Quality Television - UK "quality Television"

UK "quality Television"

In the UK, television plays from the 1950s and 1960s tackled a range of controversial subjects, yet still managed to garner large audiences. These televised plays were regarded as a benchmark of high-quality British television drama, part of what some television historians refer to as the "golden age" of British television. British television drama writer John Hopkins has been noted for “...successful pioneering...the short series for serious drama,” which “...established an important precedent in Britain” and served as a model for subsequent television writers such as Dennis Potter and Alan Bleasdale.

The UK's National Film and Television School (NFTS), which teaches creative and commercial skills, notes the "... tension which has given us popular cinema, serious as well as entertaining television, and allowed both media to become art forms in their own right." The UK public broadcaster-produced series' The Jewel in the Crown and Brideshead Revisited "...came to represent the "acme of British quality" and the Jewel in the Crown was "...held up as the epitome of excellence" and described as the "title everyone reaches for when asked for a definition of "quality television".

The Arts Council of England's event Day of British Film states that the council's "top priority is to make strategic interventions in programme-making for network television broadcast... by co-producing "...programmes made by independent producers with television partners." The Art Film Festival examined television issues such as "Short-length programming: art in the age of satellite television", which examines "...ways in which contemporary, often aesthetically difficult work can be presented on network television in ways that are innovative but accessible." Kristin Thompson argues that a show from the British public broadcaster, The Singing Detective, has what she defines as "art television" aspects similar to those that she finds in Lynch's Twin Peaks series

David Lavery has written a number of articles and book chapters on television that he argues is "quality television." He co-edited Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror: Appraisals and Reappraisals of the Show That Was Supposed to Change TV and wrote “Quirky Quality TV: Revisiting Northern Exposure.” (from Critical Studies in Television 1.2 (Autumn 2006): 34-38). In April 2004, Janet McCabe and Kim Akass organized a conference on “American Quality Television” (described above in the section on the US) and have recently published a book 'Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond' (November 2007, I.B. Tauris). This collection is part of their Reading Contemporary Television series and, along with their contributors, they discuss various definitions of Quality TV.

Unlike the above-cited scholars, who discuss the contributions made by fictional television programs that they deem to be "quality television", Dieter Daniels argues that there "...is no form of high television culture that could be seen as a lasting cultural asset to be preserved for future generations", except for the "music clip." Daniels' article Television—Art or Anti-art? states the music clips (e.g., music videos) that "have emerged since the 1980s" have "...attracted accolades in the context of art and become part of museum collections", and that they "...are often seen as a continuation of the 1920s avant-garde absolute films."