TV matters: Five Days and MasterChef

An obsession with ratings has been one of the wrecking-balls in British television. Once raw numbers become the qualification, populist formats will generally prosper at the expense of challenging material. Last week, though, brought a historic and optimistic exception to this rule, with Five Days securing around 6 million viewers each night at 9pm on BBC1, while MasterChef, recently expanded and translated to peak-time, was struggling to achieve half that audience in the previous hour. These figures challenge the conventional opinion that cheap reality is a better bet for schedulers than expensive drama. Although the BBC's recent promise to divert money to high-quality programming is widely assumed to be politically motivated, these statistics suggest – contrary to common cynicism about public taste – that it may also prove a popular policy. Though pleasing, the outcome of this fiction/kitchen stand-off also surprises me. Although Five Days was further evidence of the astonishing reserves of acting talent in Britain – in-demand younger stars such as David Morissey combining with veterans including Bernard Hill and Anne Reid – it failed to reach a satisfying resolution after the ambiguities and atmosphere that had been meticulously built up. This is the second time recently, after ITV1's Collision, that a drama stripped across the week has used a thriller format but a non-thriller denouement. It's healthy to resist generic cliches, but sometimes they deserve to be observed. There should, though, be another series of Five Days, and there might be a chance for the episodes to stretch to two hours because it's hard to believe MasterChef will still be there at 8pm. Having already destabilised one hit format – Strictly Come Dancing – through over-extension, the BBC has now done it again. MasterChef worked as a diverting half-hour. At an hour three times a week in BBC1 peaktime, it has become bland and overambitious.