I watched a lot of silent directors who were absolutely great like John Ford and Fritz Lang Tod Browning and also some very modern directors like The Coen Brothers. The directors take the freedom within their own movies to be melodramatic or funny when they chose to be. They do whatever they want and they don't care about the genre.
It was an interesting question as to whether the BBC had a future in the digital world and what form of market failure could justify the licence fee system.