When did Sunday night telly get so stressful?

 1986.

That was the year Sunday night telly changed. 

Up until then it was a gentle slope from the end of the weekend into the start of the working week. It would be Ski Sunday, Pointless Views, Songs of Praise, the Antiques Roadshow, something about nature that we missed because it was bathtime followed by a gentle Play for Today. Then, in 1986, Denis Potter came along and flipped our world upside down with his Singing Detective. 

From that moment on Sunday night became a weekly shot of anticipatory anxiety. What happened last week? Can we remember? Oh gosh. We’ve been waiting all week. We watched the whole episode on the edge of our seat, fearful of the Russians. We were all terrified of the Russians in the Eighties. I’m pretty certain that we never found out the answer and it left us on a permanent cliffhanger (which is slightly worrying for those of us desperate to find out who H is)

I have a sneaking suspicion that this move to Sunday night anxiety was to combat work stress. From the Eighties onwards, work became a toxic environment where everyone had to work harder to keep their job. Unions had less power, we were all our own worst enemy - desperate to prove our worth by working harder and longer. And with that came the anticipatory anxiety. Would we actually make it through the week? Could we survive until the next weekend?

In recent years the Sunday night anxiety has got worse. Now we are set up for the anxiety with a weep at Call the Midwife. The program, that re-writes midwifery history to make it seem much more compassionate to tell the stories that everyone ignored at the time, leaves us feeling jittery and vulnerable. Then we get Line of Duty. There has never been a programme that we work so hard for. Who is H? Who is going to die? What’s a PIM? Was that James Nesbit? No. Yes. It was him but he can’t actually be in it because he was filming Bloodlands, which was the previous Sunday night anxiety drop. Every episode leaves us on a cliffhanger, which seems a perfectly appropriate way to start our week in these days of working in a ‘nearly’ post-pandemic world. Can we really survive until next week?