When twenty million people watched the same thing at the same time

There is a particular sort of fame that simply cannot be manufactured any more, and it is nothing to do with talent. It is to do with there having been three channels.

When a Christmas special could pull twenty-odd million viewers, the people on it were not celebrities in the modern sense. They were more like relatives. Everybody had watched the same thing, so everybody had the same reference, and you could quote it at the bus stop to a total stranger.

What that did to the people on it

Morecambe and Wise. The Two Ronnies. Cilla. Bruce Forsyth, who managed to do it in four separate decades. Delia Smith causing a national shortage of cranberries by mentioning them once.

They could not go anywhere. But they were also spoken about with something close to affection rather than the sport that gets made of famous people now — partly because there were no cameras in their bins, and partly because there was no comment section.

What replaced it

More choice, which is genuinely better, and a fragmented audience, which is genuinely worse for this particular thing. Two people can now watch television for four hours each and have nothing whatsoever in common the next morning.

The last gasps of the old way were the big soap cliffhangers, a couple of talent show finals, and the football. That is more or less it.

The honest bit

It is easy to make this sound like a golden age and it wasn't one. A lot of what pulled those enormous audiences was thin stuff that only did it because the alternative was a test card. And some of the people who were treated as national treasures at the time turned out to be nothing of the sort.

But the shared bit was real. Twenty million people laughing at the same joke on the same evening is a thing that happened, and it is not coming back.