Over on A Writer’s Life, Lee Goldberg has posted a link to an excellent article in Prospect by Peter Jukes. In it, he laments the decline of British drama writing and argues that there should be an adoption of the American model of a showrunner. I tend to agree with this idea, and have done so for a long time.
What’s interesting though is that ten years ago I attended the television festival in Edinburgh, and the talk of the town was the dramatic decline in comedy writing, while British drama was still king of the hill. It seems the consensus has reversed, with our comedy output being held in high esteem, while being unfavourably compared to the US. Maybe it’s cyclical; you know like the way the UK usually has a right wing Government when most of Europe has a left wing one.
