THESE SCEPTRED ISLES (BRITISH AND IRISH TV DRAMA IN THE ANALOGUE YEARS)
When the analogue era drew to a close, American and Scandanavian drama reigned supreme.
However for much of the analogue years some of the best drama was closer to home.
Sometimes political, sometimes funny, the drama series has enabled the British TV to nurture some of the greatest writing, directorial and acting talent to hit the small and big screen.
Writers like Alan Plater, Dennis Potter and Alan Bennett, directors like Jon Amiel, Michael Winterbottom and Martin Campbell and actors like Julie Walters, Sir Alec Guinness and Ray McAnally have all shone and produced some of the finest TV series we have ever seen.
Here's my pick of the analogue crop.
TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY
John Le Carre's classic 1974 spy novel was last year turned into a gripping movie by Tomas Alfredsen, starring Gary Oldman as George Smiley.
However 32 years before, veteran actor Sir Alec Guinness turned in an equally compelling performance on BBC1 as the spy called out of retirement to hunt down a Soviet mole at the heart of the secret service.
Sir Alec is believed to his based his performance on the real life British intelligence chief Sir Maurice Oldfield who Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher deployed in Northern Ireland.
But in truth this seven part potboiler of a series, masterfully scripted by Le Carre himself and directed by John Irvin, is packed with strong acting from the likes of Ian Richardson, Ian Bannen, Beryl Reid, George Sewell and Patrick Stewart. Available now on DVD, it is well worth another look.
THE BOYS FROM THE BLACK STUFF
"Gis' a job. I can do that!"
Playwright Alan Bleasdale's heartbreaking five part drama about five unemployed Liverpudlians gave British television one of its most memorable catchphrases and helped launch the careers of Bernard Hill and Julie Walters.
With its searing critique of the Thatcher Government's devastating impact on the industrial heartlands of the north of England, each episode of this 1982 series is brilliantly scripted and stunningly acted.
From the opening episode about the gang trying to avoid social security investigators to the powerful confrontation between Michael Angelis's warm hearted hero Chrissie and his frustrated wife right through to the surreal humour of the concluding episode, the series never sold its audience short.
Thirty two years later in another era of recession, Bleasdale's sparkling dialogue and the performances of Angelis, Walters, Hill, Alan Igbon, Tom Georgeson and Peter Kerrigan still haven't lost their power. Liverpool fans will revel in the cameo appearances of Graeme Souness and Sammy Lee in the jaw dropping Yosser Hughes episode which also features headbutting and a wonderful gag in a confessional box.
While the Thatcher era prompted a lot of angry television drama, it also inspired the conspiracy genre and this 1985 BBC2 series was among the best.
Bob Peck is charismatic as a South Yorkshire policeman Ronald Craven whose scientist and environmental activist daughter, played by Joanne Whalley, is gunned down on a rainy night outside his cottage.
Determined to get to the bottom of the murder, he uncovers Government and corporate corruption around nuclear power but can he beat these powerful forces?
One of the most influential British TV dramas, 'Edge of Darkness' is boosted by Troy Kennedy Martin's intelligent script, Martin Campbell's assured direction and top notch performances from Peck, Whalley, Charles Kay, Tim McInerny and Joe Don Baker.
Campbell remade the series as a Hollywood movie with Mel Gibson and Ray Winstone in 2010 but it failed to pack the same punch as the original.
The great innovator of British TV drama was Dennis Potter who was not afraid to push the boundaries of post watershed viewing.
His 1978 series 'Pennies from Heaven' for BBC1 with Bob Hoskins bravely broke the mould with its mix of hard hitting drama and characters lip synching and dancing to popular 1930s songs. It was a formula he would repeat in subsequent series like 'Lipstick On Your Collar' for Channel 4.
However his greatest moment came in 1986 with this six part BBC1 series about a hospitalised gumshoe detective novel writer Philip Marlowe (played by Michael Gambon) suffering from psoriatic arthritis who dreams up a Raymond Chandler style murder mystery while also reflecting on his difficult childhood in the Forest of Dean.
As ever, Potter is not afraid to blend light moments with disturbing dark memories and with his unashamedly Freudian approach to storytelling he whipped up a tabloid storm over one scene where Marlowe as a boy witnesses his mother's infidelity.
Gambon is terrific in the central role but there are strong supporting performances too from great character actors like Joanne Whalley, Jim Carter, Alison Steadman, Imelda Staunton, Patrick Malahide, Janet Suzman, Bill Paterson and Ron Cook.
Intelligently directed by Jon Amiel, with a soundtrack of classic 1940s songs mimed by its actors, the standout memory is of a hospital dance sequence to Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians version of 'Dry Bones'. An attempt by Hollywood in 2003 to turn it into a Keith Gordon movie with Robert Downey Jr and Mel Gibson failed spectacularly.
A VERY BRITISH COUP
Long before Aaron Sorkin provided Bush era US liberals with a comfort blanket in the form of fictional Democratic President Josiah Bartlet in 'The West Wing', Chris Mullin and acclaimed screenwriter Alan Plater did something similar for Labour supporters in the Thatcher era.
Donegal actor Ray McAnally turned in a towering performance as the brash but honest working class Sheffield Central MP and Labour Prime Minister Harry Perkins in this 1988 Channel 4 political drama.
Unashamedly Old Labour, Perkins takes on sacred cows like removing US military bases on British soil, announcing unilateral nuclear disarmament and delivering open government. However he encounters resistance from Philip Madoc's newspaper baron Sir George Fison, Alan McNaughton's MI5 chief Sir Percy Brown and his sneaky assistant played by Tim McInerny.
Betrayal naturally lurks in the ranks of the Labour Government in Plater's astute screenplay and there are smart performances from Jim Carter as an embattled Foreign Secretary, Marjorie Yates as the Home Secretary, Geoffrey Beevers as the Chancellor and Keith Allen as Perkins' loyal press secretary.
Channel 4 had a second bite at a screen adaptation of Mullin's novel, which was written in 1982, recently with 'Secret State' with Gabriel Byrne in the lead role but, as good as Byrne was, it failed to scale the heights of McAnally's BAFTA winning performance.
TALKING HEADS
Alan Bennett is one of England's finest playwrights and screenwriters and nowhere is this more apparent than in the first of two series of monologues for BBC1.
The monologues delivered by Patricia Routledge, Maggie Smith, Stephanie Cole, Julie Walters and Thora Hird demonstrate Bennett's uncanny ear for how women think and speak.
But there is one male voice, whose monologue is touchingly delivered by Bennett himself - a repressed homosexual whose life is turned upside down when his mother rekindles a relationship with an old flame.
Acerbically written, with astute observations about English society, each episode is witty and heartbreaking whether it is Routledge's obsessive letter writer, Smith's alcoholic Vicar's wife who embarks on an affair with an Asian shopkeeper, Cole's stoical mother, Walter's dim starstruck actress and Hird's 75-year-old lonely pensioner struggling after a fall.
Each performance is spot on in this 1988 series which far outshone its follow-up 10 years later.
GBH
Not content with delivering classic series like 'The Boys From The Black Stuff' and the powerful World War One drama 'The Monocled Mutineer', Alan Bleasdale produced a stunning political conspiracy thriller on Channel 4 in 1991 with more than a hint of slapstick comedy.
In a rare dramatic role, Monty Python's Michael Palin is brilliantly cast as a principled special needs school headmaster Jim Nelson who inadvertently defies a plan by Robert Lindsay's vain Militant Council leader Michael Murray to have a city wide strike and is subsequently harassed by the politician and his supporters.
In many ways Murray, who is believed to have been modelled on the Liverpudlian council leader Derek Hatton, is a nasty, petty character but Bleasdale and Lindsay gradually evoke some sympathy for him by stripping away his pomposity to reveal his vulnerability. As the series wears on viewers begin to realise he is a pawn in a much more sinister game.
Bleasdale alumni such as Julie Walters (playing Lindsay's elderly Irish mother), Tom Georgeson, Michael Angelis, Andrew Schofield and Alan Igbon return with dependably strong performances but there are two standout supporting performances from Lindsay Duncan as a mysterious blonde who casts Murray under her spell and Philip Whitchurch as his put upon chauffeur.
Like all of Bleasdale's best work there are moments of pathos, anger and inventive humour and an incredible piece of comic acting from Robert Lindsay in one sequence where his character develops a nervous tic.
BBC Scotland has produced some decent TV dramas over the years - not least the adaptation of Ian Rankin's 'The Crow Road' and the Robbie Coltrane classic 'Tutti Frutti' with Emma Thompson and Richard Wilson.
However this 1994 series, penned by Donna Franceschild and directed by David Blair, is a bit of an unsung gem.
The wonderful Ken Stott plays alcoholic double glazing salesman Eddie McKenna, who hates his job but whose real passion is a radio station he has set up in a Glasgow psychiatric hospital.
There he encounters Irish actress Ruth McCabe's middle aged housewife Rosalie who has an obsessive compulsion with cleanliness and whose marriage is disintegrating, David Tennant's bipolar Campbell who is an overenthusiastic partner in the radio station, Angus Macfadyen's schizophrenic electrician and Katy Murphy's troubled Francine.
Like 'Silver Linings Playbook', this BBC1 comedy drama treats mental health issues sensitively and shows real heart. Like the best TV dramas, it mixes moments of real humour with pathos with the help of an ensemble cast on top of their game - particularly Stott in a star making role.
FAMILY
When Roddy Doyle is often asked about the impact of this 1994 BBC1/RTE1 co-production about an abusive Dublin marriage, he notes how it hit TV screens just after the euphoria around Michael Flatley and Jean Butler's debut Eurovision Song Contest performance of 'Riverdance'.
The viciousness of Sean McGinley's low life criminal Charlo Spencer brought Ireland crashing down to earth and sparked a national debate on RTE as viewers reeled from the shock of the light hearted author of 'The Commitments,' 'The Snapper' and 'The Van' turning out something so dark.
With one of Britain's finest TV and film directors Michael Winterbottom at the helm, this drama was an uncomfortable reminder to an emerging Celtic Tiger Ireland of the difficulties some working class women and families face.
With each episode focussing on a member of the family, it is powered along by McGinley's amazing performance as the seedy, alcoholic, womanising, violent Charlo, Barry Ward's confused teenager John Paul starting secondary school, Neili Conroy's factory worker Nicola who becomes increasingly disturbed by her relationship with her father and Ger Ryan's inspirational performance as the abused wife Paula battling to regain her self-respect.
The series begat two powerful Doyle novels 'The Woman Who Walked Into Doors' and 'Paula Spencer' and features one of the most powerful sequences of female emancipation in any TV drama.
OUR FRIENDS IN THE NORTH
At the tail end of the Thatcher and Major years, BBC2 produced in 1995 an epic nine part drama about the ups and downs of four Newcastle friends.
Based on Peter Flannery's 1982 Royal Shakespeare Company play, this gripping drama ambitiously followed the changing fortunes of four central characters - the idealistic Nicky Hutchinson, his true love Mary, the brash Tosker and their troubled friend Geordie between 1964 and 1995.
Along the way, it tackled the decline of the Labour Party, the detrimental impact of high rise flats on working class communities, the seedy underworld of Soho, corruption in the Metropolitan Police, the devastating impact of dementia, the miners' strike and homelessness and it also propelled the acting careers of Christopher Eccleston, Gina McKee, Mark Strong and, especially, Daniel Craig.
Expertly directed by Simon Cellan Jones, Pedr James and Stuart Urban, it boasted strong supporting performances from Alun Armstrong as a corrupt Labour bigwig, David Bradley as a sensitive Labour activist, Freda Dowie as Eccleston's stoical mother and Peter Vaughan as Eccleston's principled father who succumbs to Alzheimer's.
With each episode set in a particular year and its smart use of pop music from Bob Dylan to Oasis, no series since has matched the scale and ambition of this perfectly judged love story. The subtlety of Eccleston, McKee, Frost and Craig's performances in the climactic episode are a joy to behold and as stunning as any drama on HBO today.
 Paul Abbott may be best known for creating Channel 4's 'Shameless' but that show jumped the shark a long time ago despite its brilliantly written first two series.
What Abbott should be celebrated for is this dynamic 2003 six part thriller for BBC1 about political corruption. It came out as the shine began to fade from Tony Blair's Labour Government.
It begins with the brutal gunning down of a young man on a London street and the, at first, apparently unconnected death of an MP's researcher.
John Simm's newspaper reporter Cal McCaffrey begins to investigate and is disturbed as his probe begins to raise uncomfortable questions about David Morrissey's politician Stephen Collins whose campaign he once ran.
Simm and Morrissey are as charismatic as ever but the series also has a smart cast with Kelly McDonald, Bill Nighy and James McAvoy in sparkling form as McCaffery's colleagues, Philip Glenister as a pre-Gene Hunt DCI, Marc Warren as the shifty Dominic Foy and Polly Walker as Collins' wife.
A noble attempt was made by Kevin McDonald in 2009 to turn 'State of Play' into a US political corruption movie with Russell Crowe, Helen Mirren, Rachel McAdams and Ben Affleck but it pales by comparison with David Yates' small screen version.
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