It's not exactly Rambert ... Kelly Brook and Brendan Cole are appearing in the new series of Strictly Come Dancing. Photograph: BBC/PA
A long piece in the Washington Post earlier this week mourned the collapse of serious dance coverage on American TV in the wake of reality shows and competition-based programmes like Dancing with the Stars and its forthcoming spin-off Dance Wars. As writer Sarah Kaufman put it: " washed-up celebrities and adventurous athletes .... are all that the viewing public knows of dance these days, since ballet and modern dance companies have been virtually voted off the air".
Britain, of course, hasn't needed America's lead to drive its own TV coverage in the same direction. While producers can't wait to push the next series of Strictly Come Dancing on to the schedules, opportunities for the rest of the art form in mainstream television have pretty much dwindled to the occasional documentary or the annual Christmas screening of a 19th-century tutu ballet.
By contrast, the late 1980s and early 1990s stand out as a golden age. Back then the BBC ran its annual series Dancemakers, which under the direction of Bob Lockyer featured fully staged, often beautifully filmed works by an inspiring range of choreographers from Merce Cunningham to Antony Tudor, Siobhan Davies to Marius Petipa. Dance items regularly featured on the Late Show, as well as on ITV's South Bank Show. Meanwhile Channel 4 was screening works by Pina Bausch and Michael Clark, as well as commissioning its own made-for-TV dance films. In 1986 commissioning arts editor Michael Kustow considered it necessary to hire a dance consultant just for Channel 4. Two decades on, Ross MacGibbon, responsible for dance on BBC television, has resigned in frustration. There isn't enough for him to do.
Still, the situation here isn't as black and white as Kaufman portrays it in America. The huge community that tunes into Strictly Come Dancing not only get Saturday-night entertainment, they also switch on to some seriously feisty debate about technique and style. Channel 4's recent series about young kids trained by Birmingham Royal Ballet to perform Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet was a classic, as passionate about ballet as an art form as it was about the daily dramas created by the kids.
The decline in dance programming on TV has come at a time when the culture of live performance in Britain is healthy. With more theatres around the country presenting dance, with many more foreign companies performing here, and with audiences on the rise, it's possible that we just don't need so much dance on TV.
On the other hand, it remains a tiny proportion of the population who go to the theatre, and television could still be bringing dance to many more. For Sarah Kaufman, the irony of the American situation is exemplified by the fact that the recent winner of the TV show So You Think You Can Dance? said that her ultimate goal was to perform with a contemporary ballet company. Among the millions of viewers who had just crowned her "America's favourite dancer", very few could even know what a contemporary ballet company looked like.
