In a celebrated episode of the classic 1970s sitcom Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? called ‘No Hiding Place’, best pals Terry and Bob (James Bolam and Rodney Bewes) spend the day trying to avoid learning the result of an England v Bulgaria football match so they can enjoy the highlights on television that evening.
The problem is, they have eight hours to kill.
All the while they’re being pursued by a local idiot called Flint (Brian Glover), who has bet them a tenner they won’t make it through the eight hours and is determined to win.
They do make it through, but only after a few close calls with Flint. They finally sit down to watch the highlights... and discover the match was postponed due to a waterlogged pitch.
Terry and Bob wouldn’t have called what they were trying to avoid a spoiler.
Back in the 1970s, nobody used the term spoiler, certainly not in relation to television (movies were a different matter).
Everybody watched a programme at the same time, so nobody – not even TV critics – knew the outcome before anyone else.
Things had changed a lot by 1980, when the burning question on the lips of the television-watching world was: “Who shot JR?”
Dallas villain JR Ewing (Larry Hagman) was gunned down at the end of the season three finale.
Viewers had to wait months before the identity of the assailant was revealed in the fourth episode of season four. The global audience was a staggering 83 million.
The Who killed JR? phenomenon – and it really was a phenomenon – marked the first time all branches of the media had given saturation coverage to a mere television series.
This, plus the rapidly increasing popularity of the game-changing VCR, which allowed you to record programmes even when you weren’t at home, arguably introduced the spoiler to TV culture.
If you didn’t want to know the identity of JR’s putative assassin until 24 hours after everyone else, you had to spend the day scrupulously avoiding radio, television, newspaper headlines and any real-life Flint intent on spoiling your enjoyment.
Still, this was a cakewalk compared to what we have to contend with in the age of social media.
If you weren’t part of the huge audience (12.8 million in the UK alone) riveted to Sunday night’s Line of Duty finale and plan to watch it at a later date, good luck trying to avoid spoilers.
Minutes after it ended, the reviews by the newspaper critics, this one included, went up online.
It didn’t even take that long on Twitter. Within seconds, even as the end credits were rolling, the platform was awash with opinions.
Everybody wanted to vent their feelings, positive or negative.
You couldn’t go near Twitter for a couple of days without bumping into #LineOfDuty or some variation of that hashtag. You still can’t go near it.
Out of curiosity, I searched Twitter for Line of Duty just now – just now being Tuesday afternoon – and there were 340 tweets about it in the last hour.
Even steering clear of social media platforms altogether doesn’t guarantee your enjoyment won’t be ruined.
It was plastered all over the newspapers, print and digital versions.
They were talking about it on breakfast television on Monday morning.
They were talking about it on radio.
And those radio shows that were off the air on Monday because it was a bank holiday were talking about it on Tuesday.
What can you do? Short of going to live with a silent order of monks for a while, the answer, sadly, is nothing.
Spoilers are simply unavoidable. They’re everywhere.
This is particularly unfortunate for people who are new to Line of Duty, which doubled in popularity after it moved from BBC2 to BBC1, and are still catching up with the first five seasons on the RTÉ Player.
Looking at it from the media side, sometimes all the advance warnings about spoilers don’t make a blind bit of difference.
A few years ago some clown on Twitter abused me for revealing what happened in the very last episode of Breaking Bad, even though the words “WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!” appeared in large type at the top of the column.
I wouldn’t care to be a passenger in his car when he comes to a Yield sign.
Irish Independent