Television Magazine

The writer was talking at an RTS North West online Q&A in late April. He recalled the 2008 recession, when friends at ITV told him, “‘We don’t know if we can show this episode of The Bill tonight,’ [because] they were so short of advertisers and money.

“This recession is going to be even bigger and it’s going to affect the commercial channels hugely… and [the streamers] will start cutting back as well.

“We’ve got a Government that is morally and profoundly opposed to the BBC. Please don’t think they’ll change their minds about the BBC in this crisis.”

When Dr Frank Atherton, Wales’s chief medical officer, said in late April that the pandemic curve had not just been flattened, but squashed, it was reassuring on two levels: it signalled to viewers that the Welsh NHS appeared to be over the worst of Covid-19 and it also suggested that our editorial strategy was working.

Dr Atherton had given a number of interviews to various media outlets that day, but only ITV Cymru Wales viewers heard his seminal statement that the Welsh Government’s lockdown measures had “squashed” the virus in Wales.

Welcome to the great British summer of no sport. There will be no Wimbledon, no Euro 2020 football, no Open golf and no Olympics, which leaves the sport broadcasters on the canvas.

Punch drunk they may be, but no one is throwing in the towel. The challenge is to fill the hours of telly set aside for sport this summer and to attract the bumper audiences being enjoyed elsewhere on TV during the lockdown.

Live sport has not disappeared entirely – Taiwanese basketball and baseball anyone? – but there is not much of it about.

High-end television drama has become ubiquitous. Even so, it’s unlikely that TV audiences have seen anything quite like Sky Atlantic’s new crime thriller, Gangs of London, a brooding, tense, cinematic tour de force that is most definitely not for the squeamish.

For most of those who work in the TV industry, the old cliché is true: no two days are the same. But when you’re responsible for ITV’s lunchtime, evening, and 10:00pm news, there’s a structure that can’t bend, not even when the world enters lockdown and changes life as we know it. Welcome to the working world of Rachel Corp.

More than 30 years ago, I sat in the St George’s Medical School library in Tooting, south London, contemplating a framed cowhide that belonged to a beast called Blossom. The hide came from the cow that the great 18th-century physician Edward Jenner, the founder of immunology, used in an experiment to demonstrate his vaccine against smallpox. Fast forward 33 years and here we are during a pandemic that will last for many months to come.

In the week before lockdown began and schools were closed across the UK, the BBC’s Children’s and Education department realised it had a special duty in this national emergency.

 “At that moment, we started to see stretching out before us what the BBC should do in terms of education during the pandemic. We set the ball rolling,” says Alice Webb, director of BBC Children’s and Education.

They say that good things come in threes. When Channel 5 won Channel of the Year at March’s RTS Programme Awards, beating Sky Atlantic and BBC Three, the accolade followed identical wins at February’s Broadcast Awards and the 2018 Edinburgh TV Awards.

“It was thrilling to win Channel of the Year,” says the station’s director of programmes, Ben Frow, looking dapper in a dark T-shirt. “We’ve won each one once; we’ve finally got them all. I wouldn’t actually enter another channel of the year [competition].

Warm, witty and occasionally waspish, Joe Lycett is just the man to keep us entertained during lockdown. It’s fortunate, then, that he is presenting two lengthy prime-time TV series, with another on the way. And after a whirlwind few months making them, Lycett – while mindful of the suffering that Covid-19 has brought many – concludes that the new normal has been beneficial to his mental health.

In post-production, she mimics the actors’ steps and actions – and, for the BBC thriller, the gruesome murders – to add authenticity to the sound. Her craft is named after Jack Foley, who pioneered performing effects live and in sync with the pictures on early Hollywood talkies.

What does the job involve?