Operation Patch-up: how TV is filling the schedules
With production on the majority of shows suspended, Chris Harvey finds out how channels are coping with the gaping holes
Picture Britain in July 2020: with the coronavirus pandemic receding but the nation still in lockdown, people are turning to their televisions in a way not seen since the Seventies. Teenagers and twentysomethings have “completed” Netflix. Families used to staying far more than 6ft apart are sitting down together for the first time in a generation to catch up on the latest output from the terrestrial channels.
There is still the odd disagreement: should they catch the first episode of a tough crime drama called Z Cars, or stick with The Good Life, for all those useful tips on growing your own food?
It may sound ridiculous, but could this, or something like it, be the reality in a couple of months, when the pipeline of original dramas, entertainment shows and documentaries slows to a trickle? Fingers crossed, the world will be getting back to normal by then, but in the event of a long lockdown, the options for programme-making appear limited.
Production on the vast majority of programmes has been suspended. The makers of Line of Duty stopped filming the latest series last month and producers were forced to scrap their plans to start filming the sixth series of Peaky Blinders. Filming has also been halted on Coronation Street, Eastenders and a string of other continuing dramas.
News programmes are continuing to air, of course, and the BBC intends to keep broadcasting both Have I Got News for You and The Graham Norton Show (although episodes of the latter will now only be 30 minutes long and guests will appear by video).
Channel 4 is also continuing to make programmes – Grayson Perry, for instance, will be teaching art skills to the nation in Grayson’s Art Club. Making programmes is challenging, however. The producer of Have I Got News for You, Richard Wilson, explains how initial thoughts that the show could be filmed using the Zoom video conferencing platform to connect the guests and the presenters were abandoned when it became clear that so many people were now using Zoom that it was slowing the software down.
Instead, the producers have employed specialist production house Electric Robin to link the team together in their homes. In the first episode tomorrow, the guest host will be Steph Mcgovern, with Paul Merton and Ian Hislop joined by Miles Jupp and journalist Helen Lewis – with each panellist filmed separately and then edited together to appear “magically” on a version of the studio set. The team putting it all together will be a similar size to normal, around 60 people, Wilson says.
Most channels, though, have some dramas filmed and ready to air, such as ITV’S Quiz, based on the real-life Who Wants to Be a Millionaire cheating scandal of 2001. The BBC’S stock cupboard contains novelist Eleanor Catton’s adaptation of her own 19thcentury New Zealand Gold Rush epic, The Luminaries.
Channel 4 is not bringing forward its big autumn dramas to fill gaps over the summer, as it plans to show original drama content throughout the year. In the case of Russell T Davies’s Eighties-set Aids drama Boys, of course, there’s an obvious reason to hold it back: one pandemic is quite enough for audiences to cope with for now.
But all the channels are having to be creative with their available resources. At the time when we were expecting to be excited by the Tokyo Olympics, Wimbledon and football’s European Championships, for instance, the BBC is bringing on former England striker Peter Crouch as a late substitute in a light-entertainment show called Save Our Summer.
Now, I love the 6ft 7in, robot-dancing Crouchy as much as the next person, but I don’t think it will make up for watching Harry Kane (or maybe Gareth Bale) tuck away the winner in the final of the Euros. Another Gareth, meanwhile, the bow-tied choirmaster Gareth Malone, is stepping up to bring us The Choir: Britain in Lockdown, on
BBC Two, in which he will be asking stuck-at-home viewers to help him form The Great British Home Chorus.
Channels have decided between all the anxiety-creating news, people need feelgood entertainment, hence the BBC’S plan to show comedies such as Gavin & Stacey on Saturday evenings
from April. Director of content Charlotte Moore insists: “Throughout this crisis, we will respond to the mood of the nation and provide programmes to help us escape and laugh.”
There’s also a realisation that original content has to be carefully husbanded, as is happening with the stock of new soap episodes, now that production has been halted. Coronation Street is showing three episodes a week instead of six, so its storylines don’t peter out before July, Eastenders is down to two, and Hollyoaks to three, yet ratings have soared – by three million in the case of Eastenders.
All of this means that there are going to be a lot of repeats to fill the gaps, with an emphasis on the comforting and the familiar. The BBC will air the superb 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, for example.
Sky, which is now owned by a huge US media conglomerate, Comcast, has plenty of content available – enough to supply viewers with original British and American shows well into the rest of the year, including the forthcoming Gangs of London. Sky is perhaps less exposed than the terrestrial channels because it already partly functions as an on-demand service, with 8,000 hours of content available, but it is in discussions with producers about creating new shows, too.
It seems certain, however, that we’ll all be enjoying “classics and favourites” at some point, even as the networks use all their creativity to make new shows, such as the naughtily titled Eurovision: Come Together. One thing is certain about the latter, though – literally no one will want to hear the unfortunately named UK entry, My Last Breath. Perhaps Gareth Malone could enter all of us in its place, with Crouchy persuaded to bust out his robot dance alongside. Just a thought.