But when you study the financial arithmetic, what’s so remarkable is how many shows do find a stage. According to The Play’s the Thing — Channel 4’s search for a new Pinter, or Stoppard, or Bennett, to launch on to Shaftesbury Avenue — “of the 51 plays that opened in the West End last year, 16 were new works by recognised writers, and just two of them made money: both comedies.” You’d have to have a theatre impresario’s sense of humour to find that funny.

Shaftesbury Avenue has become somewhere you go for a big musical, or for the classics. Contemporary drama has been hijacked by TV soap operas. As for going to the theatre for a glimpse of the seedy underside of life, to watch people injecting themselves with Tippex correction fluid, or knifing a stranger because he overtook them on the motorway, well, you can see that at pretty much any street corner nowadays, without having to pay £40 for a seat.

Some masochists even seem to go to the theatre as much for ammunition to remind them of why they don’t go to the theatre any more as they do for entertainment (except that, sometimes, these two coincide: Mrs Patrick Campbell once said that watching Tallulah Bankhead on the stage was like watching somebody skating on thin ice — everyone wants to be there when it breaks).

So you warm to courageous theatre impresarios in a way you don’t to Hollywood studio executives, who seem to survive even when they produce turkeys all year round, not just at Christmas. Producers of plays are like roulette players who walk into a casino with a charity’s bank account in their wallet, hoping to double their chips: it’s a very high-risk gamble, with a lot of people’s livelihoods riding on the outcome, but their heart’s in the right place.

Sonia Friedman is such a theatre impresario. She’s had 65 leading shows in London and on Broadway. “Now,” says the narrator of The Play’s the Thing, “she’s attempting something that’s not been done for 40 years: she wants to find a new play by a first-time writer and make it a West End hit.” Forty years? Can it really have been that long? Which was the last one, do you suppose? Joe Orton’s Loot? Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead maybe?

It’s clearly not for any want of passion among playwrights that their work doesn’t make it on to the stage. More than 2,000 would-be playwrights submitted plays for the Channel 4 competition; 70 per cent of them men, and 30 per cent women. Of the submissions, 81 had Jesus in the title, 198 talked of terrorism, 210 featured end-of-life experiences, and 335 visit gyms or fat clubs.

Were there any, you couldn’t help wondering, which featured all these elements? You know: an overweight Jesus gets assassinated by terrorists on his way to WeightWatchers?

And if you think that theatre audiences — wet-nursed on watching TV from their sofas — are demanding, you should hear the people who actually love the theatre. To help her to choose a play, Friedman has drafted in the actor Neil Pearson and literary agent Mel Kenyon. Discussing the work of one writer, Friedman sighs, “I want to get lost in her world.” Pearson hisses, “I want her world to get lost.” And Kenyon? “I don’t want to end up in an adult fairytale.” So if you disagree with theatre critics, you needn’t feel as if it’s you who has missed something.

Big Love is another classy American drama that Five has managed to snatch from under the noses of its rivals. Whether it’s a great drama is still a little too early to tell.

The blue-chip cast includes Bill Paxton as a Mormon polygamist who owns a chain of DIY stores; Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloë Sevigny, Ginnifer Goodwin, as his three wives; Bruce Dern as his father; and Harry Dean Stanton, as one of his fathers-in-law. The show was made for HBO by Tom Hanks’s production company. It looks sleek, in that Desperate Housewives way, but not as pointlessly arch; and not as deranged as Lost.

Big Love further blurs that line between TV and Hollywood: big name stars no longer feel as if they’re slumming it on the the small screen. The series seems to offer a peep at the countours of Mormon polygamy, but it comes across more as a drama of family life and financial feuding: a sort of Dallas, set in Salt Lake City.

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