Screen

The Thick Of It wasn’t daring. Its supposedly iconoclastic writer was just mooing with the herd

The BBC’s suffocating conformism, petty prohibitions and woozy moralism are the enemy of creativity

With extraordinary credulity the great and the good fell for far-left lies about Serbian atrocities

Strangely, it is easier to write a state-of-the-nation drama if you set it in the past

With the tabloids’ public interest defence in tatters, the BBC should beware falling into the same trap

Politics is great drama, as Borgen, a fine Danish series, shows. So why do British scriptwriters ignore it?

The stars have been axed because they tried to push their show an inch upmarket

Julian Fellowes’s Downton Abbey epitomises the worst features of the culture he claims to challenge

The boom years lasted so long that writers and artists lost their nose for trouble

Simplistic and divisive, the media response to the riots was utterly predictable