Last Thursday’s EastEnders was what might once have been referred to as a classic of the soap opera genre.
A starry new character, Freddie Slater, learnt his origins story. A child of rape, the reveal was jaw-dropping, formalising a story strand which has percolated through the soap for 20 years, since his mother, Little Mo Slater, worked at the Queen Vic.
The actor who plays Freddie, Bobby Brazier, is the son of Jeff Brazier and the late Jade Goody.
The climactic scenes were handled with due care and attention.
Brazier’s performance was first class, surrounded by concerned EastEnders veterans, watching nervously for his character’s welfare.
It may well pick up trophies.
Yet one important ingredient was missing, to alchemise Freddie Slater into a true fictional totem of his times: a massive audience.
Last week’s Ofcom annual viewing figures may prove to be something of a long, dark night of the soul for broadcasting of this type.
The average time spent watching TV in Britain is down a hefty 12 per cent, from 2.59 hours a day in 2021 to 2.38 hours in 2022. We know that young people have drifted away from traditional television shown at regular intervals on a prearranged schedule.
We probably could have guessed that TikTok’s share of the non-traditional broadcast market has spiked, averaging a peak hour a day for teenagers. But the old folk have joined in now, too. For the traditional 65+ market, who have kept the life raft afloat for soaps for well over a decade, traditional TV viewing is down 10 per cent. While BBC1 is still comfortably the most watched channel on TV, pensioners have caught the bug for streaming rivals.
Disney+ alone has seen a sizable seven per cent increased share among this age bracket.
The fresh statistics showed two major patients sitting limp in the waiting room of TV’s truest gauge of success: soap operas and news bulletins.
Where once a major event on a soap could draw an audience of up to 20 million, shows reaching an audience of more than four million have halved in the last decade, to just over 200 in 2022.
The big winners are, predictably, royal events such as Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral and the King’s Coronation, live international football fixtures and this year’s unusual upswing in interest in a Liverpool-hosted Eurovision Song Contest.
Outside these occasions, we are looking squarely at the death of television as a shared, communal crowd-puller.
The outlook is bleak for old screen habits, which now look to be in terminal decline, robbing us of those collective dramatic moments which helped gauge the mood. TV was once the medium which effortlessly crossed class and age, embracing all in its butterfly net.
Every other day, still, I’ll take a call from my mum and, with metronomic regularity, the third question, post “How are you?” and “What are you having for your tea?” will be “So, what are you watching then?”
There is always common ground. We’ve both been avidly watching The Sixth Commandment on BBC iPlayer, the exceptional dramatic retelling of the real-life calculated murderer, Ben Field.
There will more than likely be a brief interlude from her on a preposterous dress worn by a minor character on … And Just Like That, Sky’s extension of the Sex and The City brand, which she picks up on Now TV.
Somebody who said something daft on The One Show, a useful background for cooking.
Now, there is a Netflix show or two added into the chatter, too. Well into her eighties, she understands the workings of non-terrestrial TV like a teenager.
A movement in viewing habits has been discernible from Ofcom findings since the dawn of the streaming age.
For over a decade our habits have atomised to more nuanced and personal schedules. The idea of a set time for a set show has disintegrated, with catch-up options adding to the palette of screen options.
For soaps and the news, there are obvious reasons for declining viewership.
The plethora of 24-hour news programming first dented the idea of set bulletins at set times. Audiences diminished.
Now news can be felt in real time on the phone, with the ping of a socials app.
The dominance of social media has fed into how we react to drama.
When Tony Warren invented the idiomatic cornershop chatter of Coronation Street in 1960, his intention was to make sure voices like his, not just the buttoned-up RP of BBC presenters, were heard on TV.
Now we cannot move for people who look and sound like us onscreen, often who are related to us, sharing every detail of their personal dramas and opinions on Facebook and Instagram.
Indeed, the death of shared experience TV doesn’t quite correlate with the amount we know about shows we perhaps never bothered even to watch.
The massive improvement in budget and quality of dramas like Succession have come to dominate online conversation.
Another Sky show, The Idol, which garnered relatively small viewing figures, was perhaps the most talked about TV show of this year, for all the wrong reasons, a psychosexual potboiler which has been routinely denounced on socials.
Catching a fever for airing an opinion for something on TV is no longer the terrain of critics or industry folk. It is a new national sport.
One of the most frequently asked questions on socials is for viewing recommendations.
The paucity of event shows has somehow spread its own spider’s web of interest in TV as a genre. The obvious analogy is with music, which is streamed everywhere, from endless libraries of every song imaginable, yet greeted with investment sales of product that are rapidly vanishing.
Perhaps a special TV show which captures the interest of a nation while incubating a relatively small audience is the new buying a vinyl copy of your favourite record from a specialist shop?
Amid the doomy Ofcom findings, there are nuggets of excitement. The BBC Outback drama, The Tourist, starring Jamie Dornan , was among the top 10 most viewed shows of last year.
It was smart, witty and looked sensational, not just because of an unusually photogenic and gifted cast.
That appetite for the old element of fantasy and escapism TV offered is still there, despite the kicking doled out to contents that looks a little too close to real lives.
The message of the statistics seems to be that there is plenty of that elsewhere. The shift from entertainment beamed into your living room to the screen in the corner, to entertainment beamed out of it, from the screen in your lap, is not quite with us yet.
