The TV origins of the hit movie Traffic show how British television used to be a real driving force, argues Peter Ansorge

In the sepia-stained desert outside Tijuana, Benicio Del Toro’s Mexican cop waits for a truck packed with cocaine to arrive. His colleague describes a gruesome dream he’s had about his dying mother. In a cold blue-tinted Cincinnati, Michael Douglas, newly appointed US drug czar, drives through the slums looking for his heroin-addicted daughter Caroline. While on a beach in San Diego, Catherine Zeta-Jones watches her son playing after learning that her wealth and social standing are entirely founded on the drug-trafficking activities of her husband Carl.

These are the three colour-coded strands that make up the narrative of Steven Soderbergh’s epic movie Traffic, currently tipped for a slate of Oscars. As Head of Drama at Channel 4 who was responsible for commissioning Traffik, the 1989 mini-series on which the Soderbergh movie is based, watching Traffic was a peculiar case of déja vu.

It wasn’t Michael Douglas as a Washington judge in our TV mini series, but Bill Paterson as a Tory minister roaming a South London council estate in search of Caroline (Julia Ormand’s debut). The cop who dreamt about his mother wasn’t Mexican but German and he was waiting in a warehouse by the Rhine for a heroin consignment from Pakistan. Lindsay Duncan, in the Zeta-Jones role, watched her son skating on a frozen lake in Hamburg rather than a sun-lit California beach. Otherwise the drama is the same.

The movie credits Simon Moore’s original screenplay for Channel 4, but film critics who delivered their verdict on Traffic last week may not be aware of how close the parallels are. The differences are equally telling. By the end of Soderbergh’s version, we are touched by the plight of Michael Douglas’s judge. But Bill Paterson made his impact on television in a less sentimental way. He was crueller to his daughter on discovering her addiction, locking her up in her bedroom rather than sending her for immediate treatment as the Douglas character does in the movie. Paterson’s final newfound love and understanding of his daughter is more moving as a result. Zeta-Jones can’t quiet achieve the transformation from privileged wife to ruthless racketeer that Lindsay Duncan managed so skilfully in the TV version.

Above all I missed the mini-series’ perspective on the poppy growers in Pakistan and their economic need to grow the plant in order to survive. Director Alastair Reid shot these scenes with great beauty in Pakistan. The criminals were the second link in the drugs chain in Traffik. In Traffic they become, more predictably, the first.

Nevertheless, Soderbergh’s movie is a considerable achievement. The film convincingly transplants Simon Moore’s narrative to North and Central America. In doing so it reminds us of a time when British TV drama led the way and the Americans followed. Directors such as Stephen Frears, Jon Amiel, Mick Jackson, Mike Newell and Martin Campbell won their spurs in Hollywood because of their work in British television.

It is television drama such as Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge of Darkness, Alan Plater’s A Very British Coup, Paula Milne’s The Politician’s Wife and Moore’s Traffik that impresses America, not our long-running sitcoms and cop shows. The Americans do those better themselves.

British broadcasters are placing a much lower emphasis on pieces like Traffik these days. They are striving to emulate US long-running series and formats. Paradoxically, US TV drama is currently enjoying a far more creative period than our own. You will find Dennis Potter’s influence behind many of the musical set pieces in Ally McBeal; the pace and invention that Mick Jackson brought to a political drama like A Very British Coup in The West Wing; the audacity of a heart-breaking vision of life that is also comic, like Alan Bleasdale’s, in The Sopranos. Where do you find the equivalents in British TV drama today? You don’t.

The Museum of Television and Radio in America - Bafta with teeth - has announced that it will be screening Channel 4’s Traffik, at both its Los Angeles and New York cinemas next month. This is partly because "Soderbergh’s Golden Globe-winning film was based on it", but also because critics like John Leonard in New York magazine believe that the show is "twice as good when it is spelled with a ‘k’, instead of a ‘c’."

Channel 4 should repeat Traffik straight away. It raises important issues - not least because TV drama rather than cinema once led the way.