Jason joins criticism of boring TV

Published Tuesday 28 March 2006 at 13:50 by Liz Thomas

David Jason has called on the UK drama industry to produce programmes that are more adventurous, and has criticised broadcasters for relying too heavily on set formulas in the genre.

The multi award-winning actor said that there was a danger commercial channels would only stick to tried and tested formats in drama, such as police shows and medical dramas, and admitted that his own detective drama A Touch of Frost was part of the “cops’n’docs” strand that has been dominating TV drama.

He added that the increased proliferation of channels was splitting audiences and advertising revenue, this in turn was affecting the sort of risks broadcasters were willing to take with programmes.

Jason said: “This pushes us further and further away from adventurous programme making, but we do still have a few executives who are brave enough to grasp the nettle and who will carry the flag. Perhaps one approach is that we could be a bit more aggressive with pitching our products to the rest of the world, maybe that would help us continue to be inventive in a world market.”

His comments come ahead of the broadcast of his new £4 million ITV1 drama Ghostboat, in which the special effects alone cost around £1,000 per second. Jason discovered the novel, penned by Neal Burger, when he was handed it as a prop when filming A Touch of Frost. After reading it he was certain it could be successfully adapted for television and would provide audiences with something a different, but said he found it a hard task to persuade people to fund the production.

He said: “I had to convince lots of people and it wasn’t easy. We had to take it to the heads of everywhere - it is a wonder we didn’t take it to the bloody Prime Minister to get some money out of him too.”

The star, who received a knighthood last year, said that he was not in favour of product placement as a way of raising revenue - even with the increasing pressures on producers.

He explained: “I think we run into the danger of destroying what we are trying to create. It is important not to end up with some sort of variety show just to get the money.”

Jason will soon start filming an adaptation of the Terry Pratchett novel Discworld for Sky One. His criticisms come just weeks after Cracker creator Jimmy McGovern lambasted ITV’s primetime drama output, branding it “crap”.

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.”

McGovern also criticised the lack of new ideas, even from top writers, when he asked for scripts for his new project.

Last year Shameless creator Paul Abbott launched a broadside against “under-ambitious, predictable and needlessly boring” TV drama and singled out ITV1’s Footballers’ Wives for criticism.

Speaking at the Huw Wheldon lecture at the Royal Television Society Cambridge convention last autumn, he said: “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.”