If you asked any reasonably well-informed person to name a handful of television directors they would probably struggle. So too, in fact, would the average TV critic.

The names of scriptwriters – Dennis Potter, Jimmy McGovern, Russell T. Davies – may come easily, but what of the directors? People such as Anthony Minghella and Paul Greengrass may spring to mind but they, like Ken Loach and Mike Leigh before them, achieved much of their fame after leaving TV to make films for the big screen. Those directors who choose or are chosen to work in TV traditionally have had to accept that they will not be as lauded, and definitely will not be as well paid, as their big-screen counterparts.

The converse, of course, is true when it comes to the cinema, where directors are as feted as scriptwriters are obscure. Jimmy McGovern, the writer behind such TV hits as Cracker, The Lakes and, most recently, The Street, says this is down to the the “development hell” of filmmaking: writers are treated like hacks and forced to crank out countless drafts by successive producers.

Asked if, similarly, the importance of the director in the TV world is generally understated, he replies: “Yes. All the time.”

“I have worked twice with David Blair [on The Lakes and The Street],” he adds, “and I can tell you that he is the best there is. He can make a good project great... Why David hasn’t won the acclaim he deserves is a mystery to me.”

Another unsung hero is Sam Miller, a highly influential visual stylist who has worked on both the small and the big screen but has had his greatest successes with TV dramas. It was Miller who was responsible for the distinctive cinéma vérité look of Cardiac Arrest and, more significantly, This Life. Amy Jenkins was properly feted for her scripts for the latter, but the relative neglect of Miller’s contribution to the show’s success was patently unfair.

“I think, certainly in English TV, the role of the director tends not to be acknowledged,” Miller says, without any discernible bitterness. But while he agrees that there are significant differences in the way TV programmes and feature films are watched, he says filmmakers’ approaches to the two media are steadily converging. “One is generally trying to push TV towards being a more visual medium. You’re trying to make it a more cinematic experience.”

As regards his own role, Miller sees himself as the ultimate author of whatever he is making: “I can’t really work unless I feel I am, unless I believe passionately in everything I’m doing. It’s an approach to working that’s difficult to shake off.”

Yet both within and outside the TV industry, the director struggles to be taken seriously as auteur. Miller sees part of the reason for the director’s relative lack of clout in TV as a throwback to the medium’s origins. “There’s definitely something about the roots of TV being in radio and journalism that ties it to the written word,” he explains. “Do you read a script or do you imagine it? I think that there are a lot of people who only read them.”

On the question of how TV directors might improve their position, Miller suggests that they need to align themselves more with development and cites Peter Kosminsky as an example to follow. “He’s found out the two niches where he works which are poles apart,” says Miller. “[They are] Hollywood and a very interesting area of British TV – and he’s mining those areas really effectively.”

Where the American screenwriter William Goldman has been an eloquent advocate for the too often neglected movie scriptwriter, perhaps Kosminsky is the man to perform the same role for the TV director. His career has traced a similar trajectory to Miller’s, with occasional forays into feature films, including 2002’s White Oleander. Indeed, he has to a degree managed to straddle both genres, with a particular strand of politically charged, factually based films made for TV such as The Government Inspector and The Project.

“The role of the director in television is increasingly marginalised and there are complicated reasons for why that is,” says Kosminsky. “The main one... is that directors in television have never had a unified representational body. As a result directors’ fees have remained stationary over the last five or six years.”

He points out that directors in the UK have never been able to negotiate the kind of rights that the Directors’ Guild of America (DGA) has negotiated in the US. These include guaranteed editing rights or time in the cutting room. (However, both Kosminsky and Miller note that directors working in episodic TV in the US are highly remunerated while having no involvement whatever in the editing process.)

“Increasingly in television, with one or two notable exceptions, it’s become a producer-driven medium,” Kosminsky adds. “The key creative relationship is generally between the producer, often the executive producer, and the writer.” Directors, he says, tend to come in quite late in the day and get little access to the cutting room.

“I would say that the position of directors in television compared with their position in feature films is pitiful, that their rights are virtually non-existent and, aside from a few exceptional cases, their artistic contribution is very marginalised as well.”

Kosminsky calls for the establishment of a unified body such as the DGA to protect the rights of British directors, one with the muscle to withdraw labour and to fight for its members’ artistic and financial rights. U nlike writers, composers, actors and indeed their American counterparts, British directors typically get no residual payments on their work.

Echoing Miller, Kosminsky argues that directors must “roll their sleeves up” and get involved in production or at least the development of their films. And a key factor in the whole problem, he says, is simply that directors are underpaid and so are valued accordingly: “They’re held in such low esteem in the broadcasting hierarchy. If you’re having to pay a lot of money for somebody you want to get your money’s worth out of them.”

It will take a lot for things to change but one day TV directors may be as widely respected as their scriptwriting counterparts. But some people are hard to impress. As McGovern points out: “Many writers don’t deserve respect. Lazy bastards, some of them.”