You may or may not recall that earlier this year Patrick Stewart and Ashley Jensen were in a show called Eleventh Hour for ITV.

It claimed to be an exciting new concept which would use the latest science news-stories as a what-if to spark intelligent human drama.

It wasn’t terribly good.

So what happened?

Writer of two episodes and creator of the series Stephen Gallagher talks to The Scientist magazine about what went wrong.

Which was, basically, that for a series all about science the producers didn’t care about science. To the point of ignoring it.

As he points out in the article, millions of people watch House and ER without choking on the medical science. The producers of Law & Order don’t make up new laws in order to get an easier-to-understand story – so what’s the problem?

I rather suspect the problem here is a simple one – The producers aren’t writers.

As Stephen has said before elsewhere, in the UK industry as it stands now, production companies buy stories, not writers.

If we’re to hold our heads up high and compete in the worldwide television industry this has to change.