We’ve watched more telly than ever this year. Our standards may have dropped – but then Covid does cause loss of taste
I know it is tedious to look back on 2020 and force everything through the prism of coronavirus – “Hey, remember that absolute horrorshow of a year we all just-about lived through? Well, let’s look back on the horror again, shall we?” – but it is slightly unavoidable when recapping what is arguably the weirdest year in television since the format was invented. We have, each of us, watched more TV in the last nine months than at any other time in our lives. And yet, with so little of it being newly produced, there has been an odd staleness to our viewing habits. I’m bored of live TV and I’m bored of box sets, so what else is there to do? Read a book? Behave.
The first thing we need to confront is the short-lived Zoom era of Lockdown 1.0, which wasn’t very good. It’s harsh of me to single people out, but The Steph Show on Channel 4 was an early example of form clattering up against need, as a cheery Steph McGovern tried to hold together a light magazine show from the comfort of her own home. Yes, it was rubbish (and the less-constrained Steph’s Packed Lunch studio variation shows that the desperately-broadcasting-from-a-house was the faulty part, not the rest of the show’s format), but crucially it started airing on 30 March – the date we still thought we’d all be back at work within a couple of weeks – and the sheer fact that someone tried to launch a magazine show to keep us all entertained in the middle of a history-shaping global emergency is something to be commended.
