Making Room

Having already aired its first season on FX late last year, Dexter (Wednesdays, ITV) will be old news to a lot of satellite and cable viewers, but the show's debut on ITV last night is still something to be celebrated. With this and the upcoming Pushing Daisies, ITV are showing a new willingness to put high profile American shows on in a decent time-slot – something that can only be good news for British TV audiences.

Regardless of what a few (deluded) patriots might say, the difference in quality between British and American drama series is huge, and has been for a long time. In holding with misguided ideals and regulations, however, the BBC and ITV have long refused to treat American series with the reverence they deserve, instead banishing them to worthless time-slots, diminishing their potential audiences while mediocre or plain bad British series occupied prime-time instead.

The problem actually mirrors an argument going on in football at the moment. England’s failure to qualify for Euro 2008 stirred up debate about whether having so many foreign players in our domestic league has badly affected the standard of our homegrown players, and opinion on the matter is divided. Some people believe that by having so many foreigners in the league our homegrown players are not given the opportunity they require to excel. Others believe that having some of the world’s greatest players to play with and against helps to improve the standard of our players, and that a limit – a way to protect British players’ places regardless of talent or form – would only encourage mediocrity and complacency. Personally I believe in the latter, and that our two leading television channels exemplify this perfectly. By refusing to play host to a higher standard of television, BBC1 and ITV have mired themselves in a pool of mediocrity it will be hard to get out of without inviting in a better influence.

Despite the differences in budget and culture that some use to defend British shows against the superiority of American ones, it is ridiculous to ignore as we do – as creators, distributors and as an audience – all the things we could learn from the best television the world has to offer. It is no coincidence after all that The Office – our country’s finest televisual achievement of recent times – came from a man so heavily influenced by American shows. Television is a constantly evolving medium and culturally segregating yourself from its pinnacle achievements can only do more harm than good. And yes, most worthy American shows do find their way over here on one channel or another, but it’s obviously a shame they are not displayed more prominently to a mainstream audience. Can you imagine great foreign novels only being offered in specialist libraries and bookshops? The idea is ludicrous. Their absence would only deny our audience a great source of pleasure and our artists a great source of inspiration. There would be no benefit. Surely that logic should be applied to television, and our greatest institutions should feel obliged to include worthy foreign works as essential parts of the curriculum.

Obviously I’m not saying ITV should be airing American Idol instead of The X Factor (even though it is better) or that the BBC should be airing So You Think You Can Dance? instead of Strictly Come Dancing, but the thought that the BBC can’t find ten hours of prime-time a year in which to show The Wire is shocking when you consider that all they do seem to air are musical-based elimination game shows, hospital dramas and Eastenders. How is there not room (in the budget and in the schedule) for obviously better television? It's not good enough that everything truly good be labelled "cult" and shifted to a lesser channel on which many people won't see it. If we want to make better television, we need to let people understand what it is first.

It’s my hope now that ITV’s newfound boldness with their schedule means they have realised this error and decided to correct it. It’s a risk ratings-wise, certainly, but both ITV and the BBC are in need of a good shake-up and the change would pay off in the long run. Hopefully ITV will have the patience and the foresight to see that possibility. In the short-term, one can only hope that an audience so long deprived of colour aren’t blinded by the lights.