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In Tuesday\u2019s Daily Telegraph<\/em> Eric Idle said that television is now full of people \u201ctrying to bonk each other on islands.\u201d He blamed streaming television but that\u2019s quite wrong. In the week that Apple TV launched the latest series of Slow Horses<\/em>, you could argue that streaming TV is where the real creativity is in British television.<\/p>\n The problem, instead, is with the mainstream channels.<\/a> All of them. And in every area of TV, from drama and sport to news and comedy.<\/p>\n Of course, there are exceptions. The BBC marked the anniversary of the liberation of Belsen with The Road to Auschwitz<\/em>, a moving documentary about the Holocaust presented by Sir Simon Schama, and What They Found<\/em>, a documentary about Belsen directed by Sam Mendes.<\/p>\n A few years ago BBC4 showed a wonderful tribute to the documentary maker Christopher Nupen. But this is the point. Nupen made his greatest music documentaries back in the golden age of Music and Arts at the BBC, from the 1960s when he made his famous film of a performance of Schubert\u2019s Trout Quintet<\/em> by Jacqueline du Pr\u00e9, Daniel Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, and Zubin Mehta on 30 August 1969, to 2004, when he made We Want The Light<\/em>, focusing on the relationship in music between Jews and Germans.<\/p>\n There are great TV dramas from yesteryear on BBC iPlayer. Dramas like Elizabeth R<\/em> and All Passion Spent<\/em>, recently repeated on BBC iPlayer, but they were also made more than forty years ago.<\/p>\n That was the era of dramas like Colditz, Days of Hope<\/em>, Dennis Potter\u2019s Pennies from Heaven<\/em> and Frederic Raphael\u2019s The Glittering Prizes<\/em>, all on the BBC; Minder<\/em>, The Sweeney, Brideshead Revisited<\/em> and The Jewel in the Crown<\/em>, all on ITV.<\/a><\/p>\n When Alan Yentob died,<\/a> the BBC repeated a number of episodes of Imagine <\/em>as a tribute but hardly any of the great films that Yentob, Nigel Finch and Anthony Wall produced for Arena<\/em>, one of the BBC\u2019s great arts documentary series.<\/p>\n It\u2019s about quality of course, but it\u2019s also about the range of programmes. From dramatisations of Plato (Jonathan Miller\u2019s The Drinking Party) and Alice; broadcasts of The Merchant of Venice, Rigoletto and The Mikado; a series on BBC2 about the history of medicine and madness; art documentaries with Susan Sontag and Herbert von Karajan; Francis Bacon and Michael Powell.<\/p>\n