So what were we watching in 2008? The multiplication of television continues at speed. If you have cable TV you might have, say, 80 channels to choose from, most of them having nothing to offer you whatsoever. Some have almost no viewers. You could afford to advertise a missing cat on some of them, except that nobody who might have seen your cat is watching. Richard and Judy have been demoted from terrestrial TV to a hopelessly obscure channel — ratings at one point dropped to 21,000 — yet their book club continues a sort of phantom existence, selling huge quantities of paperbacks even though almost no one sees R&J plugging them.
Supporters of the new dispensation claim that this is an ideal situation; nobody would go to a supermarket that offered only five different foods. Yet there are drawbacks to all this choice. Television costs a lot of money to make. Not as much as feature films, of course, but a drama with decent production values is going to cost at least £1 million an hour. That’s why so much is co-production, often with an American company such as Home Box Office or Public Television’s WGBH in Boston, or sometimes with an entire European Union of backers, such as the recent ’tec series Wallander. (There is, by the way, a new cable channel called Alibi, which offers nothing but detective stories, from gritty ones such as Taggart to the stylised improbabilities of Poirot.)
But cable draws off enough viewers to bring the numbers sharply down. We will never see again the kind of figures Morecambe and Wise got at Christmas: fully half the population was watching. A year ago, the biggest Christmas audience was for the EastEnders special, which got nearly 14 million — less than one in four of us.
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