Screen writer

Even great TV is second to film, writes Donald Clarke

DID YOU see This Is England '86on Channel 4 earlier this week? It was pretty good. It wasn't a patch on the Shane Meadows film that inspired it, but, considering that This Is Englandis one of the key movies of the past decade, that should not have surprised us.

Anyway, it’s on the telly and, as any fool knows, television is a lesser medium than mighty cinema. TV is for sloths and drug addicts. Film is for people who wear corduroy jackets and read Penguin Modern Classics.

Oh, no. Somebody is lumbering towards us with an HBO box-set.

You know how this argument goes. For the past decade or so, US TV drama has, the cathode apologists state, offered more nuanced and complex entertainment than that available on the big screen. Have you watched Mad Men? Nothing happens for hours and hours, but, all the while, some sort of narrative tumour is steadily building within the viewer's unsuspecting psyche. You don't get that in The Last Airbender. Do you? Well, do you? Blah, blah, blah.

The current stand-off between television and film is just the latest episode in a struggle that has gone on for half a century. For most of that period, the consensus has been that TV is the lesser form. Appearing on the junior medium was like handling foodstuffs after going to the lavatory (without washing your hands). The actor still looked the same. He still tasted the same. But most film producers perceived an invisible taint.

True, Clint Eastwood managed the jump from TV to movies, but he had to take the indirect route via strange avant-garde Italian westerns. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, actors such as James Garner, Farrah Fawcett-Majors and Tom Selleck repeatedly failed to break through the celluloid ceiling. Conversely, when you saw Bette Davis appearing in an episode of The Virginian, you knew the great actor's career was waning.

The situation has certainly changed over the past 30 years. Bruce Willis, George Clooney and Will Smith survived successful telly series to forge proper, grown-up movie careers. Meanwhile, serious film actors happily slum it in TV movies and HBO series. Just last week, Al Pacino won an Emmy for his performance as Jack Kevorkian, the right-to-die activist in a small-screen production called You Don't Know Jack.Behind the camera was Barry Levinson, director of Dinerand Rain Man.

So, is the game up? Has the increasing quality of high-end telly caused the perceived gap in seriousness between the two to narrow dramatically? Well, 1,000 articles have said as much but, if you want to clarify what the industry itself feels, imagine an archetypal top-flight actor and ask him one question: would you rather win an Emmy or an Oscar? Rightly or wrongly, cinema remains the field in which entertainment professionals are most keen to succeed. What a durable medium the movies are.