MIKE MULVIHILL

The past year was a brilliant one for television – but 2017 promises to be even better

Television has always been seen as the poor relation of cinema, but that perception is changing fast. While it costs upwards of £1 million per screen minute to make your average blockbuster feature film, this has historically fallen to around £1 million an hour for TV drama. But that figure is soaring as competition between channels is pushing up quality and cost.

The trend took a huge upward curve in 2016 when TV was taken to a new level, with some of the biggest budgets ever and a scale and ambition never seen before. There was Planet Earth II, War And Peace, The Night Manager, The Grand Tour, Westworld and The Crown – reportedly the most expensive TV series made, costing Netflix a staggering £100 million for the first 20 episodes.

But it’s not just internet streaming sites that have deep pockets – BBC drama The Night Manager came in at £3 million an episode, while Sky’s Game Of Thrones can cost anything from £5 million to £8 million per instalment.

Drama wasn’t the only programme genre being lavished with eye-watering sums: Amazon reportedly spent more than £200 million securing the first three series of Jeremy Clarkson’s new car show The Grand Tour while the BBC spent millions on Planet Earth II, the most impressive natural history series ever made.

Not only is TV getting more ambitious, there’s more of it. There were 416 hours of new UK drama on free-to-air channels last year, up from 371 in 2015. And there’ll be even more in 2017 – including blockbuster shows on all platforms.

Among the highlights coming to the BBC are Hollywood star Tom Hardy’s impressive historical drama Taboo, which begins on BBC1 tonight (see the feature over the page), Nicole Kidman in the second run of detective mystery Top Of The Lake, an adaptation of Len Deighton’s alternative post-Second World War novel SS-GB, and ambitious versions of JK Rowling’s Cormoran Strike novels and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. ITV has more Broadchurch, The Durrells, Victoria and Prime Suspect, this one a prequel with Stefanie Martini stepping into Helen Mirren’s shoes as Jane Tennison. On Amazon, Robert De Niro is rumoured to be getting £700,000 an episode to star in David O Russell’s new as-yet-untitled crime drama, while Netflix has the second instalment of The Crown and the cinematic new series Frontier, about the North American fur trade in the 18th century.

With bigger stars and even bigger budgets, you might feel the need for a bigger telly. Luckily the January sales are still on...