Lockdown has shown that performances depend as much on the audience as the playersCoronavirus – latest updatesSee all our
Coronavirus coverageThe longer it goes on, the more lockdown confirms the supreme importance of the audience.
Premier League Football is to return, in empty stadiums, with artificial crowd noise for television audiences. Clearly, the “canned” crowd noise is an attempt to get around the fact that a spectator sport sans spectators could severely lack atmosphere. Nor is this problem confined to sport. Look at musicians performing at those lockdown “concerts”. Once you get past gawping at bookcases and patio heaters – the sheer novelty of the enforced domestic intimacy – it starts to feel like a series of lacklustre soundchecks in the soft furnishings department of John Lewis. However much noise is being made, it’s too flat, one-sided, empty. As popular culture fights to survive, something important is missing, and that something is the audience.
This much is obvious, and has become one of the recurring motifs of lockdown: art,
music, film, sport, literature, every aspect of culture is horribly isolated and struggling, and not just because of the hideous economic impact. Even politics is affected. Look at Jacob Rees-Mogg frantically trying to get MPs back into the Commons – not least, one suspects, because, without all the braying and guffawing (what passes for crowd-noise in Westminster),
Boris Johnson is horribly exposed for what he is: an overgrown schoolboy who’s spent a lifetime not being arsed to do his homework.