How to escape the routine

Criminal Justice

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With British TV drama slammed as formulaic, Paul Hoggart asks commissioners and practitioners whether there's really a dearth of innovation - and how fresh ideas can be encouraged.

Barbara Machin's impassioned plea for more innovation in television drama in this week's Hot Topic column must have taken courage. An established writer on Casualty, Machin has written 74 episodes of Waking the Dead and produced 15, but producers and writers rarely imply that the commissioners on whom their livelihoods depend might not be doing a superb job.

But Machin is not alone. Her Hot Topic captures the essence of the speech she made on Tuesday opening this year's Cheltenham Screenwriters' Festival, which was greeted with enthusiastic applause. Her view is that in an ultra-cautious ratings-driven climate it is getting harder and harder to pitch unusual ideas. "I've talked to so many of my contemporaries in the past three weeks, and they all feel the same." Her complaints echo the regular grumblings of critics and commentators dismayed by "safe" formulaic drama, or tired viewers who complain that their weeknight primetime schedules are cluttered with reality and lifestyle shows, long-running serials and samey generic drama.

But are they right? Are we really in what Machin calls a particularly "chilly climate" for innovative drama? As the BBC's controller of fiction, you might expect Jane Tranter (another speaker at the festival) to bristle at the critique - and her impatience is clear when we speak. She cites a string of recent BBC productions which have added something new to drama: broadcasting Andrew Davies' adaptation of Dickens's Bleak House in soap-opera length episodes, echoing the author's original part-work publication; the cultural time-shifts involved in the concept of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes; the rejuvenation of Doctor Who; the structure and scheduling of Five Days last year, and Criminal Justice (pictured) this week.

Tranter rejects the idea that, say, experimenting with mere surface narrative structures constitutes genuine innovation. "Something isn't necessarily innovative because it tells a story backwards," she says. "It is innovative because it makes you look at a genre in a new way, as Z Cars, The Sweeney, Morse and Prime Suspect did in successive decades - because it completely raises the bar."

Tranter is equally sceptical of what she calls "whizz-bang" innovations: tricky camerawork or super-fast editing. "People have been trying to do that since This Life with its rocky cameras and so on. It might have been innovative 10 years ago but we're so far on from that now. Now what would be innovative would be something that was so slow that you could hear every breath and look at every solitary detail.

"Style is very different from innovation. Innovation is something that comes from the very heart of the project."

Subject and structure
Mention focus groups to Tranter and she says: "Now I just want to lie down and die!" Mark Lawson recently startled Russell T Davies by raising this issue, she explains, "but we have never used a focus group in commissioning or development on my watch." Any kind of executive interference is only a problem, she says, "if the executive isn't any good".

When it comes to innovation in drama, Machin feels that even Channel 4 "has lost its way" because its issue-led dramas are not in themselves innovative. Not surprisingly, Liza Marshall, C4's head of drama, does not agree. It is not just that the channel is willing to tackle difficult and controversial material, such as paedophilia in Secret Life, she says. Britz, Peter Kosminsky's two-part thriller about British-born Muslims in a post-9/11 Britain, had a brilliantly intertwined, dual-perspective narrative structure: "We won every Bafta going last year." Marshall also points out that the channel's only long-running serial, Shameless, rewrote the rule book, shattering traditional renditions of working-class life with an explosively -entertaining but deeply humane portrayal of a seemingly chaotic underclass.

An altogether different kind of innovation has found its way into the writing of E4's teenage drama Skins. Producer Bryan Elsley talks about establishing a writers' room system where they have been training teenage writers (some drawn from the cast) on the job, in a kind of screen-writers' apprenticeship. This, he argues, has given the series its much-praised realism, freshness and vigour. "We have completely changed the cast for the next series," he says. "How many long-running series have ever done that?"

Another festival speaker, veteran producer Kate Harwood, whose credits include Cranford and Charles II: the Power and the Passion, points to a different kind of innovation that is on the rise: the ingenuity required to produce quality drama on very restricted budgets. She cites BBC4's recent Curse of Comedy season featuring dramatised biographies of troubled 1960s comics and her own cheap but stylish adaptation of Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky.

Even commissioners will agree with Machin that when it comes to innovation, the best American imports have tended to make the running in recent years, not just with shows such as Lost and 24 but in the field of -comedy-tinged dramas such as Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy or Six Feet Under.

Tranter particularly admires Heroes for its unprecedented global cast and contexts. Point out a period when the BBC was regularly criticised for making pallid clones of other networks' successes such as Heartbeat or Cold Feet, and Tranter insists those days "are long gone", but concedes this is at least partly due to the influence of American shows.

Comic energy
One could argue that the distinction between comedy and drama is arbitrary anyway, and that some of the most exciting dramatic innovations here, such as The Royle Family, The Office and Extras have simply fallen into a different category. Tony Jordan was particularly pleased that ITV was prepared to run his unprecedented twin series, the comedy Moving Wallpaper and the pastiche soap Echo Beach.

"That certainly hasn't been my experience," says Jordan of Machin's concerns. "In the past few years I've done Hustle and Life on Mars as well as Moving Wallpaper." And Tranter is particularly proud of Life on Mars, though Machin points out it took seven years to bring it to the screen, and it had already been turned down by C4.

Clearly commissioners and producers can point to numerous examples of drama that has been genuinely innovative in a wide variety of ways, so why does the impression that Machin might be right persist? Perhaps because there is so much drama being churned out that the formulaic and lazy still predominates. Machin believes that the unexpected appeal of much reality TV lies in its sheer unpredictability, and that drama must somehow recover the ability to surprise us.

For Liza Marshall the trick lies in allowing producers and writers to come forward with ideas that are "close to their hearts". Surely nobody can argue with Machin's belief that this is an issue the whole industry should be addressing.