Dennis Potter: Has TV drama lost its nerve? All six episodes of Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective are being shown this month at the ICA in London. It deserves every second of such exposure. Funny and fierce, personal and fantastical, complex and deeply moving, there has never been anything on TV quite like it. Potter gave his hero, Philip Marlow, the same crippling and disfiguring form of psoriatic arthropathy from which he suffered, and then wove around it a drama in which events in Marlow's imagination and memory are interleaved with hospital life and with nostalgic songs that comment on the action. Potter sent a draft of his script to the BBC's head of drama, Jonathan Powell, in 1985. Powell recalled: "I'm not entirely sure I absolutely understood it, but it was heart-stopping material, especially the childhood stuff. And I went and told Michael Grade that it wasn't a thriller, but was about somebody with a terrible skin disease, and he said, 'Is it any good?. And I said, 'I'm not quite sure, but it's got some fantastic stuff in it. And he said, 'OK, off you go and make it. Which we did. Looking back, the serial's producer, Kenith Trodd, who is taking part in the ICA event, recognises the freedom he and Potter were allowed. "It was a period when you could light a fire and provided you didn't burn down the building, they handed you another box of matches," he says. As a result, Potter's dramas stand as the great flowering of an individual writer's voice on television. Over decades, he produced piece after piece indelibly stamped with his distinctive mark. He demanded to be watched. When The Singing Detective premiered on BBC One in 1986, eight million people tuned in. This rose to 10 million after a huge press furore about a scene where the child Marlow witnesses his mother's adultery. Those viewing figures are staggering: nowadays they are the kind enjoyed by froth such as Strictly Come Dancing, not by serious, challenging drama. This is, of course, partly due to the fragmentation of the audience by multichannel television. But only partly. When you search for Potter's equivalent today, you find yourself peering into a void. Stephen Poliakoff is probably the only writer given the same creative freedom as Potter, yet his languorous dramas are regarded as elite viewing. Jimmy McGovern, who emerged with such a distinctive voice, has tailored his talents to the semi-soap but socially crusading plots of The Street - and pieces of one-off campaigning such as Hillsborough. Paul Abbott's last major drama for TV, State of Play, was shown in 2003; his focus is now the long-running Shameless. State of Play, however magnificent, was also a thriller. And that is a clue to the kind of drama we get nowadays. Trodd says everything is now driven by genre, and it's true. If a programme doesn't fit a mould, then it is less likely to get made, so great sprawling dramas such as Peter Flannery's Our Friends in the North, distinctive in flavour and message, no longer seem to have a place in the schedules. Yet that serial attracted around five million viewers. The dramas that currently creep onto our screens are barely finding any viewers. The first episode of The Hour (part thriller, part period piece) attracted only 1.34 million viewers, a 6.1 per cent audience share. The political thriller Secret State, so trumpeted on Channel 4, found only 865,000. These are flagship dramas on major channels. When it was repeated on BBC Four recently, The Singing Detective still attracted 304,000, enough to make it the channel's highest-rated show. All of which raises many questions. Have we as a nation just lost our taste for watching ideas-based drama on TV? Or have our television commissioners lost the courage to give free rein to people who have something to say and think television is a great place to say it? Could British television today produce something as passionate as The Wire, the nearest modern equivalent to the ambitious work of the past? Could it cope with Dennis Potter? Would anyone watch if it could? I am not sure, but perhaps the fact our theatres are suddenly full of new plays which allow individual voices and complicated arguments to emerge, tells us something about the failure of television to be the great communicative medium of which Potter once dreamed.