Bryony Gordon
The licence fee is worth every penny
The country is finding a reason to unite and bond: over Sunday TV
Is anyone watching Killing Eve? I know, I know. If you’re not watching it, it’s probably because you are watching Bodyguard. Or Press. Or Trust. Have you not seen Trust? You must, right this minute! Put this newspaper down, get yourself on to the sofa, and marvel as Donald Sutherland is cast in the role he was born to play: an impotent billionaire living in an English country estate with his five mistresses, pet lion and cocaine-addicted Playmen model grandson. What’s not to love?
Anyway, Killing Eve. It’s on iplayer, and is all about a spy and an assassin, both of whom are women. Watching it must be what it’s like to be a man watching any crime drama ever, where members of the opposite sex exist only to be a) lusted after or b) bumped off by the evil protagonist. My husband tells me he feels objectified when he watches it, and I tell him that the dishes won’t wash themselves. (That’s just a joke, guys. We’ve got a dishwasher.)
There is so much good television on at the moment that I am having to schedule in “me” time to do things such as: eat, sleep, work, go to the loo. I feel like a character from an American comedy show called Portlandia, who becomes so addicted to Battlestar Galactica that she risks bladder infection, social exclusion and being fired – all so she doesn’t have to interrupt her binge-viewing of the programme’s four seasons. When Battlestar Galactica reaches its conclusion, she kidnaps the show’s stars and producers and forces them to write more episodes. This is extreme, but we all recognise that emptiness that comes when we get to the end of a good television series.
Tomorrow night, Bodyguard finishes and, unusually in this day and age, we will all discover who killed Julia Montague at more or less the same time (if, indeed, she is actually dead). Our on-demand culture has given rise to the spoiler, a concept that did not exist before the turn of the millennium, when we were all forced to sit down at an allotted hour to watch the limited programming on offer on the five channels we had, the fifth channel being exciting and new, if a little bit saucy. Then Sky Plus arrived, followed by streaming giants such as Netflix and Amazon, and nobody has ever sat down to watch anything at the same time together again – not even people who live in the same house. I’m in the living room watching Killing Eve, while my husband is upstairs watching history documentaries on his ipad. It is dizzying. It is liberating. But it is also a bit lonely, not being able to talk to anyone about the programme I am watching alone, just in case they decide to watch it alone, but at a later date.
You can watch Bodyguard whenever you want, of course, but it is so good that everyone chooses to do it at the same time, so we can come together at water coolers and on social media to discuss ridiculous plot twists and wild conspiracy theories. It’s just like the good old days when it wasn’t unusual for an episode of Coronation Street or Eastenders to get 20 million viewers, because what else were we going to talk about at work the next day? Brexit? The hilarious-but-cute video we’d just seen of a sloth trying to cross a road?
And what does all this brilliant TV drama have in common? The BBC. Every single must-see programme at the moment is available to watch thanks to Auntie – which probably explains why the director general, Lord Hall, chose this week to suggest that the licence fee might need topping up, much like a teenager asking for an increase in their pocket money after some good mock GCSE results.
And while I know it’s not popular to sing the praises of the corporation, I’m going to do just that. The BBC is brilliant. It is more than fulfilling its role as a public service broadcaster in that it is, for once, bringing the general public together. In what must be the most fractured period in recent British history, the country is finding a reason to unite and bond: over Sunday night television. A chance to briefly forget about Brexit? I’d say that with Bodyguard alone, the BBC is more than earning its licence fee.