Infertility

There's a lot about American TV that Marchant - the man behind the searing, polemical and very British dramas Holding On and Goodbye Cruel World - does not like.

Such as Lost.

"Glossy, meretricious crap," is his damning verdict.

"It's pricktease TV.

It only exists to pull you in for the first five minutes and the last five minutes.

In between, nothing happens.

The creative impulses aren't honourable, they're all about: 'Let's get a 26-week season, then another.'" Marchant, 45, was a boxer in his youth and he's pulling no punches in the rarefied confines of Bafta's Piccadilly offices today.

Why, asks this recipient of the academy's awards, is a great dramatist like Peter Flannery not on our screens any more?

And whatever happened to Scotland's undisputed heavyweight champion practitioner of pulverising drama, Peter McDougall, who was at the peak of his powers when Marchant was making his debut?

Banished to the goggle-box wilderness, it seems, while the likes of Hustle and Hotel Babylon take centre-stage.

Both ape America, both are "glossy crap".

If you're going to copy America, Ma...

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