Provocations,I: What do we need in a crisis? Broadcast TV!

The first Covid-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom meant that there was a lot more TV viewing going on. What does this mean for the long-term trends in TV consumption? Many TV scholars seem to be obsessed with Netflix and binge-watching, but the lockdown experience dramatically demonstrated the continuing importance of broadcast TV. In Easter week, 6–12 April, ‘viewing to BARB measured TV grew by 23% in all time, 34% in daytime and 12% in 7pm–10.30pm peak, compared with the same, non-Easter week in 2019’, according Stephen Price writing in Broadcast (2020). During the later weeks of lockdown, terrestrial broadcasters began to run out of content, and streaming services started to reassert themselves. In April 2020, 46 per cent of viewing time for all adults was of live TV, with 10 per cent more watched in recorded playback, making 56 per cent of total viewing (down from a total of 63 per cent in 2019). SVOD (Subscriber Video-on-Demand) took up 18 per cent of viewing time and YouTube 12 per cent (Media Nations 2020, 2020). Nevertheless, it is far too early to declare the death of linear broadcast TV, at least in the United Kingdom.

The really dramatic increase in daytime viewing in the early weeks of lockdown shows not only the obvious fact that many more people were at home, but also the nature of their viewing choices. Many chose to watch the most despised form of TV, everyday TV or ‘ordinary TV’ as Frances Bonner (2003) called it. It may also mean that older forms of TV watching began to return as well, particularly shared family viewing. Why did this happen? The factors include the creation of routines, the desire for consolatory entertainment and the need for connection. Broadcast ordinary TV fulfils all of these in ways that streaming services cannot.

Lockdown advice frequently urged the establishment of routines to structure the day. The broadcast TV schedule provides a ready-made structure of routines with series offered the same time each week or, in the case of strip scheduling, each day. Strip scheduling is the mainstay of daytime, and at the start of lockdown ITV used strip scheduling in the evening too, to maximise the impact (and audience) for its Stephen Frears directed drama, Quiz (2020). This three-part factional drama itself celebrated a time only 20 years ago when Who Wants to be a Millionaire (1998–) could attract an audience of 15 million or more. The routinising aspect of ordinary TV within the TV schedule has been explored in exemplary ways by scholars such as Rachel Moseley, Helen Wheatley and Helen Wood (2017). Routine and repetition-with-difference remains an important feature of contemporary TV to many citizens, and the crisis should bring it back to scholarly attention. Indeed, there appears to have been little or no research so far to discover whether users spontaneously construct routines around their use of streaming services. The use of binge watching as a ‘treat’ to be anticipated would seem to be the obvious place to start.

If aspects of routine TV seem a little domestic or female oriented, then it is worth reflecting on the insightful words of the Guardian’s sports-writer Jonathan Liew from that far-off time of 14 March when sports events began to close down. ‘For so many of us, sport isn’t simply a way of passing the time but a way of marking it. It offers a liturgy, a structure on which to measure the passing days and seasons…In frightening times, virus or no virus, these are the rituals that offer the veneer of normality, a background noise as reassuring and immutable as the ticking of a clock’ (Liew, 2020). As it is with sport, so it is with ordinary TV.

Of course, sport and TV have an intimate relationship. The sports industry has been profoundly reorganised by TV schedules and finance (or, more fundamentally, sports became an industry because of television). The TV industry, in turn, is driven by the business opportunities and the technical challenges offered by sport. It is a relationship that, oddly, has also not received much scholarly attention. Once the ritual structures of television sport were suspended for the duration of the crisis, where were the replacement ritualised broadcasts? Maybe we need to look no further than The Repair Shop on BBC1 on a Wednesday evening, with an audience of almost 6 million, 30 per cent of those watching broadcast TV. This DIY show was, until recently, on daytime and it has already spawned a number of imitators.

Consolatory entertainment is the second reason for the return to broadcast TV. Consolatory entertainment does not challenge. It is comfortable and familiar; emotion rather than message. It is Mrs Brown’s Boys (2011–) rather than Catastrophe (2015–2019); Sunday Night at the London Palladium (1955-1969) (currently repeated on Talking Pictures TV on Sunday nights) rather than The Tube (1982–1987); Antiques Roadshow (1979–) (which, at 6 million viewers on BBC1, in the top 10 of shows) rather than Black Mirror (2011–). Consolatory entertainment can be exemplary and heroic, as was demonstrated by the unexpected success of the second series of BBC2’s Race Across the World (2019–) early in lockdown. This reality show succeeded because of its careful casting of individuals not normally found in such series and its consistently caring approach to their difficulties. The cross-media phenomenon of One World: Together at Home (2020), was another exemplary form of consolatory entertainment. This 18 April concert, brought together by Lady Gaga, was streamed to an unknown number of people (streamers don’t publish their figures) and repackaged by BBC1 and other broadcasters. The broadcast package version was watched by 21 million in the United States, according to Ric Porter for The Hollywood Reporter (2020) and an average of 5.4 million on BBC1 (Kanter, 2020). The UK version was interspersed by tributes to frontline medical and social support workers, a highly effective form of consolatory entertainment where emotion and empathy easily bring tears (‘it’s hay fever season’, as a clearly moved presenter Dermot O’Leary remarked ironically at one point). Light relief was provided by Charlie Watt’s air drumming in a broadcast that existed as a telethon fundraiser in the United States but devoid of fundraising in the United Kingdom.

This concert, and the role of presenters like O’Leary, demonstrates the third reason for the resurgence of ordinary broadcast TV: the need for connection. Ordinary TV is peopled by on-screen presenters whose USP often lies in their very ordinariness. It’s difficult to remember who presents a genial magazine show like BBC1’s The One Show (2006–) unless they are as awkward and wooden as Amol Rajan. The role of a presenter is to be as comfortable and relaxed as possible. They connect with viewers and bring people together as individual viewers. They use all the techniques of direct address, casual asides, harmless banter, topical references and occasional fluffs to achieve this. It’s something that grew very quickly in television, but as I have argued elsewhere (Ellis, 2015) needed to be learned and perfected. Paddy Scannell summed up the way in which this form of address works in the idea of the ‘for-anyone-as-someone structure’ (2000). The address is personal, but it can include almost any viewer who shares the language and at least some of the references. It is a shared sense of personal address: each individual experiences it as an individual, but with an awareness that many others also share that same experience.

The ‘for-anyone-as-someone structure’ is very different from the address of much social media, especially Facebook, which can be summarised as a ‘for no one in particular’. There is little sense of connection in Facebook, with its limited range of emoticon responses (still less with Twitter which prompts us to ‘love’ tweets about loved ones carried off by the virus). Posts on Facebook often excite dangerous emotions like jealousy and inadequacy, which are problems for some users in ordinary times. The lockdown, with practices of isolation that many found difficult, intensified the propensity of social media platforms to provoke troubling reactions. Reassurance is hard to find in social media, but it has long been an operating practice in ordinary broadcast TV. Graham Norton has perfected the ‘for-anyone-as-someone’ mediation of major celebrities, providing the reassurance that they, like us, have mundane concerns and unexpected weaknesses, and he manages to wrap it all up in a comforting aura of fun which makes potentially painful confessions into a share moment of intimacy. ‘For no one in particular’ forms of address simply cannot replicate this, and neither can the scrolling menus and trailers of the streaming services. Connection and reassurance, long the business of ordinary TV, have found their cultural role in this time of crisis. There is a new reality that we all share…and it has newly commonplace problems, one of which was dramatically demonstrated by Claudia Winkleman’s epic video connection failure The One Show on 14 April, when presenter Gethin Jones simply had to curtail the interview. An experience that has become an all-too familiar one for us all.

What does this mean for TV studies? It is worth interrogating Ofcom’s extensive research to find an answer. Preliminary results from April 2020, combined with extensive research over several previous years, can be found in the Ofcom’s interactive report, Media Nations 2020 (2020). It shows that for all viewers, live and recorded TV made up 56 per cent of total viewing in April 2020. But for the 16–24 age group, things were very different: a total of 28 per cent for live and playback TV; 32 per cent for SVOD and 22 per cent for YouTube. Both live TV and YouTube had declined from the 2019 figures (31 per cent and 25 per cent respectively). We are probably looking at a TV culture with quite a serious generational divide. The crucial question here is whether the less routine-based lifestyle of most in the 16–24 age group contributes substantially to this difference. Unfortunately, there are no figures yet for the generation entering their thirties who may have a more routine-based lifestyle.

It is certainly not justified to extrapolate from this to say that ‘live TV will die’ in the longer term. Not every household has an SVOD subscription, and many say they have no intention of getting one. According to Ofcom, SVOD use is dominated by Netflix with 31 per cent of all 16-plus adults surveyed in April having watched it in the past 7 days (and 43 per cent of the 16–24 group). Amazon Prime accounted for 17 per cent (20 per cent for 16–24); the newly launched Disney+ was at 8 per cent (15 per cent); Sky’s Now TV 5 per cent (7 per cent) and Apple TV 2 per cent (3 per cent). But SVOD subscriptions existed in only 15 million of the UK’s 27.8 million households, with 13 million having Netflix subscriptions, 7.8 million Amazon and 1.6 million with Now TV (Media Nations 2020, 2020). Around half of UK households have subscriptions, but SVOD accounts for much less than half the total viewing. Clearly there are households, or household members, who do not access their SVOD subscriptions very often, despite the tolerance by Netflix of a certain amount of subscription sharing between households (Media Nations 2020, 2020). Further, Ofcom’s survey of household subscribing intentions reveals that 50 per cent of households surveyed said they do not intend to get Netflix, with the other SVODs even less in demand than that. So, in the United Kingdom at least, Netflix may be approaching market saturation at 50 per cent. This, significantly, is the level at which Sky subscriptions have stalled for some years (and the reason for the launch of the low-cost Now TV access to some Sky content). This seems to reveal that some people want more television stuff than others. The problem with aggregate viewing numbers is that they tend to cover up vast disparities in the level of TV use between different population segments. Back in the late 1990s, the scheduling community then in dominance used to refer to ‘the ELVs’, or ‘Elusive Light Viewers’ whom they hoped to attract to more niche programming. ELVs are simply those who choose other activities than TV viewing, whether it be gaming, clubbing or reading the London Review of Books. Therefore, one question for TV scholars must be, what content is core to the almost universal usage and desire for television? and then, what are the patterns amongst those who desire extra TV, who could be called hyper-users? TV scholars are overwhelmingly found in the latter group, of course, but the continuing social importance of television as a medium (and its role as a universally available public service) depends much more on the former. So, do the super-users simply want ‘more of the same’ as the ELVs, or do they want much more of particular genres and maybe less of others? The predominance of two season drama series in the Netflix catalogue indicates what they think their users want, and this is based on Netflix’s hyper-detailed data about actual moment-by-moment behaviours of their users. Netflix’s hyper-user group does not seem to care much for ‘ordinary TV’. The lockdown success of the outrageous US reality series, Tiger King (2020), seemed to be an isolated event.

The explanation may also lie in the specific answer given in a particular viewing culture to the question ‘what is TV?’ When UK SVOD viewers were asked on which device did they watch SVOD output between January and March 2020, the overwhelming answer was the TV screen: 68 per cent in total, with 19 per cent watching on a television connected to their SVOD by a laptop or similar. Less than 5 per cent watched on a smart phone. This would seem to indicate that screen size, quality and location in the home mattered to UK SVOD subscribers, and may account for the demise of the Quibi service which offered short bites for consumption on the move (Media Nations 2020, 2020). This attitude may well be culturally and market specific. Chinese viewing seems to be more anchored to mobile devices (used for more time than TV viewing), in part driven by the fact that phone providers are also the major providers of SVOD and ad-supported TV content. Viewing cultures are determined by the availability of both services and devices, the infrastructure that supports them and the ways content is framed (to use Catherine Johnson’s useful distinctions (2019; see my review, 2020)). All of these specific factors determine the potential shapes of viewing cultures on the levels of class, gender and race, national/regional markets, individual preferences and behaviours, and TV cultural heritage. Television as an object of study has just got a lot more complicated.