Sherlock Holmes and the Strangely Silent Eighties

Those of us who find ourselves straying from terrestrial television in a bid to find something worth watching (if it's only Two and a Half Men) will be aware that the commercial breaks on many channels are not only amazingly long but also extremely loud. Now ITV3 has got into trouble for 'excessively strident' ad breaks during an episode of Sherlock Holmes. It's all about 'subjective loudness', and ITV3's defence is interesting: this Sherlock Holmes (the definitive TV version) was made in the Eighties and is therefore full of silent pauses, making the ads seem louder than they are. A bit of a lame argument perhaps, but based on truth. It's a reminder of how different TV drama was just a couple of decades ago, when it was not afraid of silence, or of inactivity, or of words. To watch such Eighties epics as Brideshead Revisited or The Jewel in the Crown now is to be amazed not only at the 'silent pauses' but at the leisurely pace, at the restrained use of music, and at how packed with serious dense dialogue - and static scenes - they are. Television dramas now keep dialogue minimal and functional, while filling the screen with (often pointless) activity, and laying on washes of music at every opportunity - and yet, despite the appearance of activity, they rarely get anywhere much. Compare an episode of a standard US crime drama with its UK equivalent - there is more meat in one crisply-scripted 40-minute episode than in an entire British miniseries. The mainstream TV dramas that reach the small screen these days are busy all right, and loud - but they are busy doing nothing.