Afternoon:
12°c
The Baftas have been and gone, and the ugly masks have been put on the mantelpieces. On the face of it there were few surprises; true, Cranford was pipped for Best Drama Serial by the modish Britz, but the valetudinarian Eileen Atkins still picked up an award for her portrayal of Mrs Gaskell's Miss Jenkyns. Gavin and Stacey was lavishly praised, not, I think, because it's such mould-breaking comedy but, on the contrary, because it's a return to the timeless verities: the British love whimsy above all else.
However, planted in deeper among the winners was Molly Dineen's fine documentary The Lie of the Land, which fearlessly set out to expose the irrationalities that graze the devastated fields of British agriculture. So, there you have it: at the high end, an old actress being fêted for her role in a dramatisation of a novel that mourned the passing away of the bucolic myth; and elsewhere a documentary that completely explodes it.
For me these are the twin peaks of contemporary British television. Because these are the things that we cultivate superbly: intelligent but accessible classic serials and properly authored documentaries. One was for the BBC, the other for Channel 4, both broadcasters with a public service remit. I have no objection to the other channels screening as many reality shows - or as many tedious adverts - as they want: that's a free society. But the great problem for the public service networks, in an age when there are any number of ways to view a programme, is to somehow stamp their identity on their channels.
In my view, critics unfairly attack the BBC for its preoccupation with rolling news and its ever-expanding internet and digital platforms; if we require the Corporation to be a profit centre, we cannot expect it to create an "ident" any other way. Not all Cranfords are hits. If the taxpayer wants to subsidise loss-leading drama and quality documentary, then equally that's fine by me - given the alternative is still more balkanisation, and more crappy reality shows.
Perhaps the oddest moment in the Baftas was when the film-maker Paul Watson, accepting a Special Award for his controversial documentary about the last days of a man dying from Alzheimer's, inveighed against these "reality" shows, saying they were part of the "bullying culture" inherent in the industry. He went on, "British television is in serious bad times."
I don't know about bullying but the serious bad times are certainly here, and mostly because the public service broadcasters have to cleave to a commercial model, while the programmemakers are in thrall to the commissioning power of the networks. But the TV folks' Academy can't have both awards sponsored by Sky - admen call them "naming rights" - and expect Auntie, the biggest name of them all, to remain primly buttoned up in her country bonnet.
