Television - Andrew Billen wonders at the spate of time-starved dramas

Brevity, as we know, is the soul of wit. A development in TV drama worries me, however. In the past fortnight, three prestigious dramas, each the autumn flagship for its channel, have launched with running times of a mere 30 minutes where one would have expected an hour.

Linda Green (9pm, Tuesdays) is an important newcomer to BBC1, and is being heralded on poster sites. It comes from Nicola Shindler's Red Productions, which made Clocking Off and Bob and Rose, a factory of bespoke quality which just about keeps intelligent British drama alive on the box. Written by Paul Abbott, who created Clocking Off, it may prove to contain his best work yet. In Green, he has certainly created a central character who is both original and immediately recognisable, the kind that takes on a life of her own in the culture. Rooted as ever by Abbott in real life, Green is a devil-may-care car finance saleswoman by day. By night, she is a devil-may-care cabaret singer and devil-may-care sexual adventuress.

The opening episode had her ditching her current boyfriend and then welcoming into her bedroom a friend who, by the casualness of his "Fancy a jump?", we realise is one of a stable of casual lovers. Although she opens the programme singing the refrain "It's got to be perfect", Green, unlike almost every other thirtysomething woman on television, does not worry about the perfect relationship. She frets merely about getting the best possible sex. She is, in other words, a healthy, red-blooded male - except she is a woman, which is what makes her interesting.

It is a spectacular performance from Liza Tarbuck as Green. Tarbuck has been a Big Breakfast presenter and a quiz show hostess, but this indisputably establishes her acting credentials. Green is pleasantly overweight and so self-confident that she wouldn't mind you saying that, either. She is tough and bitchy. Her tongue is lacerating and Abbott gives her wonderful dialogue to sharpen it on. (Incidentally, in the first programme, he has also inserted a fantastically dirty joke about which side of the bed a man should sleep on.) Yet she is also cuddly. Throw the word "slag" at her and it would bounce right back at you. She is what the BBC has been trying to make out of Pauline Quirke for years.

For the life of me, however, given the generous proportions of her performance and the breadth of talent of her supporting players (Clare Rushbrook, Dave Hill), I do not understand why Abbott has narrowed his scope to a series of ten half-hours. The 30-minute format overemphasises Abbott's weakest point, which is his plotting. The opening story relied on Green's boyfriend having an identical twin, who was considerably nicer than he was. Even Christopher Ecclestone, who played both Tom and Neil Sherry, could not make this look likely. And the lesson Neil taught Green at the end by impersonating his gentler brother ended up having to be spelt out in shorthand: "Tom gives women what they want, but that's not what women want, is it, Linda?" Even her response to this - a head-butt - could not make this speech sound less like the punchline to one of Aesop's fables.

I hope the success that Linda Green will surely be will be rewarded with an expanded running time. The failure of the first season of Tony Garnett's Attachments (10pm, Thursdays, BBC2) has, conversely, been punished by the episodes being cut down to half an hour each for the second series. There was something wrong with this story of sexual and business betrayal in the dotcom world, and Garnett, one of the few people in television whom I would unhesitatingly call a genius, realised that it was not simply that the website bubble was bursting just as his kids were getting rich from it.

Concluding that his show only half worked, he has now ditched almost all reference to the boardroom and computers and concentrated on the bedroom. So it is literally half the programme it was, and we'll see if Garnett has ditched the right half. In the meantime, we can enjoy the pure moral sordidness of the proceedings - the beer-poured-on-Golden-Nuggets moments - and relish Tony Whitehouse's dialogue, which includes charming outbursts such as: "This fucking friendship crap. Like you're going to listen to all their shit and not get your dick sucked in return." My hunch is that the difficulties with Attachments are not going to be solved by paring it down to its elemental nastiness, when elemental nastiness is actually the problem.

ITV, meanwhile, has got itself into another muddle by commissioning a series of H E Bates's Uncle Silas stories as half-hours and then losing its nerve and showing them back to back in one-hour packages. Funnily enough, although I have reservations about Albert Finney's unthreatening performance as the bucolic rogue, in this case, half an hour is quite enough to do justice to this slimmest of Bates's creations. However, one cannot but look back at the expansiveness of The Darling Buds of May ten years ago, and the seriousness of Country Matters in the Seventies, and think how Bates has in the past been used to greater effect and at greater length. Small may be beautiful but less is not always more.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard

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