Interesting thing in today’s MediaGuardian. It asked whether ITV1′s recent critical successes – you know, those 9pm dramas that mean people like me are actually watching the channel – is a good thing, or actually damaging for the emabattled channel. Phooh, who would be ITV1? First you make utter tummyrubbish and it gets slammed by people like us, but when you do make some decent stuff it gets questioned. Why is ITV1′s recent ejaculation of good stuff being scrutinised in a bad way? Read on…

Related: Place Of Execution episode one review | Place Of Execution episode two review | Super ITV Me | Lost In Austen news and reviews

It’s been a really decent couple of months for ITV1 (yes I know, it’s a weird sentence to read… think about how odd it was to write). We had Lost In Austen, a fairly original and very enjoyable post-modernist period romp, and then we had Place Of Execution, which is very good. We’re going to soon have The Prisoner and Wuthering Heights and Wired. The network has also signed up Pushing Daisies, Dexter and Gossip Girl for new series. All promising and exciting stuff.

So ITV1 is getting its act together slowly but surely. But the piece in The Guardian this morning speculated that it’s all very well producing this sort of quality (which, if you want to get highly demographical, caters for those ABC1s out there) but is it good enough to attract those much-coveted advertisers.

After praising the channel for its recent output, the piece then goes on to say:

“Despite high costs and long gestation periods, high-concept drama has an excellent track record when it comes to saving commercial networks – in the US, at least. CBS was trailing a poor fourth when it commissioned CSI at a then unheard of $1m an episode; ABC was in terrible trouble before Desperate Housewives and Lost; then there’s NBC and Heroes – the list goes on.”

So this sort of drama can work. Or can it?

“Lost in Austen attracted huge numbers of ABC1 viewers, as much as 22% up on that slot’s usual performance,” explains Andrew Stephens, founding partner of X-Box and Virgin Media’s planning agency Good Stuff. “The problem is, it averaged 3.5 million viewers over the series, where the slot usually gets 4.2 million.”

It’s mad isn’t it? As a watcher of television, I really don’t care too much about these facts and figures – all I care about is whether something good or not and worth watching. But, obviously, there’s more to it than that. ITV, if it doesn’t pick up the viewing figures the piece said, may have to sell its advertising cheaper next year.

What does that mean to us? A brief flirtation with quality and then back to utter rubbish? I hope not, but it’s a question of economics.

As I asked earlier, who’d be ITV1?