WHAT’S THE best-kept secret in Hollywood? Go on, guess. If your answer involves a Scientologist, a bar of soap and George Clooney in a French maid’s outfit, you’re wrong. The little-talked-about fact is this: during 2005 the average American household tuned in to TV for eight hours and 11 minutes per day — a daily sit-a-thon that was 2.7 per cent longer than the previous year, 12.5 per cent longer than ten years ago, and, for good measure, the longest reported since Nielsen Media Research began monitoring such things in the 1950s.

“The perception has been that TV viewing is going down and that people are using other media,” said a spokesperson for Nielsen. “But we’re not seeing that. Overall, TV watching is up.”

So why should Hollywood care? Here’s one good reason: as TV viewing increased, cinema attendance fell to its lowest in 20 years. The official excuse — that moviegoers stayed at home to watch DVDs — doesn’t wash. The truth is, they were at home, watching TV.

All of which prompts another question: weren’t the movies of 2005 too, well, gay for Americans? To judge by the country’s most popular TV shows, that seems unlikely. There is a gay son in Desperate Housewives, a gay mobster in The Sopranos and a gay theme night on American Idol (if songs by Queen count as a gay theme). As for those other popular family-values shows, there are offerings about a corrupt, murdering cop (The Shield); a corrupt murdering President (24); a polygamist businessman and his three wives (Big Love); a misanthropic hospital doctor (House); and, of course, a prison inmate and his sex offender sidekick (Prison Break).

For Hollywood, this is the uncomfortable reality: TV has adapted far better to the 21st century than the movie studios. TV networks, long regarded as the cheaper, less glamorous relations of Hollywood — consider the media attention given to the Emmys compared with that to the Oscars — have spent the past five years cancelling sitcoms and investing in the kind of hour-long comedies and dramas that helped to turn the cable channel HBO into a modern-day version of the BBC.

Production budgets have increased. Writers have been poached from film studios. And, perhaps most importantly, viewers at home can watch in high-definition quality with surround sound, played back on 42in widescreen plasma TVs.

As much as the TV industry has fought against them, digital VCR services such as Tivo — which record your favourite shows on to a hard drive — have made hour-long shows even more popular. To judge by the number of product placement deals going on — the credits of House include a nod to Sota Turntables, among other designer home items — there is at least some consolation for the lost advertising revenues. Will 2006 be another blockbuster year? The convenience of digitally recorded TV, combined with the trend of buying multiple TV sets as part of home remodelling projects (flat screens fit in places where it was hard to put the old tube sets), suggests that it will.

So what is Hollywood doing about it? From what I hear, the response of some movie people has been predictably self-serving: they have moved into TV. Film production companies are pitching TV concepts. Writers have stopped trying to sell screenplay ideas and are now focusing on series ideas (if you create a show, you can expect to get about $40,000 per episode, even if you didn’t actually write it). Meanwhile, Hollywood continues to roll out such bilge as Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction.

Even the cinemaplexes are stuck in the 1980s — in Los Angeles, where a Starbucks can be found on every other corner, movie theatres still offer little other than Coke and popcorn as refreshment. What about a cup of tea, an espresso, or, God forbid, something to eat other than a jumbo box of M&Ms?

TV, in contrast, seems unstoppable. The latest gadget is the Slingbox, a machine that takes the live TV signal from your living room and beams it to your mobile phone or PDA, allowing you to it watch anywhere. Then there’s TivoToGo, which allows you to store programmes on your laptop, so you can watch them later — during, say, a long flight. The internet, it seems, didn’t kill TV — it just made it stronger. Hollywood needs to find an answer, and fast. We can only hope it’s not Basic Instinct 3.

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