Can opera on television ever succeed without one medium compromising the other? How do you scale down an art form as outsized as opera to fit a small flat screen? Perhaps one has to start from the premise that television can open opera up in new dimensions, letting the eye of the camera see it from unexpected and intimate perspectives, editing out the melodramatic excess that opera is prone to and reinventing the convention of people singing what they would normally speak. But isn’t there a danger that such a reduction desiccates opera of its theatrical lifeblood?

These are issues that make the history of opera on television a saga dotted by false starts and fruitless experiments. The problems can never be altogether solved: in the end, opera will always be a gallon’s worth and television a pint-pot. But the creativity that has gone into squeezing one into the other has produced programming of extraordinary quality and ambition.

Not surprisingly, Channel 4, with its brief to extend the boundaries, has a particularly distinguished record in this field – a kick-start being provided by the network’s first Chief Executive Jeremy Isaacs, an opera buff who went on to run the Royal Opera House. Under commissioning editors Michael Kustow and Gillian Widdicombe coverage began with a brave refusal to resort to the easy option of using fixed cameras to relay performances from opera houses. Peter Brook’s reinvention of Bizet’s Carmen, Birtwistle’s acerbically modernist Punch and Judy, Michael Nyman’s delightful whimsy The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (which Channel 4 co-commissioned with the ICA) – all these were designed for television, filmed rather than merely recorded.