have been idly wondering how many times I will watch Jamie Oliver roast a chicken before I die. I am 32 now and I’ve seen him roast, let’s say, 10,000 chickens. Oliver didn’t really get big until I was about 12 so that’s a rate of 5,000 chickens a decade; and speculating that I live to the current projected life expectancy, that gives me around 50 more years of Jamie Oliver roasting chickens. (In this simulation, Oliver lives – and roasts chickens – right up to the age of 93.) So, I will watch Jamie Oliver roast 25,000 more chickens before I die. And none of them will be roasted quite as chaotically (on his knees in an outhouse, subbing in cheddar for parmesan) as he does in Keep Cooking and Carry On (streaming on All4). This isn’t just Oliver, obviously: fresh supplies of well-produced TV are dwindling, our national stockpiles of Hollyoaks and EastEnders are already being rationed out, and television is having to pivot to something DIY and on-the-fly: helpful children with iPhones precariously balanced on taped-off tripods, jittering Skype connections, urgently shaved heads, bookcases in backgrounds. Oliver’s home-cooking show is made for lockdown: farmhouse kitchen, robust ingredients, herbs from the garden – bosh. It is actually unnerving how ready he was to do two neat, 15-minute recipes a day, to be edited up and broadcast; Oliver the same as he ever is, that curious mix of wholesomely matey and inescapably dislikable. In fact, if he just had some low-income parents to shout at through a chainlink fence about eating chips, it would be identical to his pre-lockdown output. Oliver is not the only star of quarantine, he is just the one who seemed the most prepared. There is The Steph Show (Monday to Friday, 12noon, Channel 4), too, a Steph McGovern-hosted lifestyle programme that sees her chatter around her own house then occasionally Skype some everyday-hero type to see how they are coping in a lockdown. We will watch The Steph Show back in a museum one day, showing our children what entertainment looked like when coronavirus robbed us of it. The Steph Show tries hard but is unwatchable: a projection of what it would look like if we never let Big Brother winners out of the house and just let them rot there, slowly unravelling alone, occasionally interviewing someone at a flour mill about supplies of wheat. TV is doing the best it can with what it’s got, I do understand that, but that doesn’t mean it is good. Up until now, it has felt a lot like an endless last-day-of-school-before-the-summer-holidays: the rules relaxed, the standards cheerfully lowered, you’re allowed to draw on your own shirt and bring a board game in. But we can only put up with that for so long. Can Have I Got News for You survive when the delicate snickering feedback loop that serves to actually get Paul Merton to say anything is dissolved by the cold reality of a Zoom call? Can Sky Sports News really continue to Skype in to see what Graeme Souness is angry about when Paul Pogba hasn’t kicked a ball in a month? This is unsustainable, but it should serve as a lesson: stay at home, flatten the curve, protect the NHS. The sooner we do all that, the sooner we can have good TV back.