I was lucky in a way, because I was really busy when everything shut down, so I didn’t have that “we’re in lockdown” feeling until about four or five weeks in. I have been covering Zoe Ball [on Radio 2] a lot, and it has been strange to see how desolate central London has been. I wouldn’t call it a beauty, but there is something quite special about it because the only people in town are construction workers, people who work for the NHS and BBC staff, so you find yourself nodding to people to check in on them. It’s quite heartening, really. Working on my podcast [People, Just People] has been a godsend, too, although I am a Luddite with technology – I have a great engineer who comes on to my computer and takes control of it remotely.
My wife works as a director so we have always loved watching TV together. There hasn’t been a massive shift in our viewing habits during lockdown, although it has given us the opportunity to kind of catch up on a few things that we’ve been meaning to watch for a while.
We thought Giri/Haji (Netflix) was great. It’s a Japanese-British drama about a detective, played by Takehiro Hira, who is searching for his brother, who joined the Yakuza, in London. Kelly Macdonald plays the British cop who ends up helping him. It’s much more nuanced and layered than a regular procedural and it has some animated elements to it, like Kill Bill. I know nothing about Japanese culture, but I think it captures British culture and how mundane it can be really well. Will Sharpe is brilliant; he is half Japanese in real life and flips between the languages in the show, so his character is quite integral to the plot.
I loved Normal People (BBC iPlayer), too. It was so beautiful, nuanced and underplayed, and the two leads are just magnificent. The show is all killer. No scene or dialogue is wasted and the ending just pierces your heart. I was talking to a friend about it, and he said: “Do you think it’s because of the situation we’re in right now that it chimes with so many people?” But I actually think it’s because we have all lived the characters’ lives – we have all fallen in love at 16 or 17, whether that love was unrequited or lasted a couple of months or it was lifelong, and we’ve all played out that movie in our heads.
We really enjoyed The Outsider (Apple TV+/Amazon), which is a Stephen King adaptation. Jason Bateman plays a local baseball coach in Georgia who is arrested for the killing of a small child. There are witnesses who see him coming out of the woods with blood all over his mouth, so they have him absolutely bang to rights. But then it transpires that he was 60 miles away in Atlanta when it happened. Cynthia Erivo plays a private investigator with an incredible attention to detail. The supernatural element wouldn’t normally be our thing, but it’s so well done and so well acted. It’s not like Jeepers Creepers or something, where it’s terrifying for 15 or 20 minutes and then it’s just “here’s a monster” – it’s scarier than that.
Series two of Dermot O’Leary’s podcast, People, Just People, is available now on Audible
