BAFTA winner Stephen Poliakoff calls out the troubling state of UK television drama - and how we can weaponise the past to save it

However, when the show proved a surprise hit it enabled me to follow it with Perfect Strangers in which Daniel, a suburban surveyor (the young Matthew Macfadyen), attends an elaborate family reunion populated by relatives he has never met before. Secrets, surprising stories and deep family resentments begin to spill out all around him.

Michael Gambon won a BAFTA for playing Daniel’s father, the black sheep of the family. Both these shows are being revived on BBC4 and iPlayer as the BBC continues to rediscover its archive, and give airtime to actors and creators reminiscing on how their dramas were made.

These journeys into the past mask an uncomfortable truth about the present. The output of British drama has shrunk recently and is now totally dependent on international co-production, meaning stories about our lives and our culture could become a rarity.

Leading industry figures like writer and director Peter Kosminsky have flagged up the danger, as have a committee of MPs, while forces that have been hostile to public service broadcasting are becoming more vocal. The crisis is not confined to the BBC – ITV revealed it might not have been able to produce one of the most consequential drama-documentaries on British TV, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, were it being made today.

The reason for the crisis is simple: money. The cost of drama shot up violently as soon as the streamers began competing for actors, creators, crews and locations. Simultaneously, the opportunities for co-production for terrestrial broadcasters became much scarcer as the streamers were often reluctant to fund stories purely for British audiences.

What could possibly help salvage the situation? Ironically, one of the potential weapons could be the drama archive itself. Until recently, broadcasters have been reluctant to proudly display many of their past achievements. If the BBC had done so over the years, it might have been spared many of the attacks against it.

I think back to the notorious speech Rupert Murdoch made at the Edinburgh Festival in 1989 – when he claimed BBC drama was run by the costume department and its output consisted purely of strangulated voices. In reality, previous years had brought us incredible contemporary drama by the likes of Alan Bleasdale, Mike Leigh, Alan Bennett and Dennis Potter. If that work had been revisited and celebrated by the BBC, that charge would have been impossible to make stick.

Similarly, Channel 4 rescued the British film industry in the early 1980s with the creation of Film4, which resulted in hundreds of movies being made and many illustrious careers being kick-started. However, it rarely shows these films now, even though it has a designated channel.

Can the past really be weaponised as a quirky missile against the near eradication of homegrown drama? I believe it can. There are many incredible treasures yet to be unearthed in the archive that will act as a perpetual reminder, both for audiences and our legislators, of the value of British drama and the intense aching loss that will be felt if it were to begin to vanish.

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