Robbing banks will be easier when everyone has to wear a mask, but because a fearsome lady will only allow one customer in at a time bank, robbery will have to become a solitary pursuit. Young people will only meet and fall in love on-line, no longer the casual encounter on a train, the glove dropped and picked up or the lady rescued from a tower. If eyes meet and hearts melt it won‘t be across a crowded room but in a large public space. Hospitals will remain much the same and duelling can be conducted within social distancing guide-lines. When the TV companies run out of already filmed drama and cease the repeats, new drama will have to look very different.
Kenneth Tynan is reputed to have been the first to use the F word on TV in 1965; a 1968 episode of Star Trek contained the first interracial kiss and so on. Dixon of Dock Green would have to blow a whistle if he wanted tactical support, Morse and Chandler in ‘Friends’ humped around massive mobile phones but modern dramas are largely spent looking at a monitor with satellite tracking. The Cisco Kid had Pancho, the Lone Ranger had Tonto, Morse had Lewis, but modern heroes’ side-kicks are usually computer buffs. Eve has her Kenny, Nikki Alexander has Clarissa.
Cultural and technological developments in our society profoundly affect the nature of TV drama. Last night we watched a favourite 30 minute comedy (the extent of my concentration) ‘Car Share’. This simply involves one employee, Peter Kay, picking up another employee, Sian Gibson, and their conversations as they drive to and from work. I enjoy the split second vignettes as the car is filmed from outside, or shots taken through the windscreen of typical commuter life somewhere around Manchester. Obviously edited but it is acutely observed documentary. Last night we saw mums escorting children to school, a man pushing a baby buggy in the rain, traffic hold-ups at a road junction, a cyclist weaving in and out of traffic, an old lady sheltering in a bus-stop, commuters sitting on a bus. It all looked wrong: the crowds, sharing a car, children playing together. It was the world as it used to be and may not be again for years. It was a busy, congested, vibrant world already becoming unfamiliar, the stuff of history.
Somewhere producers, especially of the soaps, must be considering the shape of new naturalistic drama played in masks, socially distanced, in small family groups, in gardens or public spaces, only one person per car and everyone, not just the forensics, in latex gloves. The Queen Vic and the Bull will be closed so there will be nowhere to meet. If realism is to be achieved this is how it will have to be. Familiar phrases that are no longer spoken will have to be excised: “Come up and see me some time”; “Let me give you a lift”; “I have two tickets for the theatre”; “Pop round for a cuppa”; “See you in’t pub.” We won’t be using them so neither can the script-writers.
Our whole popular culture is up for a major refit because a prime casualty of Covid-19 may be drama and romance. Take the words of the Barbara Streisand song ‘He touched me’:
He touched me, he put his hand near mine And then he touched me I felt a sudden tingle when he touched me A sparkle, a glow.
Now they would both panic and wash their hands with sanitizer and wipe their sleeves with anti-bacterial wipes. And what about The Brotherhood of Man’s 1976 Eurovision winner ‘Save your Kisses for Me’? – presumably while she untangles the elastic of her face mask from her rollers and finds the ear ring that’s dropped out.