Is TV Drama the New Novel?

Riffing on a remark made by Jane Tranter, the BBC’s head of fiction, at a recent Royal Television Society event, The Guardian’s Leigh Holmwood asked the very interesting question:

Should TV drama be taken as seriously as other forms of more ‘high art’? And has it really supplanted the novel as the “narrative of our times”?

Even more intriguing than the question were some of the answers Holmwood received such as this one:

I’m not convinced. Television is culturally extremely important but to say the TV drama has supplanted the novel as the “narrative of our times” is perhaps a step too far. The novel is still incredibly important – book sales are high and the novel has great influence over other art forms, in a way that television does not.

At first blush this sounds right, but even in the UK, book sales are not as high as all that. And as much as they would like to deny it, the type of books that are actually selling are of no greater intellectual weight than what passes over bookseller counters in the States: James Patterson potboilers, bodice-rippers and party-political screeds, mostly. A far more telling answer is one of the most recent on The Guardian page:

Last time I had a long flight, I didn’t take along a book. I took series one of The West Wing to watch on an iPod. Drama – as proven by The Sopranos, The Wire, and even pulp TV ‘airport’ fiction such as Lost and 24, can be every bit as engaging as a good book, and – thanks to ongoing narratives – can last a lifetime (or seven seasons…)

What say you?

British Telly’s Online Shangri-La

Our darling Beeb has taken a boot to the pants for years on both sides of the Atlantic. While often these trips to the woodshed have been deserved, the BBC has done a fair amount of good in the world that gets overlooked quite a bit.

In a move that should go a long way toward garnering that institution greater respect online,  the BBC has set out to create a Web-based repository for its more than 80 years of programming. As this piece from The Guardian’s Web site explains:

“…the project will create a web page for every episode of every single programme ever broadcast on the BBC, and be the basis of a future plan to introduce a searchable vault of archived shows.”

The possibilities here are endless. And on behalf of myself and my fellow non-British TV fans, I only hope that this “vault” is accessible by everyone.

In recent years the Beeb’s rival, ITV, has done an impressive job of unearthing classic shows for viewing online, only to lock out we foreign types. In May, for example, ITV’s Web site posted a lost episode of its classic soap opera Crossroads. You can read about that rare find here, but heaven help you if you actually want to watch it if you’re living outside the UK.

There are literally dozens of wonderful ITV programs waiting to be watched online here, safely locked away from all but British eyes. Rising Damp, Cold Feet, Chancer, Cracker…it’s pretty maddening, actually.

And while an argument can be made that these companies can hardly pop for unlimited bandwidth, would it be so difficult for ITV, and the BBC for that matter, to allow foreign users to pay a nominal sum to see these programs online? While Rising Damp and Cracker are readily available in American DVD editions, other series such as the Kevin Whately/Amanda Burton doctor drama Peak Practice are not.

Let us hope that, in the name of good will and celebration of this wonderful art form, the BBC will throw open the doors of this groundbreaking archive for the enjoyment of people the world over.