The complexity of this question is shown by the fact that, although Yentob is regularly criticised for failing to deliver ratings, he suffers abuse from many of the same quarters for screening the National Lottery draw, a show which has nothing to be said for it except large audiences.The third issue concerns the recent restructuring of the BBC drama department. Commissioning has become less collegiate, and power to advance or kill scripts is now concentrated around a smaller group of executives – principally George Faber, supreme forsingle dramas, and Nick Elliott, imported from LWT to oversee popular serials. In addition to this, Yentob and Jackson, stung by a series of drama failures before this year, have increasingly relied on their own instincts, killing some pet projects of the drama department. It may be significant, with regard to Andrew Davies’s speech, that the playwright’s champion and collaborator, Michael Wearing, is one of those reportedly left uncomfortable by the recent reforms.It was against the background of these dramas-within-drama that Andrew Davies’s address last night was written and received. And it is important to understand what he was, and was not, saying.The first point is that, while eagerly seen by Yentob’s critics as an attack on BBC1’s poor ratings performance, Davies’s lecture was actually saying the opposite It was a defence of elitism in TV drama.

What he said was: “Drama should be all about trying to make masterpieces, not chasing tired old shows downmarket after ratings.”The problem for Yentob and the BBC is the extent to which the medium has changed since Dennis Potter first wrote for television in the Fifties or Andrew Davies turned in his first scripts in the Seventies. At that time, serious drama (as distinct from sitcom or soap opera) was largely exempted from the ratings struggle, even in ITV. In 1976, Thames screened in peak-time Bill Brand, a densely dialectical series about a Labour MP, written by Trevor Griffiths. ITV even competed with the BBC in the area of “classic serials” – principally, Granada’s Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel In The Crown and Hard Times.These days a producer who approaches ITV holding a book by Dickens, Waugh or Paul Scott or 13 Trevor Griffiths scripts could expect to be taken away in a van. The previous consensus – in which even the commercially funded ITV was, in effect, a public service broadcaster – was broken by market reforms imposed on the media by the post-1979 Conservative governments: multiplication of channels and introduction of satellite TV, development of the home video market, auctioning of ITV franchises to the highest bidder.And so the BBC was left as the sole British producer of single plays and adaptations of serious novels. (Channel 4 has concentrated on cinema co-productions and one major drama serial a year from an established writer such as Potter or Alan Bleasdale.) This isolation might have had benefits – no competition for actors, playwrights or rights to novels – if it had not coincided with another cultural shift.

In the first half of this decade, politicians and critics have come to accept ratings as the only real arbiter of a drama’s success.For the first time in its history, the BBC has been judged by its success on enemy territory – in the field of mass-audience drama, where series are measured rather than treasured – and it has suffered heavy losses Some of its difficulties result from mistakes. Certain of ITV’s recent successes – the sentimental Heartbeat and the formulaic Peak Practice – might seem no great loss to the more cerebral executives at Television Centre, but questions must be asked about how they managed to miss such quality products as Cracker, Inspector Morse and Prime Suspect.There have also been structural failures. For all their qualities, neither Yentob nor George Faber is celebrated for organisation or quick decision-making and the Controller and the drama baron have sometimes paid for their delays. Star writers complain of growing old while waiting for decisions. The second series of BBC1’s one popular drama hit of last year, Chandler & Co, will be lacking two of the three original stars because of prevarication over contracts.

Lengthy agonising over whether the BBC1 saga Seaforth would be given a second series (eventually, it wasn’t) further encouraged the view that the BBC’s management floor is full of desks where the buck does not so much stop as hang around for a few months.The difficulty is that Andrew Davies’s suggestions for reform are seriously flawed. He asked for the drama department’s hunches to be supported by the channel bosses. But Yentob and Jackson started calling the shots themselves precisely because the specialist section heads had heavily backed so many lame horses. Davies mocks the present Controller’s background in the arts, but when a former drama head, Jonathan Powell, ran BBC1, he scheduled more losers than Yentob.Also, if you widen the definition of drama to include comedy, the BBC leaves ITV with one, or even two, feet in the grave.

Indeed, under Yentob and Jackson, a specific and distinctive genre of BBC fiction has developed. It ranges from sitcoms like Absolutely Fabulous and The Brittas Empire, to the police series Between The Lines, the black medical comedy Cardiac Arrest and the classic adaptations Middlemarch and Martin Chuzzlewit. It is an intelligent semi-populism, verbally and visually slick, often subversive in intention. This genre has a natural audience of around 6 or 7 million, although individual episodes may attract as many as 10 million It is the sole preserve of the BBC.