Mr Selfridge is, without question, the very model of a Sunday-night ITV show. It’s period. It’s pretty. Hardly anything ever happens in it. The series is a gentle punt designed to glide the weekend to a standstill, while soothing the anxiety of another working week. It has always very deliberately been a Sunday-night show, almost to the point where it’s feasible to assume that it was created specifically to trick the dumbest 10% of the audience into thinking they were still actually watching Downton Abbey.
And yet the new series of Mr Selfridge begins on Friday, not Sunday. There’s probably a fantastic reason for this. It might be because War and Peace is on the BBC at the same time, and ITV didn’t want to risk embarking upon a win-at-all-costs corset-battle with the maker of the greatest period dramas in the world. Or it might be because Endeavour is back on Sunday, and ITV knows that your mum would rather spend two hours watching Shaun Evans in a skinny suit than and hour watching Jeremy Piven gnaw on a manky cigar like a beaver trying to suck a beachball down a drainpipe. Who can say for sure?
But still, Friday night does seem like a weird place to put it. There was a time when Friday night TV was a spectacular blowout curated for young people. It was edgy and smart, full of livewire entertainment shows and high-grade imported sitcoms. The former – if the muted return of TFI Friday was any indication – has died a horrible death, although the latter still has a place on television. That place, incidentally, is on Channel 4 very early in the mornings during the week, shortly after the Countdown repeat.
Compare the glory days of Friday night TV with what we’ve got now. This week there’s Mr Selfridge on ITV, sport on BBC1, a bummer of a documentary (albeit a very good bummer) about a dead singer on Channel 4 and a series of dramatised monologues about the royal abdication on BBC2.
In fact, the nearest thing to golden age Friday night TV is happening on Channel 5. There’s a Celebrity Big Brother eviction, an episode of Lip Sync Battle and something that really exists called Puppies Make You Laugh Out Loud where a dog sings Let It Go from Frozen. And that, to be fair, sounds legitimately abhorrent. That’s less a modern British TV schedule than the sort of line-up you vaguely remember watching on the hotel TV on your first night in Latvia in 1991.
Perhaps this is just the modern TV landscape. Perhaps, now that young people have almost entirely abandoned television, Friday nights are destined to be just as dreary as the rest of the week. Perhaps this is how television ends, with an all-out war to capture the last band of sedentary 56-year-olds who still watch television as it’s broadcast. If that means sticking Mr Selfridge on in the old Reeves and Mortimer slot, so be it. It’s a horrible thought, but Friday might just be the new Sunday.
