Are we seeing the decline of the costume drama on British television? Of the offerings announced so far for 1999, The Scarlet Pimpernel, starring Richard E. Grant as the elusive, swashbuckling hero, is the only non-contemporary offering. Otherwise, there's a mix of comedy and drama, much of it reliant on familiar faces from other, recently deceased series.
Nick Berry, freshly escaped from Heartbeat, returns as an ex-serviceman turned harbourmaster in Harbour Lights (BBC 1). Michelle Collins, formerly of EastEnders, plays a holiday tour rep in Sunburn (BBC 1), and Neil Morrissey is directed by his Men Behaving Badly co-star Martin Clunes in Hunting Venus (ITV), a comedy film set in the early 1980s, with Morrissey as a New Romantic pop star who has a sex change after his band breaks up.
ITV's Wonderful You, meanwhile, is a drama series about a group of London friends coping with life at 30. Also on ITV, in Rhinoceros, Robson Green and Niamh Cusack play a divorced couple searching for their missing teenaged son, while Births, Marriages and Deaths (BBC 2) has Ray Winstone, Phil Davis and Mark Strong as three old school-friends for whom a boozy, prenuptial excursion has unexpectedly dramatic results.
Jimmy McGovern's powerful The Lakes is back for a second series on BBC 1, and the BBC attempts to cash in further on the popularity of medical dramas with Holby City, a spin-off that focuses on the surgical ward of the same hospital in which Casualty is set.
Documentary and factual series include a television version of Bill Bryson's hugely popular Notes from a Small Island (ITV), in which the American writer casts a wry eye over the peculiarities of modern Britain, while two new observational series on BBC 1 have a romantic tinge: Love Town looks at the marriage industry in Gretna Green, and The Matchmaker is set in an upmarket dating agency.
Next week sees several of RTE's main titles returning for new series, including the interior decoration show Beyond the Hall Door, the consumer programme Streetwise and the motoring magazine Drive! The channel's new travel show, No Frontiers, will feature destinations ranging from the exotic (Vietnam, Zimbabwe) to the more familiar (London, Donegal).
A different approach to travelling is offered in a new, eight-part series of the video-diary Across the Line, in which Leona Daly from Wexford and Lleucu Siencyn from Wales travel from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Poet Theo Dorgan presents a new book programme, Imprint, while Paddy O'Gorman brings the format of his radio show, Queueing for a Living to television for O'Gorman's People, in which he talks to people stuck on the margins of Irish society.
Starting in February, D-Watch is a fly-on-the-wall series following the work of firefighters working out of Phibsboro station in Dublin. The Leaving, another fly-on-the-wall documentary, beginning in March, watches students from around the country as they prepare for the 1998 Leaving Certificate exams. The Green, Green Grass of Home is a series in which expatriate Irish comedians return to their birthplaces, while, after Easter, Obsessions is a new series in which people talk about personal passions ranging from Morris Minors to tattoos. Also planned for the spring is a new, eclectic cookery programme, The Big Stew, presented by Tom Doorley.
TV3 will continue to be heavily reliant on imports over the first few months of the year, although the channel promises a significant increase in home-produced programming as 1999 wears on. Most notable among the major new titles starting over the next few months are the witchcraft series Charmed, a big hit in the States, and the cult cartoon favourite South Park.
But many of the new American shows which form the backbone of the Network 2 and TV3 schedules have been performing badly in their domestic market. Audience figures for mainstream television in the US have been falling now for some years, in the face of competition from cable, video, the internet and other forms of communication and entertainment. But the whole of television is on uncertain ground at the moment: the arrival of the first digital TV services last year has set the scene for a complete transformation of the medium - but nobody really seems to know what the future will bring. For the moment, more prosaic issues such as who owns Cablelink are likely to have more effect on the choices available to Irish viewers.
In British television, the single most noticeable change in 1999 will be the long-predicted demise of News at Ten, ITV's flagship news programme, which the channel has been trying to dump for years. In response to charges of dumbing down, ITV has been making reassuring noises about new, quality, current affairs programmes and documentaries, but when the chips are down, we can expect to see movies and feature-length dramas at 9 p.m., without losing chunks of audience-share during a 40-minute "intermission". The BBC and Channel 4 are also planning revamps of their flagship news programmes in the next few weeks, while on RTE, we should be seeing the arrival of the controversial "weather babes" by the summer.