The Stage

McGovern attacks primetime ITV drama

Published Tuesday 14 March 2006 at 14:15 by Liz Thomas

Cracker creator Jimmy McGovern has hit out at the health of ITV’s primetime drama, branding it “crap”.

McGovern, who is regularly hailed as one of the best writers of his generation, lambasted the network’s drama output in the 9pm timeslot at the launch of his new BBC1 series The Street.

He said: “If I see anything on at ITV at 9pm, I don’t turn on because I know it is going to be crap. It wouldn’t be on ITV at that time if it was any good. I might watch something at 11pm but at [9pm] it’s crap and every writer I know feels the same way.”

He also criticised the lack of new ideas coming through, even from top writers, when he asked for scripts for his new project. He said that he had found that more experienced writers submitted the least original work and stressed it was important to find new voices to push boundaries.

McGovern, who started his career in television working on Channel 4 soap Brookside, is highly respected in the industry and has won plaudits for his hard-hitting, edgy programmes including Hillsborough, which looked at the 1988 footballing tragedy, and Sunday, about the Bloody Sunday massacre.

His comments come despite the fact that the network’s production arm, which makes most of ITV’s drama programming but also produces shows for other broadcasters, developed The Street and is creating the new version of his popular detective drama Cracker.

An ITV spokesperson said: “Jimmy is obviously entitled to his own views but we assume he is excluding the fantastic new Cracker he has written for ITV1 that will be coming up in that slot in the autumn.”

McGovern’s outburst follows Shameless creator Paul Abbott’s broadside against “under-ambitious, predictable and needlessly boring” TV drama, which singled out ITV1’s Footballers’ Wives for particular criticism.

Speaking at the Huw Wheldon lecture at the Royal Television Society Cambridge convention last autumn, he said: “The commonest excuse for drama being bland or inoffensive or just crap is that the audience just can’t assimilate complex storytelling. That is just patronising. Audiences today can handle as much as you can throw at them.

“Audiences deserve and, I believe, crave much more protein in their diet. Only by giving the viewer a workout, making them join the dots, use their own imagination, can we reclaim television drama as the challenging, exciting, life-changing medium that I and many others have known it to be.”