![]() But that expectation and ambition has petered out. Great drama was expected of the Beeb - and it delivered. Weekly audiences of 19 million watched Edward Hardwicke, Robert Wagner and David McCallum plotting their way to freedom from a German fortress prison.Īll those shows were BBC productions. In a nation where anyone over 35 had lived through World War II, the thrilling PoW drama Colditz was unmissable ‘event TV’ in 1974. Intelligent and challenging, Quatermass demonstrated that television was much more than an ‘idiot box’.Īnd television could bring recent history to life, too. If BBC1 controller Danny Cohen (pictured) 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 jeopardyįamilies 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. In 1953, The Quatermass Experiment caused a nightmarish frisson among Britain’s tiny viewing population. ![]() The BBC also excelled at darker fiction, and it had almost from the outset. ![]() 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.īut it wasn’t just 19th- century romance. 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. The BBC has always excelled in two areas: wildlife documentaries (in which it is still peerless) and classic dramas. 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. And as if that wasn’t marvellous enough, it also stars sitcom treasure Frances de la Tour, beloved as Miss Jones in Rising Damp. Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi, revered thesps both, camping it up from their boots to their bow ties. The first of these has a cast any broadcaster would die for. 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. It was impossible to imagine clever political comedies such Yes Minister on the commercial channel. ![]() Sitcoms on ITV were more end-of-the-pier. In more snobbish households, commercial TV - all those mindless adverts! - was always seen as a bit common. Foyle's War, starring the masterly Michael Kitchen, returned last month with a pitch-perfect evocation of Britain at the height of post-war austerityįor decades, ITV was synonymous with raucous game shows, coarse comedy and rattling good soaps. ![]()
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