There was a moment, somewhere around 1990, when I sincerely believed that the most important thing my mother did each evening was sit down at 9.00pm sharp to watch the news.
Not 9.01pm. Not 8.59pm. Nine, on the dot, because that was when the news began, because Sir Alastair Burnet had decided it was so, and because the rest of the United Kingdom, including, by the look of it, the entire cabinet, appeared to be doing exactly the same thing. The country ran on a single national rhythm, like a great wheezing grandfather clock, and the people who set the time wore tailored suits and lived in a place called Wood Lane.
That rhythm is now thoroughly, demonstrably, embarrassingly dead. And the people doing the burying are not bedroom-bound teenagers in TikTok-stained pyjamas. They are the very figures who built the broadcast schedule in the first place.
Take Stephen Colbert. Forty-eight hours after CBS finally smothered The Late Show with a corporate pillow, the network insists this had nothing to do with the lawsuit, the Skydance merger or the present occupant of the Oval Office, and we are of course expected to accept that assertion at the value of a Liz Truss lettuce, Colbert popped up on a public-access channel called Monroe Community Media. Then he popped up, rather more pointedly, on his shiny new YouTube channel, with Eminem and Jeff Daniels in tow, gathering 120,000 subscribers in a single weekend. No 11.35pm slot. No commercial break. No procession of Affiliate Sales stations of the cross. Just Stephen, a camera, and the most generous tip jar in the history of broadcasting.
A few months earlier, Piers Morgan walked off the Murdoch reservation entirely, to which I would normally raise a single languid eyebrow, but the man left a reported £50 million on the table to do it. He has called the TalkTV slot a “straitjacket”. He has 3.6 million YouTube subscribers and a four-year arrangement that hands him ownership of his own brand. Trump, Zelensky, Peterson, Ronaldo: all interviewed not for the dignified British 10 o’clock viewer but for a global congregation that watches him in Brisbane, Boston and bed.
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