2022 hasn’t been a vintage year for culture – but real-life drama has kept us gripped

Jessie Thompson thought we’d fully witness the fruits of creative lockdown labour this year, but instead most of it was... well... fine. Happenings in the real world have been the big draw

A year to remember for the real-life drama (Getty/ITV)

Wasn’t 2022 meant to be normal? After two years of the pandemic, we’d finally get to see all the great work that had been delayed by Covid. We’d fully witness the fruits of creative lockdown labours. At last, we’d get back to doing all the things that we used to do. Except, the world of culture seemed timid and tired, struggling to get back up in a depleted climate. No particular film, book, play or TV show felt definitive. There was some good stuff, some truly terrible stuff (hi Blonde), and mostly it was fine – although very little was truly great.

But if much of the work didn’t deliver on that sense of delayed gratification, the real-world drama at least left us relentlessly gripped. For much of the twelve months, it was as though we were trapped in a constant succession of viral moments. It was a forgettable year that was also entirely unforgettable, and certainly not normal.

After craving the glamour of real-life red carpet events, we were reminded by the year’s award season just us how thuddingly dull such events actually are, dragging on with safe, predictable winners like Coda, and zero controversy to speak of – save for Emma Watson’s sly Baftas dig at JK Rowling. Until… the Oscars. Will Smith. Chris Rock. “Keep my wife’s NAME...” The slap. All around the world, people repeatedly watched the King Richard star – moments away from Best Actor glory himself – thwacking Rock around the chops, trying to process what had just happened. But we couldn’t, so the task was left to Liam Payne, promiscuously flitting through accents, to tell us that “whatever he felt that he did, he had the right to do”.

If the pandemic warped our sense of time, the sheer number of chaotic events in 2022 broke it entirely. Have we really had three PMs this year? The UK is not OK hun. Boris Johnson, whose rightful legacy is a boring Sky Atlantic drama that nobody watched, left office having inserted a permanent state of omnishambles into our political sphere.

The end-of-days atmosphere has seeped into even the most innocuous-seeming parts of our culture, with Richard Madeley having fights with union bosses and Holly and Phil turning the cost-of-living crisis into a This Morning competition segment. Joe Lycett proved to be our most incisive comedian with a perfectly judged appearance on Laura Kuenssberg’s new political breakfast show; he simply told Liz Truss she “smashed it” when she clearly didn’t. His mischievous heckle brutally exposed Truss’s indomitably vacuous soundbites, just a month before her now inevitable-seeming resignation.

Meanwhile, Matt Hancock’s cynical attempt at public rehabilitation on I’m a Celebrity saw the public repeatedly vote for him to endure gruesome Bushtucker Trials, until it became clear he had an almost sociopathic ability to complete them. There have been some fever dream moments this year, but watching the former Health Sec sing Ed Sheeran while sitting on a log and wearing camo shorts is something that will never leave me. The British public’s voting patterns are once again hard to read: did they vote him to the final out of a newfound sympathy, or simply to extend the reign of terror? The fact that Jill Scott won the crown after the Lionesses’ historic Euros victory in the summer felt like a positive turning point, with female commentators now a permanent fixture of World Cup coverage.

The death of the Queen in September, just three months after the Platinum Jubilee, was perhaps the year’s defining event, many moved by the visceral feeling of living through history. As well as some masterclass broadcasting from Huw Edwards, delivering the news with the teeniest crack of emotion in his voice, it was an event that saw us expressing our grief in the most British of ways: projecting our feelings onto the fictional character, Paddington Bear. At one point, mourners were even urged to stop leaving marmalade sandwiches. The queue to see the Queen lying in state, often requiring a 16-hour wait, became a symbol of public decency; Holly and Phil, accused of skipping it, were persona non-grata overnight, while David Beckham, stoically shuffling along in a flatcap, was a paragon of virtue. Of course, Joe Lycett later saw to that.

The Oscars kicked off 2022’s real-life drama in March (AFP/Getty)

The Queen’s funeral was a formal affair in comparison to the free-flowing confessions of Harry and Meghan, whose Netflix docuseries beat the fifth series of The Crown in terms of viewer figures, if not watchability. But curating an image has never seemed trickier for celebrities, with the now infamous Don’t Worry Darling press tour an example of the carnage that ensues when you can’t stay on script. It began with rumours of a feud between star Florence Pugh and director Olivia Wilde and ended, surreally, with internet theories that Harry Styles had spat on co-star Chris Pines while at the Venice film festival.

Before anyone had seen it, the film became a magnet for drama – was it a calculated move to drum up interest? Was it misogyny, clouding the work of a female filmmaker? Who knows, but we’ll always have the memes. There was a similar fixation with both Kanye West’s ongoing public outbursts and the ugly Johnny Depp v Amber Heard trial, in which the A-list exes sued each other for defamation and aired countless private details of their dysfunctional marriage. Less toxic, far more entertaining, and already turned into a TV show, was the Wagatha Christie trial, in which Rebekah Vardy sensationally lost her attempt to sue Coleen Rooney for libel. It really was……… Rebekah Vardy’s account.

Did Harry Styles spit on Chris Pine during the Venice film festival? (Getty)

Amid the year’s lively moments, there has been a great deal of loss in 2022, with treasured talents leaving a huge hole in our cultural landscape – but, to our fortune, so much wonderful work behind them. There were the legends: Wolf Hall author Hilary Mantel. Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie. Artist Paula Rego. Theatre director Peter Brook. Harry Potter actor Robbie Coltrane and EastEnders star June Brown. Stage icon Angela Lansbury and Oscar winner Sidney Poitier. There were those taken too soon, from Coolio to Ray Liotta to Olivia Newton-John. And there were the shocking deaths of Taylor Hawkins, Anne Heche, Darius Danesh and Aaron Carter.

There were harrowing moments, too, such as the shocking attack on author Salman Rushdie while on stage in New York to give a speech. It was made all the more distressing given that Rushdie, who lost the use of one hand and sight in one eye, had only recently said he felt his life was “relatively normal” after years of living under the threat of a fatwa. The war in Ukraine, which ignited slowly then suddenly in February, left many at a loss, with news bulletins filled with disturbing images of violence and conflict. The country’s Eurovision victory – Kalush Orchestra won for their mix of rap and Ukrainian folk music – was a powerful moment of collective solidarity from the European community.

Many legends were lost in 2022, including the novelist Hilary Mantel (AFP/Getty)

The contest, held in Turin, won over previous Eurovision-sceptics with its sense of joy. It was in these moments of live communion that it really felt like we were putting the pandemic behind us. Paul McCartney’s all-conquering three-hour Glastonbury Pyramid stage set, which saw him blitz through Beatles hits and do a virtual duet with John Lennon, was one for the ages. The whole nation practically vibrated with a field full of people’s “nah-nah-nah-na-na-naaaah”s. The appetite for shared live experiences was felt again when Peter Kay announced his first live stand-up tour for 12 years, with a reported online queue of 200,000 people.

In the world of books, there was a sense of the ground shifting, with TikTok’s BookTok contingent increasingly defining the market – the platform’s most popular author Colleen Hoover dominated bestseller lists around the world. Celebrity memoirs from the likes of Matthew Perry, Melanie C and Tom Felton suggested that some public figures now prefer old school, longform mediums to share their stories, instead of digital platforms, while the “cancel culture” debate continued to consume the industry, with novelist Joanne Harris overcoming a confidence vote to force her to stand down from her role as chair of the Society of Authors after weeks of in-fighting.

Ukraine’s Eurovision win with Kalush Orchestra won over even the hardened sceptics (PA)

After it looked like Netflix might take down traditional telly, the streamer appeared to stall this year, announcing declining subscriber numbers and bringing in adverts. Other than introducing Gen Z to Kate Bush in the latest series of Stranger Things, Netflix struggled to create major talking points. Episodic TV shows also seemed to be regaining ground from binge-watching habits created by streamers, with this year’s biggest and best shows – The White Lotus, House of the Dragon, The Traitors, and, yes, Love Island – reviving appointment viewing by drip-feeding instalments.

The theatre world, having been decimated by Covid, had to contend with a round of savage Arts Council cuts, with the Donmar Warehouse, Hampstead Theatre and English National Opera particularly affected. As a whole, the industry seemed less confident, more self-doubting, other than in a handful of productions that offered fresh new visions, from Lucy Moss’s revival of Legally Blonde the Musical to Clint Dyer’s Othello at the National Theatre. Amid the rising cost of living, ticket prices seem increasingly out of reach; the creation of The Ticket Bank, giving unsold tickets for free to those who can’t afford them, was an important innovation.

The art world, also trying to revive visitor numbers after the pandemic, had to contend with masterpieces becoming cannon fodder for political demonstrations, with Van Gogh’s Sunflowers getting an extra coating in tomato soup from Just Stop Oil activists. Veronica Ryan was a worthy winner of the Turner Prize, while rapper Little Simz picked up the Mercury Prize to universal approval. Beyoncé’s seventh album Renaissance was as consummately slick as ever, but the year’s biggest earworm was – unexpectedly – a 20-year-old Louis Theroux rap, given a second life on TikTok.

A new Taylor Swift album, Midnights, was released to a muted response, which is probably okay as Swift now wants to pivot to film. Let’s hope it goes better for her than Harry Styles, whose flop acting career was one of the big stories of the year. Other than Jordan Peele’s Nope, it wasn’t a summer of cinema-filling blockbusters, with indie offerings such as Aftersun and The Worst Person the World garnering much of the year’s acclaim in the world of film. And, at the last gasp, James Cameron’s mega-expensive Avatar sequel took $435m in its first weekend at the global box office, suggesting that people will still turn out to see pretty things on giant screens.

2022: it was A Lot. And, after two difficult, weird years, it’s understandable that the world of culture needs a bit of time to find its feet again, to re-harness creative energies and deliver fresh ideas. But we’d be wrong to think of it as a glitch in the matrix. We thought 2022 might be normal – but, in 2023, we might start to ask ourselves, what does “normal” even mean anymore?