By the end of the latest season of Doctor Who, it was clear the BBC’s once high-flying franchise was on life support. Ratings had collapsed. Lead actor Ncuti Gatwa was keen to move on to Hollywood. Whatever the television equivalent of urgent medical attention is, the Doctor needed lots of it.
The real surprise, though, was that the decline of the Doctor went largely unnoticed. There had been widespread speculation among hard-core Whovians that the BBC and its international partners in the franchise, Disney +, were considering pulling the plug on the Tardis (the eventual twist was far more shocking, with former Doctor’s assistant Billie Piper revealed is to be the new custodian of the venerable blue police call box).
What was most telling, however, was that, amid all the online chatter, nobody in the real world much cared. The entire saga of the Doctor’s rumoured demise and the character’s bombshell resurrection in the guise of the former Because We Want To chart-topper passed without comment – in contrast to the widespread anguish that had attended the cancelling of the series for the first time in 1989.
Such has been the pattern in recent decades – and not just in the context of time-travelling British eccentrics. Contrast the present-day television landscape with that distant time when The Late Late Show on RTÉ ranked as unmissable viewing. Or what about Montrose’s perpetually okay-ish soap opera Fair City, which once held the entire nation in its thrall - including when it aired Ireland’s first on-screen kiss between two men in 1996. Or in November 2001, when 800,000 viewers tuned in to the soap to see abusive sociopath Billy Meehan beaten to death by the son of his partner, Carol. People were talking about it at the bus stop and in the pub (back when the pub was a place we frequented in numbers). Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t get away from bad Billy and his bloody exit.
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Those days are clearly long over. According to RTÉ, some 280,000 people watch Fair City each week (with more tuning in on RTÉ Player). But when last did you hear someone discuss a Fair City plotline – or even acknowledge its existence? It’s still out there, and fans still enjoy it, but to the rest of us, it’s gone with Billy in the grave.
The fracturing of television audiences has long been a source of dismay to those who care about such matters. In 2019, Time Magazine fretted that the end of Game of Thrones would be “the last water cooler TV show”. That same year, author Simon Reynolds despaired of the great geyser of streaming TV and how it had deprived us of unifying cultural milestones. With so much entertainment jetting into our eyeballs, how is it possible for any of us to hold dear any particular film or show? “There is,” he wrote in the Guardian, “always something new to watch… an endless, relentless wave of pleasures lined up in the infinite Netflix queue.”
More recently, Stephen Bush wrote in the Financial Times that “everywhere in the rich world, the era of truly ‘popular culture’ is over”. This, he posited, “is bad news for modern states, which are held together to some extent by the sense that we are all part of a collective endeavour ... the decline of shared viewing is eroding shared cultural reference points”.
The death of monoculture is generally presented as a negative. Weren’t we all better off in the old days, when Biddy and Miley’s first kiss in Glenroe held the nation transfixed, and the big reveal as to who shot JR was a global news event that pushed trivialities such as the Cold War off the front pages?
But is that such a loss? It’s easy to look back with nostalgia, but the age of the monoculture was the era of having everyone else’s tastes forced on you. Consider the great cultural tragedy that was Britpop, where lumbering, flag-waving Beatles cover acts became the dominant force in music.
Those bands never really went away, and some of them are back in force this summer – asking you to pay an arm-and-a-leg for the privilege of a ringside seat (or, indeed, a seat miles away). The difference is that today, you have the option of not participating. Instead of going to Oasis in Croke Park, I’ll be in London watching the K-pop band Blackpink. Thanks to streaming and the general fracturing of popular culture, I can, moreover, essentially put my fingers in my ears and pretend Oasis doesn’t exist. Thirty years ago, that option was not available. They were everywhere – in the summer of 1996, it felt as if Wonderwall was stalking us. But because mass entertainment has splintered, you no longer have to feel as if you are being followed around by Liam Gallagher every time you leave the house.
It is also important to remember that the monoculture is still occasionally capable of making its presence felt. Let’s go back to The Late Late Show, which, according to the latest statistics, is watched by about 400,000 people. That may be a long way off the annual Toy Show spectacular, which in 2024 drew 1.6 million viewers, but it remains a national talking point – every bit as much as Billy Meehan getting his just deserts.
The same effect can be seen in streaming. Granted, the extraordinary response to the Stephen Graham drama Adolescence, which streamed on Netflix earlier this year, was in some ways a product of a moral panic more than an epoch-defining cultural moment. But while the show had some astute points about misogyny in our schools, its depiction of what it’s like to be a 13-year-old boy was painfully wide of the mark.
Still, it did capture the public imagination. And maybe there will be a similar response to series three of Squid Game, which was released on Netflix this weekend. So it isn’t as if we aren’t capable of bonding over our favourite TV shows any more. It’s just that such instances are far rarer than they used to be. But is that a bad thing? Nowadays, we are free to follow our own interests, rather than having someone else’s forced on us. And when we do come together, that moment of shared excitement feels all the more precious. The water cooler is dead; long live the water cooler.
