Who's getting dumbed down?

Is British telly dumbing down America? Owen Gibson of MediaGuardian seems to think so. Once again the ghost of the Beatles in '64 is evoked as Gibson states, "America is in the grip of a second British invasion. But this time it's not our music that's proving a hit but our light entertainment television shows starring faded celebrities." He's talking about the newly repackaged versions of BBC and ITV formats being bought up by US media "in unprecedented numbers." London Calling has talked about this before (see, e.g., Format programming: UK rules and our take on The Office) but apparently it's getting worse - or better, from a UK balance-of-payments perspective.

Gibson's piece notes the particular success of Granada America, part of Granada International, ITV's export/production arm - that as of last week, "the company provided a fifth of the weekday prime time schedule for Fox and NBC, until recently a proportion that would have been unthinkable to most US TV producers."

Just to keep things straight, he runs through some of the British shows at the trailer-trash end of the spectrum, currently repacakaged for an American audience:

• Dancing With the Stars (adapted from BBC's Strictly Come Dancing, and pulling in "more than 15 million" viewers on ABC after three weeks on air).
  
• Hit Me Baby One More Time (Granada America, ITV's export/production arm, now on NBC)
  
• Nanny 911 (Granada America, now on Fox)
  
• Hell's Kitchen (Granada America)
  
• Fire Me Please (based on BBC3's The Sack Race)
  

The piece reminds us that for many years "it tended to be mostly one-way traffic" from the US to the UK, "with Anglophiles restricted to watching imports" on cable channels "and the big four US networks selling their best comedies and dramas to the BBC and Channel 4." Of course, "The long list of hit US imports, from Dallas to The Sopranos, and game show formats wasn't matched by a reciprocal flow of programme ideas the other way." (He's actually thinking back to the 1970s in particular, when US programming often dominated UK prime-time schedules; US imports are still huge, but for years even the top US imports to Britain, such as Friends and The Sopranos, have been pushed off to "minority" channels - such as C4 or Sky - and lesser timeslots.)

Anyway, Gibson's piece paraphrases Mike Phillips, deputy chief executive of BBC Worldwide (the Beeb's commercial arm), noting "the success of Who Wants to be a Millionaire and Pop Idol changed the game."
Phillips say he overcame network skepticism and convinced ABC chief Andrea Wong to take a risk with Strictly Come Dancing, drawing on the experience of the show's huge sucess in Britain and Australia (where the link to Baz Luhman's Strictly Ballroom undoubtedly helped).

Paul Jackson, CEO of Granada America, says another reason for the current US opening is the vacuum in American broadcasting as networks cast around desperately for Big Hit replacements for their now-defunct moneyspinners such as Friends and Frasier. Says Jackson: "America is a much more faddish market than over here. While entertainment shows have remained a staple of the British market, that Saturday night type of entertainment show hadn't been seen in America for 20 years. . . . This summer, they've latched onto the British entertainment market and decided to take a risk on it."

So is this a case of the Brits dumbing down American TV? Britain, the land of The Forsyte Saga, Upstairs Downstairs, and David Attenborough's Life on Earth? You betcha. This is the other side of British television, the side that Americans never used to see. It's similar in many ways to Britain's two-tier, high-low class, contrapuntal press system (whose influence is also being felt in the US). Now we're seeing a similar two-tier, high-low class, contrapuntal TV system spreading its influence across the Atlantic.