THE 1990s IN REVIEW: TELEVISION - Let's have more great British ideas, please

There were far too many weak sitcoms and flimsy docusoaps; but Caroline Aherne is a treasure. By Brian Viner

Television is set to leave the 1990s much as it arrived, criticised for a dearth of originality and an excess of sex, soap, general pap and American imports. Paradoxically, though, the rising standard of American imports has appeared to emphasise the relative feebleness of homegrown products. No matter that Cheers, Seinfeld, Frasier, Friends, The Simpsons and particularly The Larry Sanders Show represented the very best of American comedy, or that The X-Files, ER, NYPD Blue, Murder One, Homicide and particularly The Sopranos represented the very best of American drama; their captivating presence on our screens forced us to question the old saw, which we had no reason to question in the 1970s and 1980s, that telly-wise, we knock America into a cocked hat.

In many respects we still do. And speaking of cocked hats, the mid-1990s saw a rejuvenation of costume drama, led by the BBC's superb adaptation of Middlemarch. Unfortunately, while a nation swooned as Colin Firth got his shirt wet in Pride and Prejudice, producers legged it to Waterstone's to see what other classics they could unearth. For a while it all got terribly out of hand. And contemporary drama suffered as a result, notwithstanding such landmark events as Our Friends in the North, This Life, Hillsborough and Warriors. The trend continues, but mercifully it has a) slowed down and b) taken an intriguing new direction. Significantly, some of the decade's best contemporary drama, GBH and Holding On, was written by men (Alan Bleasdale and Tony Marchant) who are about to unleash their versions of Dickens (Oliver Twist and David Copperfield).

Documentary also suffered a kind of Pride and Prejudice effect, as a relentless conveyor belt of docusoaps chugged along in search of television's holy grail, manifest in such relatively cheap hits as Hotel and Driving School. The nadir was reached when This Is Your Life featured Maureen Rees of Driving School; television had moved from navel-gazing to the even more unwholesome habit of navel-picking.

Still, it was a good decade for the epic documentary project. David Attenborough compounded his reputation as a national treasure rarer than the natterjack toad, while The Death of Yugoslavia and The Nazis: A Warning from History continue to reverberate. The People's Century, too, was a remarkable labour of love. And Molly Dineen (The Ark, The Company of Men) emerged at the head of a batch of brilliant younger documentary-makers.

In sport, the BBC began the decade as Manchester United and ended it as Crewe Alexandra. That's the glib conclusion, anyway, but the emergence of satellite made it inevitable that BBC Sport would lose some of its gems, and no government was bold enough to put them under lock and key. ITV Sport, by contrast, leaves the decade as holder of the FA Cup final and Des Lynam double, unthinkable 10 years ago. And Rupert Murdoch will also look back on the 1990s with considerable satisfaction. He revolutionised television, and in so doing revolutionised football. Whether for the better is the $64,000 question. Phone a friend, if you like.

Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? is surely the light-entertainment phenomenon of the 1990s, and just what its acclaimed presenter, Chris Tarrant, needed to bury memories of the excruciating Man O Man. The point is that the quality pendulum never swings so violently as in the realm of light entertainment. But without debating the qualitative merits of Noel's House Party, Don't Forget Your Toothbrush and The Big Breakfast, it is fair to say that they all made a significant impact on the television landscape, a landscape that has not, as far as I can see, been much enhanced by Channel 5.

Channel 5 News, though, at least brought some freshness to what has, on the whole, been a pretty tired decade for news and current affairs in terms of presentation, if not content. Tears were shed as two old warhorses, World in Action and News at Ten, were killed off, although in hindsight it is remarkable that News at Ten was allowed to cock up the ITV schedules for so long. And fair's fair, television rose majestically to the occasion when it had to. In their very different ways, the Gulf war and the death of Diana made formidable logistical demands that were dealt with not just capably, but brilliantly.

But never mind the Royal Family. With The Royle Family, not to mention The Mrs Merton Show, Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash proved that Americans do not have a monopoly on wonderfully inventive comedy. I'm Alan Partridge, Harry Enfield and Chums, The Fast Show, Shooting Stars, Men Behaving Badly, Father Ted and Brass Eye reinforced the point, as did One Foot in the Grave, which seems to have been going on since time began, rather than 1990.

On a final sombre note, let us not forget that this was also the decade when, for Jill Dando, television stardom proved fatal.

NINETIES TV

1992 GBH

Lunacies of the far left in a 1980s "northern city". (C4)

1993 THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW Cleverest US comedy. (BBC2)

1994 MIDDLEMARCH

Inspired the mid-1990s glut of costume dramas. (BBC2)

1995 THE DEATH OF YUGOSLAVIA

A landmark in documentary-making. (BBC2)

1995 PANORAMA - THE DIANA INTERVIEW

Gobsmacking stuff. (BBC1)

1996 THIS LIFE

Brilliant and daring sex, drugs and affidavits drama. (BBC2)

1996 HILLSBOROUGH

Jimmy McGovern's remarkable drama-documentary. (ITV)

1997 BRASS EYE

Current-affairs spoof, at times astonishingly funny. (C4)

1998 WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE?

Its genius is its simplicity. (ITV)

1998 THE ROYLE FAMILY

A complete reinvention of the sitcom. (BBC2) BV