British Telly

Nearly four years ago, back when Holly Willoughby and Philip Schofield were still mates, and both still employed by ITV, it felt normal to watch the two This Morning hosts get emotional as they embraced through a “cuddle curtain” – a thick sheet of plastic with arm sockets. “Why does it feel like we’re in prison?” laughed Schofield. “This is what the internet was made for!” yelled guest Ant McPartlin, sitting on the sofa a safe two metres away.

It was proof that coronavirus had turned television completely upside down.

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It was a relief when audiences slowly started to return, albeit masked and sitting two metres apart. “The best description of what it was like came from Frank Skinner, who looked at an audience and said: ‘Doing this show is like waking up in an operating theatre.’”

This was quite a feat for other shows that lost live audiences, too, such as Strictly Come Dancing (the crew stepped in, whooping and hollering), Question Time and Have I Got News For You. Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway even received its highest ever ratings. Then again, that is hardly surprising, given that the alternative was buying a dry scotch egg with a QR code in a pub.

Behind the scenes, though, TV production was in crisis. In April 2020, the TV and Film Charity reported that 93% of industry freelancers were not working because of the pandemic. Many struggled to obtain government recognition to qualify for sick pay and financial support. By 2021, Creative UK Group said one in 20 screen industry jobs in Britain had been lost.

It was bleak. Many productions downed tools, while quiz and cookery shows filled the schedules. Even the soaps had to pause production. Luckily, most filmed up to six months in advance and episodes could be rationed. But what next?

“The soaps have never shut down for anything. It was scary,” ITV’s executive producer of continuing drama, Iain MacLeod, tells me. “But soaps are incredibly adept at responding to catastrophes – we’ve had 60 years of practice.”

Emmerdale was the first to return with new episodes in June 2020, using two-hander lockdown episodes. EastEnders stopped broadcasting for three months – its first ever break – and came back in September. Coronation Street came back in between, in July, with a “light touch” inclusion of Covid into the storylines.

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There was still plenty of ready-made TV to distract us – and all Covid-free! An increasingly sex-deprived nation made horny drama Normal People the BBC’s most watched show of the year, while the utterly absurd Tiger King provided the ultimate Zoom catch-up conversation starter, and Quiz – based on the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? cough scandal – tapped into the nostalgia we felt, longing for simpler times.

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This is a strange anniversary to be marking: for many of us, lockdown was a discombobulating, scary period made slightly better by morning telly mishaps and wild Netflix shows; for hundreds of thousands of others it was a time of utter grief, anger and injustice that would go on to fuel devastating dramas. For plenty of us, it was probably a bit of both. That was Covid: laughing at a chatty kid crashing her mum’s serious interview one minute and crying at televised powerpoint charts of mass deaths the next.