know it is tedious to look back on 2020 and force everything through the prism of coronavirus – “Hey, remember that absolute horrorshow of a year we all just-about lived through? Well, let’s look back on the horror again, shall we?” – but it is slightly unavoidable when recapping what is arguably the weirdest year in television since the format was invented. We have, each of us, watched more TV in the last nine months than at any other time in our lives. And yet, with so little of it being newly produced, there has been an odd staleness to our viewing habits. I’m bored of live TV and I’m bored of box sets, so what else is there to do? Read a book? Behave. The first thing we need to confront is the short-lived Zoom era of Lockdown 1.0, which wasn’t very good. It’s harsh of me to single people out, but The Steph Show on Channel 4 was an early example of form clattering up against need, as a cheery Steph McGovern tried to hold together a light magazine show from the comfort of her own home. Yes, it was rubbish (and the less-constrained Steph’s Packed Lunch studio variation shows that the desperately-broadcasting-from-a-house was the faulty part, not the rest of the show’s format), but crucially it started airing on 30 March – the date we still thought we’d all be back at work within a couple of weeks – and the sheer fact that someone tried to launch a magazine show to keep us all entertained in the middle of a history-shaping global emergency is something to be commended. Then we started to cope. This was officially The Year TV Presenters Started Standing Really Far Apart, and that will probably continue deep into 2021. Some formats have coped pretty well with social distancing, because they were basically socially distanced anyway – Sunday Brunch has done just fine, proving Tim Lovejoy is a sort of TV cockroach that even nukes cannot finish off – and, once it restarted, Sky’s bombastic blokes-shouting-opinions-at-each-other-while-absolutely-not-touching-at-all football coverage remained largely the same. It is possible our standards dropped a little – The Queen’s Gambit and The Undoing were both feted simply because they were new TV, rather than good TV – but then I suppose one of the major symptoms of coronavirus is a loss of taste. It should be said, though, that I May Destroy You, Normal People and Industry more than made up for, say, Netflix’s The Stranger. Part of me is hopeful for the next couple of years of TV – if nothing else, writers have had nine months to develop stellar ideas, and those scripts that didn’t go into production before the pandemic have had almost a full year of polish – but I don’t want to diminish the here and now. TV has been there for us, and for that reason, one of my shows of the year was The Great British Bake Off – normally something I dismiss as twee nonsense for people who only go to Glastonbury to drink gin – but this year elevated to essentially a public health service, with cast and crew bubbling together to make a cosy competition show that felt like a tranquil island of normality. So that’s 2020, then: not the best year for innovation, nor for the premium quality drama we’ve grown accustomed to in the golden age of TV, but it’s kept going, and that’s something to be thankful for, at least.