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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.
On 12 January 2020 BBC TV News first reported “an unknown pneumonia-like virus”. It wasn’t until 16 March, five years ago, though, that daily life in Britain changed – with prime minister Boris Johnson’s first televised Covid-19 update, telling people to work from home and avoid pubs, clubs and theatres.
A week later, more than 27 million people watched his lockdown announcement – one of the most-viewed broadcasts in UK history. These conferences would become a daily fixture; appointment viewing for an in-part bored and scared nation. By July, a £2.6m investment for “White House-style TV briefings” from 9 Downing Street was announced, with rumours of Richard Madeley hosting.
TV’s pandemic period begins
From that first update, the industry had to respond, fast – starting with live telly. Presenters “providing public service broadcasting” were key workers, but they had to isolate and work from home like many others if they were exposed to symptoms. Matt Baker helped Alex Jones host The One Show via video call from his sofa with his dog, Bob, and a week later, after nearly 10 years, he left the show from that sofa.
Things inevitably became silly very quickly, providing light relief from reality. Over on ITV, everything was going up in flames. Literally. While recreating the McMuffin in his own kitchen for This Morning, John Torode’s tea towel caught fire. “John, your tea towel’s on fire. Turn around, turn around!” shouted Willoughby from the studio, about 30 seconds after nervous viewers at home clocked it. Torode kept calm, threw it in the sink and carried on. It led to the London Fire Brigade issuing a warning about safe cooking at home. “I felt like a bit of a duffer,” the chef later said.
‘Doing this show is like waking up in an operating theatre’
Remarkably, programmes that rely on guests and studio audiences persevered. The Graham Norton Show was commissioned for eight remotely recorded episodes, with equipment installed in Norton’s back bedroom. The first episode aired in April, with Michael Bublé, Martin Freeman and Daisy Haggard – plus a phone call with Judi Dench. There was even an admirable music performance from Celeste in her living room, where she had hung a red curtain as a backdrop.
“It was very hard for Graham,” executive producer Graham Stuart tells me. “But he did incredibly well. It was a real achievement.” The whole show continued to operate via Zoom. “We’re not Newsnight. What we’re doing is entertaining. Things are pretty awful but we can still have a laugh, and Graham’s natural persona helped that,” Stuart adds.
Guests were excited as they returned to the studio in spaced-apart armchairs: “Tom Cruise was trapped in London in lockdown. He loves the show and decided to come on to promote Top Gun: Maverick, even though cinemas were closed and the movie wasn’t coming out for a long time. He said, ‘You should watch the film!’ So he got a Leicester Square cinema opened for 15 of us to go and watch it.” But nobody wanted to give Covid to a Hollywood star. “When he came to the studio we warned everybody: ‘Do not go near Tom Cruise!’”
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.
‘Soaps are good at responding to catastrophes’
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.
“The risk was that people were queuing outside a supermarket with a mask on for an hour – by the time they got home and watched Coronation Street, did they really want to be reminded of that?” But most fans did appreciate some of these experiences being reflected: shopkeeper Brian obsessively sprayed some coins with anti-bac cleaner, while Tim asked Sally in lockdown: “What do you want to talk about? Weather? Football? Social distancing in the workplace?”
Some viewers did complain that Covid had “killed the show”, thanks to changes in production – a real-life couple was used to film a kissing scene, actors over 70 weren’t allowed to return to set, and a man with a 2m stick enforced the social distancing rule.
“One day of filming started with five [cast members] and one actor rang up saying they had a cough,” MacLeod recalls. “So the scriptwriter rewrote the scene without that character. While they were doing that, a second actor rang up to say they were shivery. That scene ended up being one person on a telephone.”
With government rules changing every week, MacLeod admits Corrie “missed the mark sometimes”. Would he have done anything differently? “We thought: ‘There’s enough ingenuity in this building to work in safe perimeters and make something fantastic’ – and that’s what we did. I look back on it with pride.” By mid-2021, a complicated, action-packed sewer collapse storyline – something that couldn’t have been made at the height of Covid – proved that Corrie and other soaps were back. “It doesn’t matter what crisis befalls soap … they’ll get through it by hook or by crook,” says MacLeod.
‘It’s an emergency, I’m here to entertain the nation’
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.
Some of the best series in years dropped: I May Destroy You, Small Axe, Unorthodox, The Queen’s Gambit, It’s a Sin (a lifesaver in history’s most depressing January), Mare of Easttown and Squid Game. We also gobbled up the mediocre – The Undoing, The Crown, plus comforting “ambient TV” such as Emily in Paris and Selling Sunset. There were also years’ worth of classics on streaming platforms to binge on for the first time or revisit.
But TV also reacted with brave and bold new productions. As quickly as June 2020, Sarah Lancashire, Maxine Peake and Kristin Scott Thomas, some of the screen’s finest actors, were filming Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues. Peake had been working on a play when everybody was sent home. When she was offered the monologue Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet, it turned into an experience like no other.
Rehearsals and costume fittings took place over Zoom. “A lot of the costumes were our own,” Peake tells me. “There was a cardy that was my mum’s – but the rest arrived in a box that you couldn’t touch for 72 hours.” She was taught how to do her own hair and makeup (“a disaster!”) and got a keyworker letter (“I felt a bit weird about that – ‘I’m an actor, it’s an emergency, I’m here to entertain the nation!’”) to drive from Salford to London.
“What am I doing? There’s a pandemic going on. This is slightly bonkers,” was her first thought in the empty hotel. But there was calmness on the day of filming, which required minimal crew. “It was quite a profound experience. I felt, ‘I’m so fortunate I have a job. Creatively, I’m able to do something.’”
More creatives answered the call: friends Michael Sheen and David Tennant teamed up to parody themselves in Staged, filmed over video calls, while Sheridan Smith and Eddie Marsan starred in ITV’s Isolation Stories about families in lockdown.
There is also a strong argument that the pandemic was responsible for one of the best TV shows of the decade: The White Lotus only got the green light because it was easy to film. “Maybe we can do a show in a posh hotel?” was film-maker Mike White’s response to HBO when asked for “some idea that was Covid-friendly and in one location”. It has since cleaned up at the Emmys and is in its third hit season.
‘You hope that you’ve written Mr Bates’
The most poignant new show was Jack Thorne’s polemical drama Help, which ferociously exposed the care home crisis during the early days of the pandemic. “Would you come if I said it wasn’t a care home?” carer Sarah (Jodie Comer) shouts down the phone to 999, as she is left to help residents with severe Covid symptoms. “I’m so sorry Kenny, no one is coming,” she tells one man.
The one-off drama is even more difficult to watch now than it was in September 2021, knowing that a year later the high court would rule discharging untested hospital patients to care homes unlawful. “We thought and hoped it would all be over by the time the show came out,” Thorne tells me. His mother was a care worker and after reading a Luton Today article about the number of deaths in a home, Thorne immediately began work with Comer and Stephen Graham (who stars as a resident with early onset Alzheimer’s) to create something big.
The research was upsetting, as the carers he spoke to were still in the thick of the pandemic. “I always remember this one woman, a manager, saying: ‘I let my gentleman down.’ It was overwhelming and gave us a kick up the arse to tell the story as well as possible.”
They filmed in Liverpool. “Stephen Graham’s daughter got Covid and [he] had to isolate, so we were talking to him on Zoom when he was in the same hotel as us. It was wild.” There was also constant fear over the older cast: “I was really scared we were going to give Sue Johnston Covid. We had days when actors of a certain age were all in a room filming – and that was terrifying.”
Thankfully, everyone came out of the production unscathed. The TV film aired to rave reviews and went on to pick up Baftas and an Emmy. For Thorne, though, this wasn’t enough. “You hope that you’ve written Mr Bates, a show that will cause people to sit up and say: ‘This is unacceptable, what can we do?’,” he says. “But care work is still incredibly badly treated, nothing has changed … I really wanted it to be Cathy Come Home and it didn’t do that.”
Would people tune in to Help today? “If I was doing a drama about Covid now, there would be a lot of nerves. It does seem the blue masks have been put in the drawers and not been seen since.”
When This England aired in late 2022, it felt far too soon, too raw, to dramatise the actions of Boris Johnson in the pandemic. Considering that the programme was in post-production when the Partygate scandal broke, it was misinformed, too. Jed Mercurio’s Breathtaking, about life on a Covid ward, which came later in 2023, was better received – perhaps because it was much easier to care about doctors. Still, five years on, there seems to be little appetite for shows about this most traumatic of times.
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.
A new normal?
Covid changed TV. Although traditional telly enjoyed a huge surge during lockdowns, less than half of gen Z tune in post-pandemic. But streaming continues to soar. “Suddenly your 75-year-old nana’s watching a South Korean drama about an ultraviolent, dystopian gameshow,” MacLeod says. Even soap fans, he says, want more sophisticated narratives and grittier true-crime flavoured stories, “in a way that they didn’t five years ago”. But he is adamant that TV is meeting that demand.
Conversely, Thorne worries that “TV is being more conservative in its output” because “it is reassessing, rebuilding and working out what it is in this post-streaming age. That is really damaging for younger writers.” He has a point: senior TV producers are now having to take on second jobs such as shelf-stacking and bar work. Almost a fifth of industry freelancers say they are out of work.
One thing, possibly, is for sure. There will never be a time again when Reeta Chakrabarti reports on a Texas lawyer who went viral for accidentally appearing as a cat in a virtual court hearing, while donning a lion filter with whiskers on her own face. “Well, they said they would do this to me and they have,” she said. “It was inevitable, I suppose, and it will give you paws for thought.”
