ON THE TV MOMENTS THAT TRANSFIXED US
You’ll get square eyes,” is what parents used to say to children who watched too much telly. If the old wives’ tale is true, we’ll all have emerged from lockdown square-eyed, stragglyhaired, slightly overweight and unaccustomed to social interaction. An accurate description of most TV critics at the best of times, as it goes.
Stats say that Britons have watched 51 per cent more TV than usual over these past four months – from government briefings to binge-worthy box sets, from sport in eerily empty stadiums to repeated reality shows. No wonder there was a stampede to the pub at the earliest opportunity.
Lockdown’s first water cooler hit – or with everybody working from home, “kitchen tap hit” might be more accurate – was Netflix true crime freak show Tiger King.
This stranger-than-fiction tale of big cats, bad fashion and murder plots doesn’t look like going away any time soon. A dramatised version is in the works, with Nicolas Cage playing redneck Joe Exotic. Purrfect casting.
The BBC’s addictive adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People had us obsessing over the mumblings and fumbling of two lovestruck Irish teens. Daisy Edgar-Jones excelled as privileged-butdamaged Marianne but Paul Mescal, aka workingclass romantic Connell, became the breakout star. His silver chain necklace and short shorts trended on Twitter. With talk of him being the next James Bond, Mescal-mania looks here to stay.
Spring TV’s ratings sensations were a pair of fact-based dramas. ITV’s Quiz (bravely for 2020, a drama about coughing) and BBC One’s The Salisbury Poisonings were both cleverly stripped across the schedules over three consecutive nights, became event TV, and duly pulled in 10million viewers. A dramatisation called The Leicester Lockdown might be in the pipeline already.
With the shutters coming down on TV production, remote filming came into its own. We’ve had Zoom dramas (Staged, Isolation Stories, Talking Heads),
Zoom chat shows (The Graham Norton Show, Loose Women, Later… with Jools Holland) and Zoom panel games (Have I Got News For You). Handy for nosing at famous people’s houses but I suspect we’ll be so sick of video-calls that we’ll never want to see such stilted, glitching awkwardness again. Grayson Perry’s Art Club was the only offering that might have legs after lockdown is lifted. Perhaps pandemic TV’s biggest surprise has been the reinvention of professional motormouth Piers Morgan. He’s gone from shouty irritant on Good Morning Britain to Covid19’s inquisitor-in-chief. Even long-suffering co-host Susanna Reid has stopped rolling her eyes as much.
Fundraising funnyman Matt Lucas became a lockdown hero (thank you, baked potato) and as the new host of Bake Off, could soon become even more beloved. However, the glitterball stopped spinning for Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Friday night “kitchen discos” – in which she’d glam up and belt out floor-fillers while dodging her five dancing children – around the same time we stopped clapping for carers.
DIY satire became the hot TikTok trend, thanks to Michael Spicer’s “room next door” skits and the lipsync Trump spoofs by US comedian Sarah Cooper. She soon spawned a British equivalent in voice artist Meggie Foster. Skewering politicians with their own words somehow suited the absurdity of lockdown life, but let’s hope these new talents stick around.
Another thing we certainly hope continues is the gatecrashing of live interviews by children. With home-working parents and homeschooled kids, it’s become more frequent, and always makes us feel much better about our own chaotic lockdown lives. In the immortal words of Sky News foreign affairs editor Deborah Haynes’s son: “Mummy, can I have two biscuits?” With those bargaining skills, the boy will go far.