Try using "ought", "should", "duty" and "obligation" in front of modern media managers and you would bewilder them. True, occasionally Andrew Davies does classic adaptations and the BBC has just released The Special Relationship, a drama-documentary account of Blair's relationship with Clinton. (It is as sexed-up as an Iraq war dossier, according to Alastair Campbell.)
But no writer would think of proposing making a drama-documentary about how the Great Depression destroyed Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government in 1931 for all the contemporary echoes, or a biopic on the life of Kingsley Amis, Sagan's contemporary, while downplaying his affairs, just because he was a great British writer.
Once the British media did see themselves as guardians of the culture. The divide between Britain and France is also a divide between Britain's present and past. The only media organisation that now feels the old obligation to promote British literature and history is Radio 4, which is why it should be forgiven its political bias and supported.
Elsewhere, the changes of the 1980s left behind old conservative patriots and liberal believers in the importance of high culture — who have more in common than they imagine. No French media grandee is going to grow rich making a biopic of Sagan, but their British counterparts can grow very rich by dismissing the old cultural standards as elitist impositions. Rupert Murdoch has been the great beneficiary. Successive governments have exempted BSkyB from EU rules that would have compelled it to make British programmes for a British audience. The richest network in Britain produces a mere handful of original dramas and comedies, almost as an afterthought.
The canny Murdoch used the Sun to gain business favours from client politicians. But even if he had not, I doubt Tony Blair or David Cameron would understand if you tried to explain why it was important to care for British culture and pass it on to the next generation. If people wanted serious drama, they would reply, the market would surely provide it.
As luck would have it, Gibson Square has republished George Walden's The New Elites, the best analysis of the cultural shift of the past generation. The masses are kept in their place, he writes, not as before by poverty or impotence, but by wealthy men and women who feed them a diet of continuous pap. If the elite is criticised, it can turn round and accuse its critics of being the real elitists who are turning up their dainty noses at the democratic choices of the sovereign people.
On the front cover of the new edition is a picture of David Cameron. His only job outside politics was as the excessively well-rewarded head of PR for Carlton, one of the worst stations in British television history. It took the franchise from Thames, which had produced serious documentaries and dramas, and whose best staff clung to the old idea that education should not stop at school but be continued in the wider culture. Carlton replaced its worthy efforts with such shows as A Woman's Guide to Adultery. After a few years, Cameron moved from a station that celebrated adultery into politics, where he announced his belief in the importance of marriage.
Mark Thompson should be less euphoric. A culture that allows privileged men to make money by pimping trash, and does not laugh them to scorn when they complain about "the broken society", is having it every which way except the right way.
