British v American TV
 

In the sixties we had programmes such as Bonanza - we all used to sit around the telly each week watching 'much loved characters' like Little Joe and Hoss. Wo betide if an old friend, or even worse, an old girlfriend turned up because they had a shorter life expectancy than a red shirt in Star Trek. Basically it was a load of poo. Meanwhile, Brit telly was showing 'The Avengers' at its best a psychedelic trip with a variety of beautiful women.

Also during the sixties we had fantastic one-off dramas like Cathy Come Home which highlighted the plight of the homeless

In the Seventies we had endless American cop shows like Kojak, Columbo, Banacek and so on - old men playing younger men and always winning. We had The Sweeney, dramas like The Guardians about a future police state and Survivors - people surviving in a post apocalyptic world. We also had brilliant comedies such as Marty Feldman, The Goodies and Monty Python.

Now in the eighties I pretty much stopped watching telly - but was always of the opinion that British TV was far superior to American TV. And then I became a long distance lorry driver. And because I saw adverts for the West Wing every where I bought myself a boxed set and was blown away - the best telly I've ever seen, and now i'm hooked on Flash Forward.

American series seem to be 24 programmes a year for as long as they can keep it going - contrast that to the return of Survivors last year - six episodes and no mention of it since.

And as for comedy, I know Friends was not everyones cup of tea but I enjoyed it, Frasier was sublime, Cheers was brilliant.


So my point is that American TV is vastly superior to UK telly, and it's not just about money - it's their commitment to an ideal - and we just don't seem to have that commitment anymore to making excellent telly - so when I am bored of surfing the internet I'll turn on sky and flick through 900 channels of crap, hoping that there'll be some gem in there.

American TV
 

I almost never watch US TV shows now. As you point out, Dave, they all now tend to be 24 episodes per series and have a continuous story (Heroes, Lost, etc). 24 episodes that six months. OK there are opportunites to keep up with each episode (video tape, Sky+ and online) but it is still a big committment. I remember the first episode of Heroes and the short documentary after each episode. My heart sank when the first thing the narrator said in the documentay was that this was the first episode of 24. I ended up watching the whole series, but I must admit I was looking forward to seeing New York destroyed, because I was getting bored with the show. I watched the first episode of the second series, then gave up.

UK television was run by a bunch of left-leaning intellectuals from the early 1950's up until the late 1980's. As a result we had television to die for - all demonstrated in the viewing schedule for a typical Tuesday night - Play For Today on BBC1 and The Sweeney on ITV. Best of both worlds.

In the late 80's John Birt took over at the BBC and ITV ran afoul of Thatcher with the documentary Death on the Rock. Birt turned the BBC into a money-making exercise for middle-management suits and cut back on quality programming to do so. Thatcher broke ITV regional companies like Thames and sold them off to her media cronies who then followed the Birt model. It's been downhill all the way ever since. We've gone from having the best TV in the world to having shit onscreen every night.

I can't really comment on American TV as I don't watch much, but it does seem to demonstrate an extraordinary range and level of investment.

Documentaries
 

I mostly watch documentaries now and I think it is an area that the BBC and the commercial companies do well.
I don't watch ITV much as it seems to be all soaps. I use this term broadly to mean any show which has a continuing story and the lives of the characters are covered more than the plot. Take The Bill, a cop show, but I think that the crime story takes a back seat to the private lives of the characters. Same applies to Casualty. On the other hand I could be talking shite as I've never watched a full episode of these shows, but that is the impression that I get from what I have seen.

You're not missing much - you'd think these programmes were written by children trying to guess how adults behave. The amazing thing is that these programmes still display an extraordinary technical skill - the sets and photography and editing are often superb. But the writing and acting seems to have regressed - everything is handled hysterically and painted in broad strokes. There's no room for subtlety or moral ambiguity. A case in pont was the recent 'Execution of Gary Glitter'. That beggared belief.

I've given up - I just collect vintage shows from Network, or torrent sites, or repeats on BBC4. Now that Simon Gray and Jack Rosenthal and John Mortimer and so on are dead, their work is slowly emerging from the archives and it puts our current generation of dramatists to shame.

I watched the first series of Skins (mostly for the nudity if I'm being honest) and got the same impression.

In every era, including today, there are always excellent shows that people will remember, there are a fair number of good shows but given the time that needs to be filled there also was & still is an awful lot of rubbish. Our brains are very good at filtering out that rubbish so our memories of TV in bygone eras are always better than we felt at the time. There is a whole nostalga industry based on this premise.

You're right, Jawbone, but I think excellent shows were easier to make in the old days, like Bonanza, or whatever. The spectrum of genres were wide open back then, tv was really still in it's infancy. By now, a lot of the premises have been run into the ground. I really don't find much on regular tv these days, except for stations like Discovery, or the History Channel, or TLC, or PBS, who still play many excellent programs like Masterpiece Theatre. (Or Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network:rolleyes:). But the premium channels like HBO are really the groundbreakers nowadays. A series like The Sopranos is hard to top these days. Or Rome, or Six Feet Under, or Curb Your Enthusiasm, or political talk shows like Real Time with Bill Maher. I think all the premium channels are going nuts to find another series like the Sopranos, that one will be hard to beat.

I suppose that works 2 ways - if you enjoy it 24 programmes are not enough, if you hate it then 2 progs are too many.

Agree with you there - Horizon, Man Alive and so on were compulsory viewing. However, so many documentaries are spoiled for me because of the way in which they are filmed, for heaven's sake, just sit an expert down and let him talk to me, I'm reasonably intelligent and can follow an argument. And stop flying celebs out to far flung corners of the world - just because their on the telly does not mean I want to hear their views on global warming, or lions, or poverty in Natal