OF ALL TIME (or 30 YEARS)

This morning, The Guardian unveiled its “50 greatest dramas ever made” for television. Cue apoplexy in the Gilbert household, predictably enough. The apoplexy was not exactly ameliorated by the on-line version of this exercise, which, unlike the newsprint original, was headed “The Guardian’s top 50 dramas of all time” [my itals]. Needless to say there was no “all time” about it. Television was first transmitted in Britain in 1936 but there was precious little on this list made before 1980. Here it is in full:


Michael Bryant, Judi Dench, Margery Mason and Maurice Denham in John Hopkins' Talking to a Stranger, which George Melly called "the first authentic masterpiece written for television"

1: The Sopranos
2: Brideshead Revisited
3: Our Friends in the North
4: Mad Men
5: A Very Peculiar Practice
6: Talking Heads
7: The Singing Detective
8: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
9: State of Play
10: Boys from the Blackstuff
11: The West Wing
12: Twin Peaks
13: Queer as Folk
14: The Wire
15: Six Feet Under
16: How Do You Want Me?
17: Smiley’s People
18: House of Cards
19: Prime Suspect
20: Bodies
21: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
22: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
23: Cracker
24: Pennies from Heaven
25: Battlestar Galactica
26: Coronation Street
27: The Jewel in the Crown
28: The Monocled Mutineer
29: Clocking Off
30: Inspector Morse
31: This Life
32: Band of Brothers
33: Hill Street Blues
34: The Prisoner
35: St Elsewhere
36: The L Word
37: The Shield
38: Brookside
39: 24
40: The Twilight Zone
41: Pride and Prejudice (1995)
42: Red Riding
43: Oz
44: The Street
45: The X Files
46: Bleak House
47: The Sweeney
48: EastEnders
49: Shameless
50: Grange Hill

There are some productions that are grossly – even grotesquely – flattered by this rating: A Very Peculiar Practice, House of Cards, This Life, 24, Pride and Prejudice, The Sweeney, Grange Hill. At least they omitted Doctor Who. There are several that I happily confess I am not qualified to judge: How Do You Want Me?, Bodies, The Shield, The L Word, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, the last two of which make me distinctly dubious even without the benefit of exposure. I don’t understand a rating for St Elsewhere but not for ER and, though they’re obviously hobbled by falling into the ill-favoured category of comedy-drama, I would put Desperate Housewives and even Ugly Betty ahead of some of these desperately serious American shows. I have no beef with The Wire but it would never have achieved half of what it did achieve if Hill Street Blues hadn’t done it (rather better) nearly thirty years earlier.


David Rudkin's marvellous one-off drama Penda's Fen which Alan Clarke directed for BBC Birmingham (in colour, despite the still)

Now, of course, the whole modern “list” movement is a load of what the Irish call bollix. It’s comprehensively meaningless to start tabulating like against not-like in some cockamamie attempt to measure their respective value. Anyway, as soon as anyone puts any two items in a one-two order, 20 percent of commentators will say “that’s fine”, 20 percent will say “the other way around” and the other 60 percent will say “oh no, two other things entirely”. So I say: “don’t do it, Deirdre”.

But it’s done. So okay, let’s play. Let’s assume that this is not a totally idle exercise. In that case, first of all we have to excoriate the exclusion of one-off drama from the list. It’s easy to see why this was decided. One-off teledrama is effectively dead. Nobody commissions it any more and so nobody is writing it. But in the golden age of television drama, which extends roughly from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, dozens of fine writers were creating original one-off plays for both the BBC (The Wednesday Play, Theatre 625, Play for Today) and ITV (Armchair Theatre, Plays for Britain) and young, ambitious directors were realising those scripts both on location and (a forgotten drama resource, these days) in the studio.

The fabulous and important thing to note about these one-off scripts is that they weren’t genre pieces nor were they dramatizations of pre-existing fiction or of the lives of the dead, lightly or (more usually) heavily fictionalized. This is almost entirely what passes for teledrama today.

It seems extraordinary that the assembled Guardian critics can knock out an "all-time great" list of teledrama that lacks any work by David Mercer, Ken Loach, Harold Pinter, Julia Jones, John Hopkins, Alan Clarke, Mike Newell, Nell Dunn, David Rudkin, Nemone Lethbridge, Jack Rosenthal, Charles Wood, Trevor Griffiths, Jim Allen, Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh, Moira Armstrong, Alun Owen, Philip Saville, Rhys Adrian, Mike Apted, Howard Schuman, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Jeremy Sandford, Troy Kennedy Martin, John McGrath, Roy Battersby, Arthur Hopcraft, Rudolph Cartier, John Bowen or James Cellan Jones, to name a very few. And don't get me started on the creators of single drama in the States – Paddy Chayevsky, Tad Mosel, Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer, Reginald Rose ... But then I guess it must be conceded that they pre-empted this objection by ruling out single drama. You may feel that is legitimate. I don’t.


Howard Schuman's dazzling Rock Follies, made by Thames and one of the last serials to be shot all on tape

Even given their own criteria, however, the list is nowhere near something that merits the description “of all time”. Here are a few pre-1980 dramas not listed that ought to be on any British telly-watcher’s “all-time” list: Z Cars, Talking to a Stranger, The Quatermass Experiment, Days of Hope, Diary of a Young Man, Roads to Freedom, Rock Follies, Gangsters, The Houseman's Tale, Law and Order, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The History Man, I Claudius, Thérèse Raquin, The Avengers, The World of Gurney Slade, Tutti Frutti and Minder, this last of which must surely be self-recommending if The Sweeney is thought worthy.

The lack of any of these candidates goes to an age-old problem with television criticism. Television is a vast subject (the BBC alone must sponsor more new work each week than the Arts Council does in a year) but newspapers have always insisted that television reviewers be generalists, which means that their ignorance is vast. No serious newspaper would employ a movie critic who didn't know Griffith, Eisenstein and Murnau or a theatre critic who lacked Shakespeare, Molière and Chekhov (though even this may be less true than it was). But writers on television are not required to know anything before last week. And it shows in lists like these.

And here we come to the central dichotomy of such exercises. Do the organizers of these lists seek to reflect popular support or expert assessment? Some years ago, Channel 4 – in one of a long series of cheap pull-together compilations that purport to construct authoritative accounts of quality – gave us its list of 100 Greatest Musicals, voted by the viewers. Unlike (I am sure) the great majority of voting viewers, I must have seen at least a hundred musicals, being an aficionado of the form. Indeed, I suspect that a great many voters will barely have seen ten musicals in their lives and probably (at the time of voting some years ago) considered Buddy, the biography loosely draped around Holly’s songbook, as what a stage musical was meant to be. So what did these C4 viewers vote as the greatest musical of all time? Yes, it was Grease. Can you (or anyone else) even name the creators of this mediocre piece of opportunism? No, neither can I.

Grease wouldn’t make my top hundred musicals at all. I am loath to settle on a single all-time great musical. After all, there are two quite distinct forms and the stage musical (or musical play as they call it on Broadway) cannot properly be compared with the film musical, by which I mean the musical conceived from scratch for the camera. The hybrid form used to be the filmed musical play but in recent years, as theatre finances have become more precarious, the reverse hybrid has grown up, the staged version of a movie musical. Most who voted for Grease will, I feel sure, have been thinking of the movie version. I have seen both the stage original and the screen rendition and do not care to arbitrate between two such uninteresting pieces of work. Among my top-rated stage musicals would be several that appear nowhere on the C4 list – Sondheim’s Follies, Company and Merrily We Roll Along, Rodgers & Hart’s Pal Joey (not the ghastly movie version) and On Your Toes, Porter’s Out of This World, Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun, Adler & Ross’s Pajama Game, Rodgers & Sondheim’s Do I Hear a Waltz? and, perhaps my first choice, Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures, the premiere production of which I was lucky enough to see on Broadway in 1976 and three or four revivals of which I have seen since.


Stephen Sondheim's stage musical Pacific Overtures of 1976 – though this is almost certainly a shot of a revival

Movies being more accessible, many of my preferred film musicals make the list (though rather low down) but among those missing are Golddiggers of 1933, Swing Time, The Gay Divorcee, Evergreen, The Band Wagon, Finian’s Rainbow, Victor/Victoria and – admittedly not a choice that many would make – At Long Last Love (a very underrated confection).

But my own lists, were I to trouble systematically to make any, would be subject to change over time, even quite precipitate change. I reckon my Desert Islands Discs eightsome would never be the same two days running. Is there really any value in such a pastime, or is it just exercise for the blood pressure?