During the golden age of TV, it was easy to make people watch your programme. There were only three channels, you see, and everyone was so exhausted from working in the mines all day that you could broadcast whatever you wanted and millions of people would automatically tune in. Wobbly-walled dramas. Soap operas about sheep. Colossally racist sitcoms. Anything.
That's all changed. Nobody watches anything at the same time these days. You might watch Doctor Who at its time of original broadcast, or Sky+ it, or catch it on iPlayer three days later, or wait for the boxset…
There is an exception. The five most-watched TV shows of last year were all live – X Factor, Strictly, Britain's Got Talent, I'm A Celebrity and the royal wedding. People love live shows. They're events. They're part of history. One day, your grandchildren will turn to you and say, "Did you see the King and Queen get married?" or "Were you there when Nu Vibe performed that Cheryl Cole song?", and the answer had better be yes.
The knock-on of this is that TV has become obsessed with making live television, and this is nothing short of a catastrophe. Sport aside, most live TV this year has been abysmal. We'll start with Emmerdale. It was the last of the big soaps to try a live episode, and it was arguably the most proficient. If anything, it was a bit too proficient. The whole thing was flawless from start to finish; you knew it was live only because the word "live" kept flashing up onscreen. People watch live drama only because they want stars to forget their lines, or start crying, or audibly fart. None of that happened on Emmerdale at all. What a failure.
Still, it was better than any of this year's live factual shows, like Lambing Live, Stargazing Live, Planet Earth Live and Volcano Live. None of these was even particularly live. They were all basically The One Show, interweaving prerecorded films with unnecessarily live links. As for Volcano Live, it should have been called Kate Humble Sits In A Poky Little Caravan Endlessly Jabbing A Map With A Biro Live.
Then there was Channel 4's Drugs Live, where Keith Allen would take MDMA onscreen. Speculation was feverish. Would Keith throw himself out of a window? Declare himself the son of Jesus? In the end, it turns out that all Keith Allen does on drugs is help create incredibly dull TV.
All of which pale into insignificance compared with The Only Way Is Essex Live. Rarely has a television show been so hopelessly sabotaged so consistently by so many people. It was genuinely unwatchable. It'll take scientists decades to figure out precisely how bad TOWIE Live was. By rights, ITV2 should be sealed off and deemed uninhabitable for the next thousand years. It should be allowed to exist only as a warning to future generations of TV producers who think that live episodes are a good idea. As TOWIE Live proved, they very rarely are.
See also in TV
• The third series of Downton Abbey.
