“He’s been absolutely boring,” says my mum, bringing me up to speed with this year’s I’m A Celebrity. We sit in judgement on the sofa with a glass of wine, both agreeing it was a mistake for producers to blow a reported £1.5m on Nigel Farage, who should not have been allowed to launder his terrible reputation on an entertainment programme and who (perhaps a bigger crime) is not even remotely entertaining.
I’m A Celebrity is not something I would have watched even three years ago. In fact, it’s something I would have firmly plonked into the category of trash – who wants to spend their time watching unwashed has-beens eat kangaroo testicles?
But something shifted two years ago when I temporarily moved back in with my parents. At first, their TV-viewing habits had mystified me. Despite having a smart TV and being perfectly adept with technology, they would manually flick through the channels until they found something that appealed to them. They’d watch whatever was on – drama, comedy, gameshow, documentary – as if it were the 90s and they had no other option.
I, on the other hand, had just come from a home where the TV wasn’t even hooked up to an aerial. Everything I watched was streamed, on demand, chosen specifically by me.
I was something of an early adopter of streaming platforms and was the first out of my friends and family to get a Netflix account in about 2012. House of Cards and Orange is the New Black landed a year later, heralding a new era of exceptionally high quality on-demand television. It felt like TV had never been better – it had certainly never been easier to binge – with no ads, huge budgets and lots of choice.
But that era was short-lived. A decade later, the landscape is now transformed, with a glut of overpriced streaming services each vying for our hard-earned cash. Alongside Netflix and the players for the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, there’s Prime Video, Apple TV+, Sky Go, Disney+, Now, BritBox, Hayu and more.
Somehow the volume of competition in the streaming market seems to have done the opposite of driving up quality and keeping prices low. In my last year or two of having a Netflix account, it was increasingly stuffed with American property and food programmes that would probably never be bought by UK broadcasters. It was becoming harder to find shows I genuinely wanted to watch.
With an increasingly busy life, I wanted to make the most of the little streaming I did, leading to a lot of unnecessary fussing. I’d sit in paralysis, remote in hand, dinner getting cold, scrolling endlessly as brightly coloured boxes whizzed past on the screen, none of them somehow quite what I was in the mood for at that moment.
In the end I decided to cancel all of my streaming contracts and embrace the chaos of scheduled terrestrial TV, which has actually been a remedy.
I have watched a dramatised documentary about Shakespeare on the BBC, a reality competition where performers competed for a role in the musical Mamma Mia (above) and a programme that followed shopping centre security guards in the Midlands trying to stop shoplifters on Channel 5. I watched an old episode of First Dates, Top of the Pops 2 from 1981, featuring Human League, Soft Cell and Fun Boy Three and I was reminded of the brilliance of early Simpsons.
As the only person I know now who doesn’t have Netflix, any fears I had about missing things on the streaming platforms have been firmly assuaged. I can count on one hand the conversations I’ve been left out of as friends fleetingly discussed programmes I no longer had access to.
There are still dozens of channels on terrestrial TV and, far from being restrictive, having some of the choices already made for you turned out to be actually very freeing. As it happens, TV commissioners mostly know what they’re doing.
Anyway, I’ve got to go, I’m getting ready for celebrity cyclone on I’m A Celeb and I can’t wait to watch Marvin from JLS get blasted off his feet by a water cannon.
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