Taking TV crossover seriously: Elizabeth Berrington and Jeremy Swift in a 2002 stage production of Abigail's Party. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
How nice it is to have a Hollywood A-lister take on the duffness of Saturday night TV and Andrew Lloyd Webber. It's hard to imagine De Niro or Brad Pitt caring so much about How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? or Any Dream Will Do, but Kevin Spacey does. Maybe he just wants something else to watch after he's finished his tea and Doctor Who.
But is it really fair to attack the BBC for not supporting original drama on TV? Should we hold them responsible for their disgraceful attitude to theatre as Michael Billington did here yesterday? I recently caught the 30th-anniversary repeat of Abigail's Party on BBC4, one of the classics that's always mentioned when people bring up Play for Today. Yes, there's brilliance there, and the performances and Mike Leigh's savage script all hold up - but I have to say, for me, it doesn't feel like great television. Surely the medium has evolved past the point where simply filming a play is enough? Theatre on TV has always felt like a compromise - not a great substitute for actually being there, and not really the best use of TV's potential.
On the other hand, there's still a lot to be found in the BBC's drama output that's more than worthwhile. The centrepiece of this year's Easter weekend, Anthony Minghella's last work, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, is one entry on a list of high-quality single dramas screened over the last few years: Stuart: a Life Backwards, Hawking, Tsunami: The Aftermath, The Ruby in the Smoke, Wide Sargasso Sea, White Girl, the Russell T Davies version of Casanova with David Tennant. And that's not to mention the string of Stephen Poliakoff feature-length dramas. (Yes, it would be great if other writers were given the same licence to use the licence fee on their projects, but at least we have him.)
How about BBC4's Curse of Comedy season that's running at the moment? Like some of BBC4's other one-off dramas - Julia Davis in Fear of Fanny and Michael Sheen's Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa! - they're biopics, so perhaps they somehow fall outside the "original" definition, but they've all been well received.
I'm not sure Spacey's idea of running a serious theatrical talent search competition would be the way forward, either. Unless it looked a lot more like Masterchef and a lot less like Any Dream or Pop Idol, it would be hard to imagine young kids being enthused about anything other than being on another talent show. BBC3's recent run of one-off pilots is much more constructive: an enjoyable set of dramas featuring young actors that all feel like they'd be worth commissioning into full series, from The Things I Haven't Told You, to West 10 LDN, Dis/Connected, Mrs Inbetweeny and the genre-led Phoo Action and Being Human.
The problem is that in a sprawling multi-channel world, it's a lot harder to find these one-offs, so grouping them together under an umbrella term could help; BBC4's Storyville documentary brand, for example, has become a real stamp of quality. If a revived Play For Today strand included new writing, repeats of the best recent TV drama, and some of the more theatrical classics (many of which are still not on DVD), that might be a way to make everyone happy - well, everyone except Andrew Lloyd Webber.
