, which went out on BBC2 on Saturday night instead.
But the real, long-term crisis doesn’t lie with The Village’s saga of shellshock, evangelism and women’s rights in World War I: it’s more fundamental than that. The BBC has, over the course of several years, let slip its grip on family drama and handed the advantage to its ITV rivals.
It’s a shift in the balance of power that will have seismic consequences. If Cohen and his colleagues cannot wrest back the BBC’s former reputation for gripping, can’t-wait-until-next-Sunday-night drama, half the justification for the licence fee is in jeopardy.
For decades, ITV was synonymous with raucous game shows, coarse comedy and rattling good soaps. In more snobbish households, commercial TV — all those mindless adverts! — was always seen as a bit common.
Sitcoms on ITV were more end-of-the-pier. It was impossible to imagine clever political comedies such Yes Minister on the commercial channel.
These days, it’s very different. It’s no longer a surprise to hear that tonight’s eagerly-awaited double bill of new comedies — Vicious and The Job Lot — is making its debut on ITV rather than the BBC.
The first of these has a cast any broadcaster would die for. Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi, revered thesps both, camping it up from their boots to their bow ties. And as if that wasn’t marvellous enough, it also stars sitcom treasure Frances de la Tour, beloved as Miss Jones in Rising Damp.
Then, at 9.30pm, there’s The Job Lot — a send-up of docu-soaps, set in a job centre where the mission statement is: ‘We turn the unemployed into the fun-employed.’ It’s like The Office on the dole.
The BBC has always excelled in two areas: wildlife documentaries (in which it is still peerless) and classic dramas. This was the broadcaster that had produced world-beating literary adaptations — the 26-part Trollope extravaganza The Pallisers in 1974, for example, when half the country fell in love with Susan Hampshire as Lady Glencora.
Twenty years later there was Pride And Prejudice, the 1995 wet-shirt-and-britches version, which caused so many fluttering hearts that Radio Times printed a souvenir poster of Colin Firth as Mr Darcy emerging from the lake wearing a damp white shirt.
But it wasn’t just 19th- century romance. The BBC also excelled at darker fiction, and it had almost from the outset. In 1953, The Quatermass Experiment caused a nightmarish frisson among Britain’s tiny viewing population.
Families who had bought their first TV sets a couple of months earlier to watch the Coronation, now saw, in their own living rooms, a slice of chilling science fiction. Intelligent and challenging, Quatermass demonstrated that television was much more than an ‘idiot box’.
And television could bring recent history to life, too. In a nation where anyone over 35 had lived through World War II, the thrilling PoW drama Colditz was unmissable ‘event TV’ in 1974. Weekly audiences of 19 million watched Edward Hardwicke, Robert Wagner and David McCallum plotting their way to freedom from a German fortress prison.
All those shows were BBC productions. Great drama was expected of the Beeb — and it delivered. But that expectation and ambition has petered out.
There are still flashes of brilliance, with Call The Midwife, for example. But the Corporation’s incompetence was exemplified this year in the programming of a five-part police series, also set in the late Fifties.
WPC-56 was warm and entertaining drama, infused with nostalgia. It featured a smashing star role for newcomer Gina Dawson as the only female copper among the boys in blue at a Birmingham police station.
But it was thrown away in a rush on BBC1 Daytime, on five consecutive afternoons at 2.15pm. Thanks to a stand-off between commissioning editors who control different sectors of the TV schedules, WPC-56 was never allowed near the Sunday evening slot — depriving many of us of a TV gem.
And it was another power struggle in the Corporation’s corridors that first gave ITV its chance to run away with the ratings. In 2007, BBC1 controller Peter Fincham was sacked over a flippant remark he made about the Queen during a press conference.
Talking to journalists about a royal documentary, he implied — quite wrongly — that the cameras had captured a palace tantrum as the Queen sat for a portrait by American photographer Annie Leibovitz. ‘Definitely a memorable bit is Leibovitz getting it wrong and the Queen losing it a bit and walking out in a huff,’ he claimed.
That bit of spin cost Fincham his job, but within six months he had been appointed ITV’s director of television. He immediately announced that the broadcaster was going to focus on family drama — with a ‘five-year plan’ to transform ITV’s image by producing brilliant, glossy serials.
He raised eyebrows when he axed stodgy fare such as The Bill, a police station soap, in 2010. He garnered headlines when leading Shakespearean actors such as Ian McKellan and Timothy West started appearing in Corrie.
But he really got the BBC’s attention when he secured a ratings smash with an Edwardian country house drama starring Dame Maggie Smith and Hugh Bonneville: Downton Abbey. The storylines echoed an ITV serial of the Seventies, Upstairs Downstairs, and explored the same tensions between the worlds above and below stairs.
Stung by Downton’s success, the BBC reinvented the original — but failed to capture the blend of fun, pathos, melodrama and wit that makes ITV’s long-running serial lighter than air. Downton soared, and Upstairs sank.
That success has given ITV the confidence to commission many more dramas, so that superlative family drama has become the norm on ITV.
Much of the success is due to Fincham’s vision, summed up in the guidelines set out for aspiring ITV screenwriters: ‘No subject is off-limits, but we will always look for some element of mainstream appeal.
‘An ITV drama is never cynical and is always entertaining, and even in the darkest stories we seek the hope of redemption. We don’t do black comedy or satire, and we can’t be bleak.’
If the BBC worked to similar, rigorously upheld standards, The Village and much more of its output might be a great deal better.
The rules are simple enough: ‘We can’t be bleak... never cynical... always entertaining.’
That’s it: a blueprint for family viewing.
By Christopher Stevens
Something odd is happening to Sundays. Television fans can tune in to classic serial drama, starring Britain’s best actors in stories crafted to appeal to all age-groups — the very definition of traditional family viewing. But not on the BBC.
Broadchurch, of course, has been the TV event of the year so far. Such superlative, multi-layered drama is far from unique in recent ITV schedules. Downton Abbey, Mr Selfridge and now Endeavour, the Inspector Morse prequel series, have given us witty writing, intriguing characters and absorbing period detail, without resorting to the shock tactics or blatant sex that can turn off mainstream audiences.
Foyle’s War, starring the masterly Michael Kitchen, returned last month with a pitch-perfect evocation of Britain at the height of post-war austerity.
And all of them are staples of the ITV Sunday evening schedule — a slot not long ago dominated exclusively by the BBC.
It isn’t simply that the Beeb made a serious error of judgment with The Village, the current six-part, peak-time Sunday drama that lost half-a-million viewers between episodes two and three and is now scraping an audience of six million — barely better than Countryfile.
This weekend, BBC1 controller Danny Cohen, 39, recently promoted to be the Corporation’s director of television, should have had the courage to admit the mistake and move this drearily depressing drama to a later slot.
It would have left a gaping hole in the schedules, but it could have been admirably filled with Charles Moore’s compelling documentary about the young Margaret Thatcher, drawing on her unpublished letters, which went out on BBC2 on Saturday night instead.
But the real, long-term crisis doesn’t lie with The Village’s saga of shellshock, evangelism and women’s rights in World War I: it’s more fundamental than that. The BBC has, over the course of several years, let slip its grip on family drama and handed the advantage to its ITV rivals.
It’s a shift in the balance of power that will have seismic consequences. If Cohen and his colleagues cannot wrest back the BBC’s former reputation for gripping, can’t-wait-until-next-Sunday-night drama, half the justification for the licence fee is in jeopardy.
For decades, ITV was synonymous with raucous game shows, coarse comedy and rattling good soaps. In more snobbish households, commercial TV — all those mindless adverts! — was always seen as a bit common.
Sitcoms on ITV were more end-of-the-pier. It was impossible to imagine clever political comedies such Yes Minister on the commercial channel.
These days, it’s very different. It’s no longer a surprise to hear that tonight’s eagerly-awaited double bill of new comedies — Vicious and The Job Lot — is making its debut on ITV rather than the BBC.
The first of these has a cast any broadcaster would die for. Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi, revered thesps both, camping it up from their boots to their bow ties. And as if that wasn’t marvellous enough, it also stars sitcom treasure Frances de la Tour, beloved as Miss Jones in Rising Damp.
Then, at 9.30pm, there’s The Job Lot — a send-up of docu-soaps, set in a job centre where the mission statement is: ‘We turn the unemployed into the fun-employed.’ It’s like The Office on the dole.
The BBC has always excelled in two areas: wildlife documentaries (in which it is still peerless) and classic dramas. This was the broadcaster that had produced world-beating literary adaptations — the 26-part Trollope extravaganza The Pallisers in 1974, for example, when half the country fell in love with Susan Hampshire as Lady Glencora.
Twenty years later there was Pride And Prejudice, the 1995 wet-shirt-and-britches version, which caused so many fluttering hearts that Radio Times printed a souvenir poster of Colin Firth as Mr Darcy emerging from the lake wearing a damp white shirt.
But it wasn’t just 19th- century romance. The BBC also excelled at darker fiction, and it had almost from the outset. In 1953, The Quatermass Experiment caused a nightmarish frisson among Britain’s tiny viewing population.
Families who had bought their first TV sets a couple of months earlier to watch the Coronation, now saw, in their own living rooms, a slice of chilling science fiction. Intelligent and challenging, Quatermass demonstrated that television was much more than an ‘idiot box’.
And television could bring recent history to life, too. In a nation where anyone over 35 had lived through World War II, the thrilling PoW drama Colditz was unmissable ‘event TV’ in 1974. Weekly audiences of 19 million watched Edward Hardwicke, Robert Wagner and David McCallum plotting their way to freedom from a German fortress prison.
All those shows were BBC productions. Great drama was expected of the Beeb — and it delivered. But that expectation and ambition has petered out.
There are still flashes of brilliance, with Call The Midwife, for example. But the Corporation’s incompetence was exemplified this year in the programming of a five-part police series, also set in the late Fifties.
WPC-56 was warm and entertaining drama, infused with nostalgia. It featured a smashing star role for newcomer Gina Dawson as the only female copper among the boys in blue at a Birmingham police station.
But it was thrown away in a rush on BBC1 Daytime, on five consecutive afternoons at 2.15pm. Thanks to a stand-off between commissioning editors who control different sectors of the TV schedules, WPC-56 was never allowed near the Sunday evening slot — depriving many of us of a TV gem.
And it was another power struggle in the Corporation’s corridors that first gave ITV its chance to run away with the ratings. In 2007, BBC1 controller Peter Fincham was sacked over a flippant remark he made about the Queen during a press conference.
Talking to journalists about a royal documentary, he implied — quite wrongly — that the cameras had captured a palace tantrum as the Queen sat for a portrait by American photographer Annie Leibovitz. ‘Definitely a memorable bit is Leibovitz getting it wrong and the Queen losing it a bit and walking out in a huff,’ he claimed.
That bit of spin cost Fincham his job, but within six months he had been appointed ITV’s director of television. He immediately announced that the broadcaster was going to focus on family drama — with a ‘five-year plan’ to transform ITV’s image by producing brilliant, glossy serials.
He raised eyebrows when he axed stodgy fare such as The Bill, a police station soap, in 2010. He garnered headlines when leading Shakespearean actors such as Ian McKellan and Timothy West started appearing in Corrie.
But he really got the BBC’s attention when he secured a ratings smash with an Edwardian country house drama starring Dame Maggie Smith and Hugh Bonneville: Downton Abbey. The storylines echoed an ITV serial of the Seventies, Upstairs Downstairs, and explored the same tensions between the worlds above and below stairs.
Stung by Downton’s success, the BBC reinvented the original — but failed to capture the blend of fun, pathos, melodrama and wit that makes ITV’s long-running serial lighter than air. Downton soared, and Upstairs sank.
That success has given ITV the confidence to commission many more dramas, so that superlative family drama has become the norm on ITV.
Much of the success is due to Fincham’s vision, summed up in the guidelines set out for aspiring ITV screenwriters: ‘No subject is off-limits, but we will always look for some element of mainstream appeal.
‘An ITV drama is never cynical and is always entertaining, and even in the darkest stories we seek the hope of redemption. We don’t do black comedy or satire, and we can’t be bleak.’
If the BBC worked to similar, rigorously upheld standards, The Village and much more of its output might be a great deal better.
The rules are simple enough: ‘We can’t be bleak... never cynical... always entertaining.’
That’s it: a blueprint for family viewing.