In Praise of the Ordinary

Over the last two weeks I have been going through comments in various media about my paper on the funding of the BBC.

Some of it was depressing. Some of it was supportive. But there was little on the core objective of the project: how we do grow our media industry and our media exports? How do we take full advantage of the new “trade routes” offered by the broadband Internet?

The UK’s success with formats should be recognised and is something to be proud of. But drama is what earns the money overseas. It is also what gives our country “profile”.

So here is a tribute to two series that have achieved that and which play all over the world: Midsomer Murders and Wild at Heart. Some people find them "ordinary". But both series know exactly what they are doing, and who they are aiming at.

Unlike so much of our fiction, they also offer the numbers of episodes that international markets want. There are more than 80 Midsomer Murders.

Both have found venues that people are interested in and which provide a stage for the 10 or 12 main characters that series seem to need. A British village is familiar territory from numerous detective novels. A game reserve was a braver notion for a new drama but it has provided a setting that people all over the world can understand – with plenty of scope for conflict, and issues that are very topical.

A detective story relies on a basic fact about human condition. We want to cooperate but don’t quite know how much to trust people – and there are some people, a minority, who are amoral and very good at concealing it. We want to see then caught and punished.

Apart form the traditional family and romantic issues, Wild At Heart can give us animal attacks, tropical storms and the rest of it. We love to see people facing up to such challenges when the performances are well executed.

Both series avoid a social agenda. People back from work on an average day can easily get depressed over problems they know they can do little about.