The BBC’s malaise as compared with the big streaming platforms, addressed in the Director General Tim Davie’s speech last week, is a cultural expression of other national failings — primarily the inability to capitalise on success that has bedevilled British industry for generations. Just as the birthplace of the jet engine, of the worldwide web and of television itself finds its innovations adopted and then outpaced by other nations, so Britain serially underperforms in its cultural exports. As Davie observed, “On global streamers, a minority of the offer is UK content,” with the result that “global economic models drive you to a different place, editorially, from a UK player”.

They certainly do. There are few more revealing exercises than burrowing deep within the algorithmic suggestions of the big streaming platforms to see the cultural production subsidised by Britain’s state rivals. For some years now, the Russian state has overseen the production of big-budget war dramas, with a theme of painful sacrifice in the service of the Motherland: it does not take a conspiratorial mind to see this output as a foreshadowing of current events. China, similarly, has produced countless lavish historical epics on the past glory of the Middle Kingdom, a flexing of civilisational confidence that reflects the priorities of the rising superpower. India’s increasingly nationalistic output, equally, should be recommended viewing for British policymakers keen to win New Delhi’s favour: Britain most frequently appears in current Indian cinema as the source of cartoon villains, brutal sneering foils to the patriotic heroism of the leading actor. It is not an exaggeration to say that, buried within the bowels of Netflix and Amazon, we gain a clearer sense of the worldview of the rising powers of the coming decades than in all the sensible think-tank pieces driving British foreign policy.

What, then, does Britain’s outward-facing cultural production say about us? Frankly, nothing good. There are few more heart-sinking phrases in the English language than “Home-grown British Drama”, given the British film industry’s strange fascination with preachy kitchen sink parables, and unwatched gentle boomer comedies set in neglected regions. If a nation is defined by its culture, then ours is Jim Broadbent going on a bittersweet late-life journey of self-discovery across the Durham coalfields, forever. There are two opposing strands to the British imagination, the astonishing, visionary creativity that, we too easily forget, still characterises Britain to the wider world, and the suffocating tweeness around which our state-funded cultural exports revolve. The wrong strand still dominates.

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And if our external efforts are drab and lifeless, British television’s domestic output, like our high streets, increasingly appears a blasted wasteland. The bulk of the BBC’s programming can be characterised as Blue Peter for adults, whose presenters address the audience with the cheerily patronising, dead-eyed bonhomie of staff in a nursing home. If ITV expresses the inner world of the British working class, then it is alone a rebuke to any post-liberal project: surely no hope lies in the proles. And Channel 4, whose executives to this day see themselves as edgily groundbreaking innovators, produces by some margin the most formulaic programming on British television, endless “blue-light” observational formats set in maternity hospitals and animal shelters that blur interchangeably into each other. From its daytime roster of programmes warning pensioners about telephone scams and featuring aspiring slum landlords buying up rundown terraces at property auctions, to its evening output following the artificially constructed sexual quandaries of dazzling-toothed Deanos, British television presents an almost surrealist vision of modern Britain in all its claustrophobic grimness.

In these circumstances, it seems delusional to lament the audience’s drift towards American streaming services: it is the rational choice for any discerning consumer. It is perhaps too late for the BBC to catch up with Netflix, given its inattention to technological investment: until recently, it was impossible to even favourite a programme for later watching on iPlayer, one of the most basic functionalities of any streaming service. Yet as with everything else in modern Britain, the malaise is easily fixable with a clear reformist vision and a ruthless wielding of the scalpel. If British cultural production is an industry in decline, then it requires an industrial strategy to address. And as with heavy industry, that overperforming fellow middle power, South Korea, perhaps provides the clearest model to follow.

As a concerted effort of state policy, the South Korean government has championed film and television in service of the country’s soft power, with remarkable success. Launched by the Korean government nearly two decades ago, as “a distinct cultural policy based on state-developmentalism, public diplomacy, and nation branding” with the explicit aim of using culture “as both a domestic and foreign policy tool to strengthen its economic diversification, export profile, and cultural and public diplomacy outcomes”, the Korean Wave or Hallyu has been a remarkable global success. As one academic study observes, through the Hallyu policy Korea’s “export of cultural goods and services has grown exponentially; between 1998 and 2019, it chalked up a forty-time increase from $188.9 million to $12.3 billion in 2019”, with a ripple effect on other industries, so that between 2011 and 2016, every $100 of exported Hallyu content “generated an attendant export of USD248 worth of consumer goods from South Korea”.

Seeded by government grants and a concerted, joined-up state effort to enhance Korea’s global standing, the Hallyu policy has matured over time to depend on private finance. While the government bore the initial risks, as the Korean Wave has blossomed, a corporate ecosystem has evolved, generating both revenue and cultural and diplomatic capital in the service of the state. South Korea’s cultural diplomacy does not strive, like the BBC does, to compete with American platforms: instead it employs the Netflix and YouTube infrastructure in clear-eyed pursuit of its own goals. Working with laser-guided efficiency towards global success, South Korea’s cultural output nevertheless remains firmly Korean. Perhaps it is this unapologetic Korean-ness, that unabashed cultural self-confidence that makes it so appealing to a global audience. It does not fawningly attempt, as we do in every sphere, to seek American approval, but wins international esteem for being so resolutely of itself.

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Yet international success does not mean playing to the gallery: from Old Boy to Squid Game, Last Train to Busan and Parasite, South Korea’s international film and television hits have been marked by formal experimentation, dark and disturbing themes and a relentless quest to construct new visual worlds. It is the precise opposite approach to Britain’s cultural strategy in recent decades, a strategy which has not only failed but goes against what is most striking about the British character: its seam of visionary, innovative imagination, too often crushed by uninspired management, a timid desire to play it safe, and the relentless national trait of letting others exploit and benefit from its own low-hanging fruit.

Tim Davie’s assertion that the BBC’s “most successful approach is to focus on our point of difference: authentic British stories produced beautifully, not worrying too much about an abstract notion of global appeal” makes the right noises, yet his focus on “a shared British culture and our democratic, tolerant society” and gobbledegook pursuit of “unique algorithms to serve our values, for good… that bring us closer, not drive us apart” naturally makes eyes glaze over. There is surely no more interest globally than there is domestically in a televisual cross between Very British Problems and a period of detention in a Michaela school, or in being lectured on our Brilliant British Values by Marianna Spring. All of this is an expression not of cultural self-confidence but of its absence, the state broadcaster uneasily papering over cracks that threaten to bring down the roof. Like the country itself, British programming is hidebound by timidity and self-doubt.

In his 2021 essay “After Brexit, We Need an Iron Maiden Britain”, the writer Jeremy Driver posits the unfashionable, but undeniably successful, rock band as a model for a reformed British state: bombastically self-confident, freed from the tiresome restraints of good taste and unashamedly hungry for global success. In pursuit of soft power and prosperity, I would go even further: we need Warhammer Britain. The unfashionable, but wildly popular hobby is an underexploited national champion which a country like South Korea would long ago have swung behind in pursuit of soft power. More profitable than Google, worth more than Marks & Spencer, the Games Workshop company behind it has turned the Warhammer 40k intellectual property into a global phenomenon. It is remarkable, for example, that both sides in the Ukraine war have displayed a tendency to allude to Warhammer’s fictional universe, with Ukraine even fielding two units named after its fantasy factions: that is what soft power means. Warhammer’s lucrative gaming figurines are all made in Britain, with the company about to open its fourth factory, bucking national economic trends. During lockdown, the company didn’t claim any government subsidies despite shuttering its more than 500 shops: it’s so profitable it didn’t need to. Its characters are “ridiculous, over-the-top pastiches, created by people who were bored and angry” in a world where “hope has been extinguished for millennia” — and what could be more British than that?

With its global fanbase, its relentlessly successful pursuit of market dominance and ever-expanding profit, its rooting in British culture and commitment to local industry, the Warhammer intellectual property has the potential to be a British Disney or Marvel, an endlessly productive cash cow that simultaneously advances the nation’s soft power, not least within state adversaries such as Russia and China. As Games Workshop recently declared, “we own what we believe is some of the best under exploited intellectual property (‘IP’) globally”, a statement of self-belief that is surely correct. Yet — as so often — Britain lets America reap the full benefits, with Amazon set to exploit its popularity in a lavishly-funded series of TV shows and films produced by the British actor Henry Cavill. There is no reason why the BBC, with government backing, could not have picked this luscious low-hanging fruit as a national champion: all the elements for success present themselves with glaring obviousness.

But the same could be said for other under-exploited British intellectual property: given the relentlessness with which discourse in recent years has revolved around issues of empire, colonialism and race, the Flashman series of novels, which presents Britain’s imperial history with a far more sceptical and ambivalent eye, rooted in scholarly accuracy, than many perhaps realise, could have been a global success, deftly asserting Britain’s ownership of its own history. Why was the success of Peter Weir’s Master and Commander not capitalised on with a reboot of the Hornblower series? Given the success of BBC’s The Last Kingdom, an adaptation of Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon series of novels — promptly sold to Netflix, with the quality declining even as the budget was boosted — could we not use the vast armies conjurable with CGI to reboot Cornwell’s Sharpe series for a new audience, or even better, adapt his Arthurian series on the forging of the British nation in a way that speaks, as the source material does, to Britain’s current, fissiparous challenges? From HBO’s Rome to Disney’s Shogun, the appeal of immersive historical worlds is enduring — and our national inclination to recreate them is surely the basis of our global brand.

The answer is that none of this is appealing to our cultural tastemakers, even if it would be wildly popular both at home and abroad. But, then, the British culture industry has been captured by people who are worse than political enemies: they are simply boring. It possesses neither the confidence to strive for high culture, nor the commercial instincts to exploit what is organically popular, leaving us stranded with a middlebrow output that, by trying to appeal to everyone, pleases no one. Who does not, when they hear a “topical” Radio 4 afternoon play, or listen to Mark Steel perform his notionally comedic circuit of provincial towns, reach for their proverbial revolver? It is like being trapped in a dictatorship whose cultural showpiece was the 2012 Olympic Ceremony. But the BBC’s rivals are no better: Channel 4 shows more of a commitment to showing quality European drama than making it, a reflection of our sad cultural cringe and lack of self-belief, while it would be an act of national self-harm to inflict ITV’s programming on the wider world. Like everything in Britain, in the interests of national survival, our cultural output requires total reform.

So where do we start? Conflicted though our tastemakers may feel about it, Britain’s Early Modern history is the basis of our global brand: it is the reason why the English language, the English men’s suit, and the game of football have become so widely adopted, globally, that it is hard to remember they are expressions of our national culture, surely the most widely adopted ethnic culture in world history. This is a vast seam of cultural capital, ready and waiting to be mined, which a South Korea could only dream of. But instead we let the wider world write our national story, turning Britain, as in Bridgerton, into a theme park for other cultures’ fantasies, a provincial museum whose captions are written by other people — and rarely to our best interests.

There is a vast market for a Britishness beyond our oscillation between tweeness and miserabilism, for a confidence that can be feigned even if it is hard to feel, and where even working out our doubts and insecurities in art — with a clear-sighted honesty absent in Britain’s current cultural output — would be productive. If we accept the argument, made in defence of the licence fee, that the BBC is a tool of British soft power, then in an era of global confrontation and self-assertion by rising powers, drawing on their history for worldly success, it must begin to act like it. For our age of moping twee to end, Britain’s new cultural imperium must begin.

Rippon, who had studied ballet as a child, astonished the world with the high-kick that followed. Now aged 78, she again astonished the world, with another high kick: one that seemed to go on several degrees past the point where most people’s legs stop bending even in the prime of life.

I’m not sure what the rather slicker and glitzier American Dancing With The Stars would make of a 78-year-old in sequins doing the splits live on Strictly Come Dancing, let alone the magnificently lumpen dad-dancing on display from newsreader Krishnan Guru-Murthy and veteran presenter Les Dennis. Certainly, Tucker Carlson’s cheerfully amateur cha-cha in series 3 of DWTS didn’t get nearly as forgiving a reception from the judges as Dennis’ gawky tango last week.

But if there’s one thing the British are good at, it’s exporting formats that get adopted internationally with local variations. Arguably our most successful ones in that sense are common law, and perhaps the business suit — but Strictly is surely up there as well. There are versions of the show in more than 75 countries, and they garner millions of viewers every year.

When a nation is so talented at white-labelling its own culture for overseas propagation, can it be said still to have a culture at all? The popular answer, among Britain’s contemporary elite, is “no”, quite the opposite: Britain, and England in particular, is believed not to possess a tradition or sensibility of its own. Rather, all our ostensibly native traditions, foods and saints originate elsewhere, while our monarchy is German. There’s a whole genre of social-media post dedicated to such assertions — shared, especially on St George’s Day, as a kind of national anti-ritual of self-effacement.

But a distinctive British sensibility does in fact exist, and has done for a very long time. It’s not clipped vowels and big houses: it’s a blend of singalong, smut, spectacle and sentiment, discernible in popular entertainment all the way back to the fairgrounds of the 17th century and probably further yet. It elicited loud tutting from middle-class moral reformers in the Victorian age, and goes largely ignored by our own middle-class moral reformers. And yet the British version of Strictly is so well-loved because it captures that ancient sensibility, in note-perfect contemporary form.

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Like snooker or Formula One, Strictly is for viewing with others. The pace is glacial, while every programme is highly structured. It’s ideal for half-watching while chatting or doing the ironing, then replaying at work on Monday. It’s not meant to be clever, different, innovative or ground-breaking. It’s meant to be for everyone.

And if each episode has a familiar formula, so too does each series. The overall effect is reassuring: some things never change. As Anton du Beke said last week: “The children back at school, the world is right again — Strictly is back on the telly!”

But if the show itself is an institution, the tradition from which it emerges is older still. In the 17th century, London’s fairs were not just about buying and selling. Events such as Bartholomew Fair were also sources of entertainment for all social classes. They combined trade with puppetry, performing animals, and shows that mixed vocal music with acrobatic spectacle such as rope-dancing.

As Britain industrialised in the 18th century, such seasonal events gave way to more permanent venues for commerce. And as the country grew wealthier, the booming urban population also demanded permanent facilities for commercial leisure. The style of entertainment that once frequented fairgrounds migrated to the “song and supper rooms” that grew out of pubs and coffee houses, and to urban pleasure gardens. These attracted working and lower middle-class people, often (but not always) men. Often a tough crowd, they would pelt disappointing performers with food, bottles, boots, or even dead animals.

But by the 19th century, music-halls were being purpose-built, with the stage front and centre, and bar facilities withdrawn to a “promenade” behind the seating. Canterbury Music Hall in Lambeth was rebuilt in 1855 to house an audience of 1,500. By the mid-19th century, then, London had between 200 and 300 such venues, where the sexes rubbed shoulders and prostitutes prowled.

This music-hall mix of smutty acts, flirting opportunities, and ladies for hire made such venues a target for moral reformers, who warned of the licentiousness and “demoralisation” they encouraged. Of particular offence were the “tableaux vivants”, live-action re-makes of famous artworks that used a sometimes-tenuous link to high art as an excuse to show off women wearing only a thin, flesh-toned layer to simulate nudity. Despite reformers’ efforts, though, the music hall thrived until the First World War — after which it gradually foundered in the new post-war age of jazz and moving pictures.

And yet the British are often reluctant to throw away something that works. So, variety adapted, embracing both jazz and the moving image, and becoming the “light entertainment” that formed the backbone of mid-century British television. From the bouffant naffness of Cilla Black and Terry Wogan, through easy-listening flautists and Children In Need and ballroom dancing (hosted by Angela Rippon, of course), to Des O’Connor and brass bands and syrupy children’s choirs and the time-honoured British tradition of the novelty Christmas Number One, Britain’s enduring love of variety entertainment has not wavered. Our heritage may be marketed overseas as laced corsets and emotional constipation, but Britain’s real heartbeat is Military Wives and singalong choruses, innuendo and “Grandma, We Love You”.

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So much so that St Winifred’s School Choir — the originators of “There’s No one Quite Like Grandma” — got back together, 38 years later, for a Christmas show in 2018. Innuendo has hardly disappeared, either, since Victorian times. In 1895, erotic magazine The Mascot described a music-hall chorus girl in distinctly horny tones:

With gesture trim she throws her limb
Out from her hip elastic
And for a fact, it’s not exact
-ly what you’d call Monastic

This is much the same mix of humour, understatement, and innuendo that greeted Angela Rippon’s leg reveal in 1976 — and its reprise in 2023. For Strictly today continues the tradition: a bit too much leg, and slightly too clingy clothing, and a bit too much pelvic action, but with a side order of muffled giggling that means you can watch it all with your nan.

It’s a testament to the enduring hold this mixture has on the national soul that it has survived not one but two revolutions in format: first the post-war transition to telly, and subsequently our arrival in the digital age. If anything, the smartphone era has intensified variety’s interactive, music-hall energy. Strictly pre-dated the first iPhone by only four years, and has leaned hard into the appetite the new medium has generated for 360-degree, access-all-areas content. Today, the Strictly fandom generates a well of tabloid gossip, montages, reviews, behind-the-scenes clips, interviews, spats. Secondary content extends the central dance-show material more or less as far as you’re willing to scroll.

And at the heart of it all, the vibe is much the same as ever. A bit horny, but playful with it; a bit glitzy, but with a hint of irony. And always, at heart, deeply sentimental: for the subset of Britons who dabbed their eye to “There’s No One Quite Like Grandma” has always been far more numerous than the subset who cringed and covered their ears. One of this year’s contestants, Bobby Brazier, has already revealed his desire to dedicate a dance number to his mum, the late reality TV star Jade Goody — a move that places him squarely in this pleasantly lachrymose tradition.

And thus, perhaps by accident, the overall Strictly vibe is considerably more conservative than the often painfully progressive BBC that produces it. But this is true in a Burkean way that’s also British, in the best sense: pragmatic, demotic, and driven less by principles than a reluctance to change something that’s working just fine.

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The structure of each show honours the beauty of ritual and repetition, while Strictly itself honours the longstanding continuity of popular entertainment itself. It has updated the format a little, in line with the country’s shifting demographic makeup and social attitudes, and perhaps the result paints an over-optimistic picture of how comfortable the culture is with these changes — or indeed how well Britain is flourishing overall today. But it’s not meant to be gritty realism.

In any case, such nods to the 21st century feel like minor adjustments, not radical cultural surgery. For both audience and contestants are, broadly speaking, unchanged: alternately sentimental and smutty, glitter-loving but gently ironic, tribal yet adaptable, and generous about cheering on the dad-dancing underdog.

Our moral betters may view this Britain as irredeemably wicked, or else — as when the Strictly format is sold overseas — as a translucent medium in which other cultures may be foregrounded. But away from the cultural cringe typical of the over-educated, Britain is still there. As showcased in Strictly’s 21st-century music hall, we’re much the same people as we have been for centuries.