Autumn is traditionally when TV unveils its lushest treats of the year. In 2020, though, you might think this can’t possibly be the case. Life has been on hold, to some extent, since March, when almost every TV show in production closed down. Surely, then, the cupboard is bare? But thanks to stockpiling of pre-lockdown footage and some clever tweaks to how shows are made, the major broadcasters and streamers have autumn slates that very nearly constitute business as usual.
When Taskmaster completes its big-money transfer from Dave to Channel 4, for example, Greg Davies will have an excuse to shout at the competing comedians even more than he did before. Everyone will be sitting further away from each other, and they’ll be compensating for the lack of noise from a now-absent studio audience. But the tasks themselves were filmed before the virus arrived.
Some light-reality mainstays don’t require much change to meet pandemic protocols: Gogglebox, for instance, which is a static camera filming people within their domestic bubbles, or Naked Attraction, which already makes use of isolation pods that are sluiced and sterilised on a regular basis. And over on ITV, The Cube’s existing format handily involves being shut inside a germproof tank. It’ll return with the Covid-tastic twist of featuring pairs of contestants from the same household – plus a new million-pound jackpot, possibly culled from the money saved by relocating I’m a Celebrity from Australia to the UK. Get ready for bushtucker trials involving less exotic creepy crawlies this time around.
Mystery still hangs over other big beasts of entertainment. Will singing contests return with a live audience or allow the acts, in a spooky foreshadowing of their future careers, to perform to an empty venue? Some sort of “virtual audience” is the likely compromise for Britain’s Got Talent, while the new run of The Masked Singer will have a live crowd, although it’s eschewed the obvious by not making everyone come dressed as a rabbit or bumblebee. Temperature checks and tracing protocols will be in force instead – as they are at QI, which has started filming new episodes with a (greatly reduced) studio audience.
All that’s confirmed about Strictly Come Dancing, meanwhile, is that it will have a shorter run in 2020, which should facilitate a later start, which in turn will give producers more time to react to changing guidelines. Suggested precautions so far include seating the studio crowd at small round tables in the style of a cabaret club, and Bruno Tonioli appearing remotely, rather than having to fly in from LA.
Quarantining the participants is the boldest solution for reality contests. Given Strictly’s constant tales of illicit midnight cha-chas, not letting the pro dancers and celebs go home during the week might cause more problems than it solves – but that is the way the less erotically charged Great British Bake Off has gone, with participants quarantined for two weeks prior to a more intensive shoot, rather than the usual approach of convening on consecutive weekends.
Comedy and drama are less of a drama, since the short answer to how this autumn’s biggest series were filmed is “before lockdown”. That’s the case with the BBC’s Us, Life, Small Axe, Industry and Roadkill, as well as season two of hit sitcom Ghosts, which squeaked in before the shutters came down by wrapping production on 17 March, and minor Covid casualty His Dark Materials. When the virus hit, there was only one Dark Materials episode unfinished, and that was a standalone instalment not drawn from Philip Pullman’s book The Subtle Knife. So it was simply binned. Bad news for fans of James McAvoy, who was going to appear as Asriel, but not fatal to the story.
Also completed pre-lockdown were The Undoing, with Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant, which arrives on Sky along with a third and final season of Tin Star, now set in Liverpool. Netflix has been sitting on the Katherine Ryan comedy The Duchess and Ryan Murphy’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest spin-off Ratched. And E4’s comedy Maxxx wasn’t just filmed before lockdown: one episode was aired in March, before the series was pulled both from the broadcast schedules and on-demand service All 4 (due to “our audience’s evolving viewing habits”) and rescheduled for autumn.
Telly is, however, finding ways to film new narrative fiction. Netflix’s original Swedish comedy Love & Anarchy, for instance, recently went ahead with a screen kiss, having isolated the two actors for a fortnight beforehand. In the UK, soaps are at the forefront of restoring dramatic output, with EastEnders back after three months away on 7 September, having shortened its episodes, as well as following procedures – reduced crew, distanced filming, actors applying their own makeup – similar to those used to keep Coronation Street and Emmerdale on air.
Spring and summer saw a few shows that were tailored for the moment, like the Talking Heads revival or the David Tennant/Michael Sheen Zoom comedy Staged. But one of the first coping-with-Covid shows, Channel 4 chatfest The Steph Show, gave up on filming in presenter Steph McGovern’s house due to the stress it was placing on her family life, not to mention her neighbours disliking trucks full of equipment reversing round the cul-de-sac. When it comes back, it’ll be made … in a studio. Impressive as efforts to create a new normal in TV have been, they can’t compete with normality.
