Double vision

THE box in the corner of the room has had its day, replaced by a huge plasma flatscreen TV. And the way that we receive our programmes ensures that the future of TV in the next decade will continue to be one of change.

The future is digital. A TV screen will be only one way of receiving the programmes you can see when you want to see them. There’ll be no need to flick through channels with your remote to find something to watch.

You could be browsing through the free online TV providers on your computer and requesting what you want to watch on your TV, computer or mobile phone. Just like ordering a Chinese takeaway – a number 43 (yesterday’s episode of EastEnders) and a 52 (last night’s episode of Coronation Street) and, for pudding, a vintage episode of number 67, the Christmas 1999 episode of Only Fools And Horses.

Perhaps you’ll just go straight to one of the total recall machines like BBCiPlayer and get a recent programme or one from the archives.

Viewers, not TV companies, will be in control, although the ability to choose doesn’t necessarily mean more choice. Despite the 400- plus channels now available with satellite, cable and Freeview, cries of “but there’s nothing on” can still be heard regularly in homes up and down the land.

While those old enough to remember when Coronation Street started nearly 50 years ago prefer the old method of viewing – the TV remote in one hand, a copy of Radio Times in the other – the new generation are much more technologically minded.

The internet means more to them, with many preferring to get their entertainment directly on their computer, be it websites, music, DVDs or that old-fashioned thing called a TV programme. They chose screens, the PC or the TV, not channels. YouTube is as important as BBC1.

With websites offering everything from downloadable US TV shows to independent movies, the choice is going to get bigger.

New ITV chairman Archie Norman has his work cut out rebuilding the commercial TV company which has made deep cuts, in both staff numbers and production budgets, as the decline in advertising eats into profits. The BBC, too, is trimming costs and slashing stars’ high salaries to justify having the licence fee, fearful it could be taken away if they spend money as irresponsibly as MPs fill out expenses forms.

ITV was saved from a totally disastrous 2009 by Simon Cowell, whose Britain’s Got Talent and The X Factor delivered record audiences and “loadsamoney” via the public phone vote.

So expect great swathes of the schedules to be filled by those shows again this year, along with I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here and Dancing On Ice.

They’re brands that take little promotion, run like well-oiled machines and invite donations from viewers. The 2010 free-to-air schedules rely, like movie producers, on remakes of old hits and the return of hit series. Ways of watching are changing, but what’s available to watch has an air of deja vu.

The Sixties cult drama The Prisoner has been given a makeover, with Ian McKellen in control as Number Two, and Jim Caviezel as Number Six, who gets chased by a big ball and shouts he’s not a number. Trevor Eve takes time off from Waking The Dead to get entangled in ITV’s fresh adaptation of the drama A Bouquet Of Barbed Wire.

This version co-stars Hermione Norris, icy cool spy Ros from BBC1’s Spooks, who may or may not have been blown up with the home secretary in the final episode of the last series.

Spooks, one of the best shows on TV, will be back in 2010 and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Ros will be too.

Julian Fellowes, an Oscar-winner for his Gosforth Park screenplay and writer of The Young Victoria, has penned Downton Abbey, about life above and below stairs in a country house.

Not to be outdone, the BBC is planning to revive another favourite old series, Upstairs Downstairs, which is much the same thing.

As the new season gets under way, next week’s schedules are chock-a-block with returning series like Wild At Heart and Lark Rise To Candleford. More excitingly, so is Being Human, BBC3’s hit about a house-sharing werewolf, vampire and ghost.

Leonra Crichlow, the ghostly third of the trio, also stars in Material Girl – not about Madonna but set in the fashion industry. Imogen Edwards-Jones’ book Hotel Babylon inspired the increasingly-ludicrous eponymous BBC series. Another of her books, Fashion Babylon, is the inspiration for Material Girl.

KAY MELLOR has taken her hit play A Passionate Woman, premiered at West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds with Anne Reid in the title role, and turned it into two TV films. Billie Piper – who also has a third series of The Secret Diary of A Call Girl for ITV – plays a young wife and mother who falls for her Polish neighbour in Fifties Leeds. Flashforward to the Eighties and Betty, now played by Sue Johnstone, finds the past comes to haunt her on her son’s wedding day.

Of the returning series, C4’s Shameless continues to surprise and shock with the exploits of the Gallaghers, led by David Threlfall’s drunk and drugged Frank, and the Maguires on Manchester’s Chatsworth estate. After seven series, the Americans have decided to remake Shameless and set it in Chicago.

BBC3 has cornered the market for biopics of late with tales of Margot Fonteyn and Gracie Fields, but C4 fights back with Mo, all about nononsense Labour politician Mo Mowlam, played by Julie Walters.

ITV goes 71 Degrees North, a frozen version of I’m A Celebrity that comes from Norwegian TV. Ten sort-of-famous people will be sent on the 2,000-mile trip to the North Cape, 400 miles inside the Arctic Circle. Instead of eating crocodile tongue and kangaroo anus, the contestants will go parachuting in the mountains, kayaking and swimming in frozen fjords.

And, of course, the new Doctor Who makes his debut proper after a brief appearance at the end of the New Year’s Day episode. Matt Smith can’t hope to be as good as outgoing Time Lord David Tennant, but can aim to be different and brilliant in his own way. This youthful Doctor has an even younger new companion, played by Karen Gillan.