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Unlike policemen, firemen, nurses and garbage collectors, social workers have failed to make a major impact on the nation's television schedules. Graham Hopkins asks television industry figures why this might be and finds that the answer is not entirely unconnected with beards and tank-tops.

In the last series of Cold Feet, two of the characters, Rachel and Adam, were meeting with a family adoption worker, when they announced that Rachel (unable to have children, hence the adoption) was - miraculously - pregnant. Rather than deal calmly and professionally with this revelation, the worker - displaying more cold shoulder than cold feet - panicked. She refused to engage with the prospective parents and exited hastily, muttering that this was "not good" and that she would have to talk to her "superiors".

That there were no "Social workers outrage over Cold Feet" headlines demonstrates just how old hat this stereotyping is. Social workers are almost invariably presented in roles which confirm suspicions that they are - take your pick - incompetent, arrogant, or obstructive. Television tends to prove itself no friend to the profession. It has no drama serials, few documentaries, and one-off dramas, if made at all, concentrate on scandals - including last year's Bafta-winning Care based on a horrifying history of systematic child abuse in children's homes in Wales and elsewhere.

But why isn't there a drama series about social services? Certainly, at last year's social services conference, Melvyn Bragg - a man who knows his TV onions, when asked if social care could break through the glass ceiling of sympathetic TV, believed there to be no good reason why not.

Others, however, seem to have many a good reason why not. BBC producer Ruth Caleb, who co-produced Care, explains: "Television drama is essentially about heroes and so heroic services are targeted - whether it's hospitals, police or fire-fighters. Social workers are not perceived as heroic because they are not at the cutting edge of life-saving."

"I think social work has a right to have a grievance against the way it is portrayed," says Terry Kelleher, an independent producer who runs Platinum TV and Films. "If it's any consolation, I don't think others - accountants, for example - are particularly portrayed as heroic figures."

Interestingly, KPMG, looking to present accountancy and the company as a hip place to work, part-financed a 1998 movie - The Sea Change - in which the "handsome, dashing and funny" lead character worked for KPMG. Sadly, in publicity the accountant hero had been spun into a "financial hot-shot".

Social workers are not the only professionals to feel misrepresented, says Kelleher. "I'm sure surgeons watching Casualty are thinking 'oh my God - they got that wrong!'" The truth is, even supposedly authentic dramas are highly fictional. In Tellyland, nobody pays cab fares, everyone finds a parking spot outside the building they're visiting, and lipstick stays on - even underwater.

Indeed, as an ex-policewoman, a senior nurse and a Derbyshire doctor confirm about The Bill, Casualty and Peak Practice: police officers placing their hands on the heads of criminals when putting them into the squad car? Hogwash! The heart monitor in intensive care displaying a flat-line to denote a death? Eyewash! GPs rushing down to hospital to make sure a patient attends? Quackery!

Couple its "unheroic" nature with its public image problem and social work is in telly trouble, says Chris Oxley, Bafta-winning director of the documentary Death on the Rock. "Their image, set in the stone of the 1970s and 1980s, is not one that's attractive in TV terms," he says. "They simply wouldn't come across as lively enough for television that wants stories of money, progress, getting on."

Social workers have the further disadvantage of always coming to people who have got troubles, adds Caleb: "So potentially you are looking at a drama that's going to be miserable." On top of that they are flawed sartorially. As Kieran Prendiville, writer of Care and creator of Ballykissangel, observes: "Television likes its drama series in uniform."

As head of drama at BBC Wales, Caleb rejected a series about social workers called The Gatekeeper. However, it later surfaced in 1999 as Jack of Hearts. The social services setting was dumped and the main character had become a probation officer. Despite these supposedly audience-friendly changes, it was a ratings disaster. On 8 September 1999 it managed only 1.9 million viewers, a record low.

With no serials to milk, could one-off dramas provide a more wholesome alternative? Prendiville believes that social workers "get a lousy press, a better TV and an even better radio." Caleb agrees that TV can be sympathetic to the profession. She cites When I Was 12 - a drama documentary about a runaway girl. "The social worker in that was a real social worker and was adviser to the film," she says. "He was portrayed in a very positive light. His scenes were brief but potent."

Caleb is working on three single dramas covering a young offenders institution, a drug rehabilitation unit and a halfway house for "mentally unstable people". Ironically, in all three stories social services plays no part. This is probably more worrying than being portrayed incorrectly. "They're not seen as part of problem-solving. So they're just not there," says Caleb.

Television is much more a business than a creative process, and those who run television are driven by audience share, says Kelleher. "There are more channels and possibly less variety, less risk. It's quite unusual that a programme like Care was made in the first place."

Prendiville was drawn to Care by a mixture of emotions: pity, anger, despair - and a feeling that somewhere in the unremitting darkness there was a huge story that had to be told and voices that had to be heard.

"What helped," he continues, "was realising that Care wasn't a film about abuse at all, it was about the legacy of abuse. How do you behave if you have suffered such evil? I didn't suppose an absolute truth, simply that in one particular case, love didn't conquer all. Sometimes evil triumphs."

So, with drama almost a closed set, what about factual programming? Workplace, fly-on-the-wall documentaries have been buzzing around our screens in recent years. But here, for social services, the big problem is confidentiality. "It's that much more difficult with this area because a social worker is nothing without a client," says Kelleher. "And that [means] members of the public. Frequently it's children - and that's an absolute no-no."

In 1995 Oxley worked on a successful documentary on adoption in the London Borough of Hackney - Playing God - for BBC2's Modern Times. "They were very suspicious of us - perhaps rightly so," he recalls. "But we filmed for a year and it took about three months to break down the barriers. Some were really good but a number of people lived down to their image."

Oxley's fear for social work's case is more real than most. He has tried - and failed - to get a drama series off the ground. "There was potential. We even had an influential producer on board but were told that nobody wants to watch social workers."

Many would argue that television is too dumbed-down for such a series. As evidence Oxley points to the tag-line for Footballers' Wives: "They're young, sexy and rich..." Do the same for social work in six words, he challenges. But perhaps "A Volvo. A tank-top. A beard," will only cause the nation's pulses to race as they search for the remote to switch over.

However, there might be one way to succeed in getting social services onto the screen and into the nation's hearts. And that is comedy. In a recent interview, a senior officer at Bedford prison said: "Of all the TV programmes I've ever seen on prisons, there's only one that's ever been remotely true to life. Porridge." It's only a matter of timeÉ

And if programme-makers think this is "not good", perhaps we should insist on speaking to their superiors.