There is, however, something wrong here. The British public will happily watch American imports for 13 weeks, so why won't they watch British serials of a similar length? Is this some sort of admission that British serials are so terrible that it is a job to stretch them out for a quarter of a year? I tried the first episode, earlier this year, of The Village, set in a Derbyshire community in 1914 but telling the story, over several series, of the succeeding century. Its advance publicity rejoiced in its apparently authentic grimness. It was a caricature grimness, of course, showcasing all the horrible things that happened in 1914 but wouldn't happen now because We Are More Enlightened. There seems to be a revenge unit in the BBC that uses period dramas to go back in time to highlight, and right, wrongs: and if that is what you want from drama, good luck to you. I gave up on The Village after one episode for reasons that would doubtless have me condemned as an elitist: the marching band that sped the men of the village off to the Western Front in August 1914 played "Jerusalem", which was not written until March 1916. I just couldn't take it seriously any more.

Those who could had six episodes to watch — with, as I say, more planned. It is a long haul from The Forsyte Saga, that ran over 26 weeks in 1967-68 (on BBC2, which was then the cultural channel), to be repeated on BBC1 the following year. The BBC thought nothing of dramatising the first six of Galsworthy's nine Forsyte novels over six months, with a very literal adaptation, and the public rejoiced. Have we really become so thick, and acquired such short attention spans, in the last 46 years that we cannot cope with more than six episodes at a time, and those composed in a fashion that is easily digested for the hard of understanding? I know there are other distractions — the internet, for example — but they apply to the Americans too. If they can do it, why can't we?

I rather fear not that the television audience in this country has been infantilised, but that too many of the people who decide what it will be allowed to watch consider it to be infantilised. BBC4, which I really do like, smells more and more like a ghetto. Our snobberies may prevent us from wanting to learn from America, but in this instance I think we can. Or, we can stop watching domestic television altogether, and let our home entertainment revolve, probably quite satisfactorily, around the boxed set.