Viewers did not have to wait until Christmas for the turkeys this year

It is the Nativity, the season for kiddies, so let's pretend television is a child, rather than the bloated seventysomething it actually is. Has it been good enough over this past year to deserve to have its stocking filled by Santa (or in the case of the BBC, awaiting its licence fee settlement, by the Chancellor)? Well, call me a Grinch if you must, but let me first consider all the duds it has come up with - and when I say "all", I mean only those I watched and recall (for a fun party game around the Boxing Day cold cuts, add your own turkeys).

Stephen Poliakoff's Friends and Crocodiles was the first stinker of the year, and smelled the less sweet for so much of the BBC's drama budget having gone into it. It was about a self-made millionaire who came from, but was not of, the evil decade in which he prospered, Thatcher's Eighties. Poliakoff evidently believed whimsy was more powerful than capitalism. His vaguely connected follow-up, Gideon's Daughter, was a bit better, but still in love with its production values. For his next commission, he should be told to go off with a hand-held camera and find some new, less thespy faces to perform before it. The Line of Beauty (BBC2) was that rare thing - a turkey from the pen of Andrew Davies, horribly mismatched with the task of sexing up Alan Hollinghurst's Jamesean novel. BBC4's Fantabulosa!, about Kenneth Williams, was something even rarer: a misfire starring the incredible Michael Sheen.

You would think, too, that you could not go wrong with real-life stories as emotive as Guantanamo Bay and the 2004 tsunami, yet both Channel 4's slightly credulous, rather dull The Road to Guantanamo and BBC2's worthy, ungripping Tsunami: the aftermath made you realise dramatisation is not always the way to go. This point was made again by a truly terrible simpleton's guide to The Impressionists in BBC1's Sunday-evening Rolf slot - it actually had an actor dressed up as Renoir saying: "Life's more fun when you don't have to worry about money, Monet" - and again by Channel 4's Death of a President, a nasty piece of pointless wish-fulfilment about George W Bush. Stand by, no doubt, for the Alexander Litvinenko affair remade by Spooks.

It was not a good year for American imports. The West Wing ended with the Bartlet era and the death of the actor John Spencer, who played Leo. Its supposed replacement, Commander in Chief, in which America got a Madam President, was not worthy of being mentioned in the same breath, and has now been cancelled. Its true inheritor is Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which even stars Bradley Whitford, who was Josh in The West Wing. Although it won't be shown here until January, I've seen a couple of episodes, which have the style of the political melodrama but not its substance. It's about TV, for crying out loud.

The same criticism applies to Entourage: it's not just that it is less funny for being about Hollywood, it's that it fails to make Hollywood a metaphor for anything beyond itself. On Channel 5, Prison Break and Big Love, after early promise, proved tedious. And having Ricky Gervais appear on The Simpsons was, frankly, a mistake all round.

By the end of the summer, I was with the gloom merchants at the Edinburgh TV Festival: television (and especially ITV1) was finished; the future was YouTube and Google Video; a teenager with a phone on a bus could make more watchable television than Davies, Poliakoff and Gervais put together, with £10m between them. And then came autumn cheer.

There was a powerful, beautifully cast, slightly old-fashioned Jane Eyre on BBC1. Channel 4 showed us how drama-documentary should be done (as drama, that is, not documentary) with Peter Morgan's Longford. Stephen Fry's The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive on BBC2 proved a model of what a documentary can achieve: it was personal, universal and investigative. The Sopranos returned on More4 and made me realise how much I had missed it. Even ITV1 made a comeback with a pretty good Cracker and a better-than-that Prime Suspect: if you no longer have the wit to be original, try being good. In October, The Royle Family's Nan died. Her last words were "Trevor McDonald". As their neighbour said: "What a fitting tribute to the man." And what a fitting tribute to its cast and writers.

And so the Christmas story came true, at least for ITV. Down the chimney landed Michael Grade, twinkling like a Santa with a flick knife in his sack, a man who may not know everything about saving TV but at least likes it. Channel 4 will be pleased to have escaped the threat of life without its capo, Kevin Lygo. The BBC, meanwhile, should regard the possibility of some competition as a gift in its own right, and one very appropriate for an organisation that has come to display a prurient interest in markets and business through The Apprentice and Dragons' Den. Unless in the excellent Life on Mars (set in the Seventies), the BBC cannot afford to live in the past, and it does not look as if it intends to.

For some children, however, the star attraction of the coming weeks will be not Father Christmas but The Hogfather. This is the first time Sky has, off its own bat, made a drama to the standards and on the budgets of a BBC spectacular. Based on Hogfather, a Terry Pratchett Discworld novel, it is a kind of Gormenghast for pre-teens, though with plenty of in-jokes and long words for adults. It is shot in high definition, and "looks like it an' all" (affectionately to quote Drive-by Abuser from Modern Toss).

And so to my personal disappointment of the year. In early summer I paid £1,000 for an LCD television and put my name and money down for a Sky HD Digi-Box. After a little rank-pulling via the press office, the box arrived in time for the end of the World Cup. The pictures are very good. That is not my grumble. My grumbles are these. First, there is, six months on, still very little digital content. Sky does its best with Artsworld and sport, but the BBC HD service is still offering repeats of Bleak House and takes up most of the day with previews. It is true that technically it has not got approval to launch an HD channel, but nor did it have approval for a website. In any case, why shoot dramas such as Hotel Babylon in HD if you are not going to make something of it?

Second, when showing normal TV, the liquid crystals are just not up to it. The pictures they form are jerky, its dark colours are washed out and, if you sit at the wrong angle, you view patches of dense pixelation. I suspect plasma may be the superior of the two new technologies, but that old cathode ray is the best of all. The truth is that there has been a conspiracy between the content providers and the set manufacturers to pretend cathode ray and HD are incompatible in order to make us buy new but inferior sets. I used to say the nicest present on a tree was usually a little gift from me to me. Well, not this year. Have I been such a naughty viewer?

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

Christmas picks

Terry Pratchett's Hogfather
17-18 December, 8.05pm and 8pm, Sky One
Death and Santa on Discworld.

This Life + 10
2 January, 9pm, BBC2
What happens when (if) Egg, Miles, Anna, Milly and Warren grow up?

The Thick of It
2 January, 10.30pm, BBC4
Armando Iannucci's take on Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition.

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