The whole world was watching

It looks like the red tops were right then: literally the whole country watched Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey. I am the only person in the land who didn’t tune in, preferring an hour of light entertainment in the form of an episode of Air Crash Investigation. I preferred to look at an air crash rather than a car crash.

Then, I saw last night’s audience figures. A staggering 11.4 million people tuned in, a very high number for a TV show these days. But wait: that’s only around one sixth of the population. The whole country literally wasn’t watching after all.

As per usual, the tabloids were hysterical in their coverage of the interview. But how many people actually buy a newspaper these days? The two most popular rags, the Mail and the Sun, each sell less than a million copies a day. And if you put them all together, all British newspapers don’t have a circulation between them of anything like the number of people who tuned into ITV last night. Do you know what I think? Well, in the voice of a drunken man, I’m going to tell you.

TV viewers are a captive audience. They’re going to watch something on the box because that is what TV viewers do. They will consider what’s the best – or least shit – programme on the box at any one time and watch it. Sometimes, we avidly watch shows, other times it’s no more captivating than the cheap cover versions you hear in Sports Direct. I’ll wager that almost no one who watched the Windsor show wasn’t going to watch TV otherwise.

Today, it was obvious that the media would spend the day talking to itself about the aftermath. So I avoided the bits that did. The only thing I really heard about was when the GMB weatherman had a pop at Piers Morgan, the pompous presenter stormed off in a fit of pique. But did he? My guess is that Morgan has been waiting for a moment like this before dramatically announcing his arrival on the new right wing TV station GB News. Sadly, we haven’t seen the last of Morgan but unless you have a predilection for aggressive right wing wingnuts shooting their mouths of about anything they consider to be ‘woke’ or ‘PC’, there are better things to watch. Like paint drying or even your dog taking a shit.

So if you didn’t watch ‘Harry and Meghan: the shit show’, then join the other 55 million of us who couldn’t be arsed. It’s a lie to say the world was watching when something like 83% of Brits weren’t. Clearly someone’s interested, but most of us weren’t.