Stuck in lockdown, possibly forever, TV watching has taken on a new urgency, especially now that we can binge watch and after a couple of days you open another bottle of wine and realise with dread, “We’ve got nothing left to watch!”

Added to the drama, TV-watching has increasingly become a process whereby you not only have to work out if the thing you’re about to waste hours of your life on is any good but also if it is going to smother you in “correct” messages, or worse, will it drag you down into the misanthropic mindset of the modern cultural elites?

I noticed the cultural imperative to “like” certain programmes a few years back while discussing women’s football on a BBC TV programme.

I’d been invited because of an article I’d written about the relative weakness of women’s football, something that was clearly not the correct thing to say. I challenged the presenter, noting that he said he was a fan of women’s football but also questioning, if he wasn’t a fan, would he feel comfortable saying so on air? He looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

We both knew the answer to this question. Since then, TV watching has increasingly taken on a new dimension, with past clichés about weak women, strong men and black people occasionally being turned on their heads and replaced by alternative tropes.

Are we in danger of patronising black people, for example, when they are portrayed in a new “positive” way and used to reflect goodness in a character? White guy married to a black woman, in case you’d missed it, means he’s a good guy. And on it goes.

The separation of the cultural elites and the punters is growing, occasionally illustrated by the huge variations in Rotten Tomatoes ratings by reviewers and the audience. Check out Asian comedy “sensation” Lily Singh, for example, who gets a thumping 82 per cent thumbs-up from the enlightened experts and a crushing 16% from the public.

The new correct caricatures often get in the way of what you’re trying to watch, worse still, however, and more difficult to spot, often until the end of a series, is the one-sided and degraded image of people that our cultural producers often hold.

Watching dramas and crime stories in particular, the new norm regularly centres on the issue of abuse and of toxic relationships and I often find myself breathing a sigh of relief when the explanation for all the badness we’ve just witnessed is not because the hero or heroine was abused as a child.

Which is why Queen’s Gambit was such a breath of fresh air this year. If you haven’t watched it, you’re in luck, and get ready to binge over the Christmas period, because this is a story with plenty of flawed characters, failed love, a tough childhood, and drug addiction but one that also has an incredibly uplifting sense of humanity.

The coming-of-age drama follows our heroine, Beth Harmon, through the stages of her life – from the grumpy old man who teaches her chess in the orphanage, her alcoholic, adoptiveed mother who lives off her success, the often-awkward romances with her chess-playing peers who she humiliates en route to play the grandmasters in Moscow.

The outcome of it all, without giving the game away, is captured beautifully in the final episode where rather than the difficult, often loving, relationships she’s had proving to be toxic and undermining, they end up being what made her the woman she is. And, in its turn, her genius is shown not to have undermined the people she’s met but has brought light, hope and joy to all of their lives.

Programmes like Queen’s Gambit give us great entertainment and goes to show that there are still writers out there who are able to climb out of the hectoring and misanthropic mindset that often holds back the production of great and uplifting art. Merry Christmas.

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