From chatshows in spare bedrooms to the sheer terror of infecting Hollywood megastars, making television in lockdown became utterly wild. The insiders tell all.
Doing this show is like waking up in an operating theatre’
Remarkably, programmes that rely on guests and studio audiences persevered. The Graham Norton Show was commissioned for eight remotely recorded episodes, with equipment installed in Norton’s back bedroom. The first episode aired in April, with Michael Bublé, Martin Freeman and Daisy Haggard – plus a phone call with Judi Dench. There was even an admirable music performance from Celeste in her living room, where she had hung a red curtain as a backdrop.
“It was very hard for Graham,” executive producer Graham Stuart tells me. “But he did incredibly well. It was a real achievement.” The whole show continued to operate via Zoom. “We’re not Newsnight. What we’re doing is entertaining. Things are pretty awful but we can still have a laugh, and Graham’s natural persona helped that,” Stuart adds.
Guests were excited as they returned to the studio in spaced-apart armchairs: “Tom Cruise was trapped in London in lockdown. He loves the show and decided to come on to promote Top Gun: Maverick, even though cinemas were closed and the movie wasn’t coming out for a long time. He said, ‘You should watch the film!’ So he got a Leicester Square cinema opened for 15 of us to go and watch it.” But nobody wanted to give Covid to a Hollywood star. “When he came to the studio we warned everybody: ‘Do not go near Tom Cruise!’”
It was a relief when audiences slowly started to return, albeit masked and sitting two metres apart. “The best description of what it was like came from Frank Skinner, who looked at an audience and said: ‘Doing this show is like waking up in an operating theatre.’”
This was quite a feat for other shows that lost live audiences, too, such as Strictly Come Dancing (the crew stepped in, whooping and hollering), Question Time and Have I Got News For You. Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway even received its highest ever ratings. Then again, that is hardly surprising, given that the alternative was buying a dry scotch egg with a QR code in a pub.