The art of spoilers: Have fractured viewing habits ruined the suspense?

Tense TV drama Bodyguard has the nation gripped, and viewers in fear of having the twists ruined before they see them. But is expecting no spoilers entirely reasonable, asks David Barnett – and whose responsibility is it to avoid them?

(BBC)

*Be warned: the following piece contains spoilers for pretty much everything over the last 400 years.

To fair London, where we set our scene: it is 1597, or thereabouts, and two men meet at the parish pump while taking a break from their daily grind of, I don’t know, planting potatoes or something.

“Didst thou attend the debut performance of Mr Shakespeare’s new diversion Romeo and Juliet last night?” says the first.

“I did not,” says the second. “For we are to meander there tomorrow, as the missus is at ye old pilates tonight, and last night was, of courseth, the footy.”

“Thou misseth a treat,” observes the first. “’Tis a romance, but a tragic one. These star-crossed lovers hail from feuding families. The girl fakes her own death so they can be together but her boyfriend thinketh she has truly carked it, and does himself in for real.”

“Spoilereths,” sighs the second, and goes back to planting potatoes.

There is little, if zero, evidence that such an exchange ever took place, nor do we really know how people did talk about popular culture in the 16th century, or if they took pains to avoid relating salient plot points to those who had not yet had chance to partake.

But in 2018 spoilereths – sorry, spoilers – are definitely a thing, and perhaps one of the most abhorred social gaffes of contemporary life.

The latest thing to get people in a flap over spoilers is, of course, the BBC’s Sunday night drama Bodyguard, written by Jed Mercurio and starring Keeley Hawes as an embattled home secretary and Richard Madden as her troubled police protection officer, whose idea of “close protection” involves the removal of all parties’ underwear.

‘Bodyguard’ writer Jed Mercurio says spoilers should not be posted until three days after airing (BBC)

Episode five, the penultimate one, airs this weekend, and hoo boy, has it been a rollercoaster ride, with Hawes’ character Julia Montague getting unexpectedly offed at the end of the third instalment.

It’s been what they used to call a watercooler moment, one of those programmes where people can’t wait to gather in the office and discuss the twists and turns of the previous night’s episode.

Except for two things: one, nobody waits to get to the office any more; they immediately take to social media to express their WTF?-age to anyone within digital spitting distance.

And two, our viewing habits have massively changed. No longer do we all gather at the same time to sit in front of the glass teat in the living room, and watch programmes simultaneously. We record them, we watch them on catchup services, we make TV fit into our busy schedules and lives.

But what to do with watercooler moments when the watercoolers have become Twitter, which connects us not just to Janice from reception and Trevor from accounts, but potentially to anyone and everyone across the whole world?

And what when half the people who might see your WTF? tweet might not have seen Bodyguard, or whatever it is we’re discussing, yet?

Here’s the tough nut to crack: where lies the responsibility with avoiding spoilers? With those who have seen the thing in question, and must keep schtum, or with those who have not yet had a chance to consume, and should therefore do all they can to avoid online discussion?

Those who think it is the latter are of the mind that if you haven’t seen the show or movie yet, then tough luck, especially if it’s something that has been broadcast “live” as it were, that most people have had an opportunity to watch at 9pm on a Sunday. You decide to watch something else and catch up with Bodyguard on Monday, that’s your outlook.‘

On the other hand, Twitter isn’t quite the same as discussing the show with two or three people who have also seen it. It’s instantaneous, for one thing; why wait for Monday morning when you can tweet about Julia Montague getting blown to bits while Keeley Hawes is still doing a BAFTA-worthy twitch on the floor?

But would you run out of your house, into a packed pub, commandeer the covers band’s PA system and bellow “Julia just bought the farm!” to a few dozen people who had Bodyguard on series-link? Because, say the anti-spoiler brigade, that’s pretty much what you’re doing by taking to Twitter to WTF? all over the place.

Bodyguard writer Jed Mercurio took to Twitter himself to weigh in, saying: “It’s impossible to manage what’s discussed on social media. Users need to employ common sense and avoid it. If you still haven’t watched the match, don’t go looking up the results.”

Which was a nice reference to something that reminds us that spoilers, and the avoidance thereof, isn’t something we’ve invented in the past 10 years.

In a 1973 episode of Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?, a stone cold classic called No Hiding Place, pals Bob and Terry (Rodney Bewes and James Bolam) go to desperate lengths to avoid finding out the score in an England vs Bulgaria football match until the highlights are shown on TV later that evening. In the end, it’s all for naught; the game wasn’t played due to flooding.

And even further back, in 1960, legendary director Alfred Hitchcock took a dim view of anyone spoiling his classic psychological horror movie Psycho. Back then, when cinemas simply rolled movies around on repeat all day, it wasn’t uncommon for people to go into a theatre halfway through a movie, watch to the end, then watch the first half on the next showing immediately afterwards.

Janet Leigh screaming in ‘Psycho’ shower scene (Corbis)

But Psycho was a different beast, in that it did something no movie had done before – and hasn’t been done much since, at least up until Bodyguard on TV – and that was kill off its leading actor.

Janet Leigh as Marion Crane was the undisputed star of Psycho, the woman who in a moment of madness makes off with $40,000 from her boss and hits the road to be with her lover, making a fatal stop-off at the Bates Motel run by creepy Norman and his mother.

There were plenty of big reveals at the end, of course – Norman turns out to be living a dual life as his henpecked self and his overbearing mum – but the huge twist comes very early on when, against all expectations, Marion is viciously knifed to death in the shower.

Hitchcock went to the trouble of having posters made to hang in cinema foyers banning anyone from entering a showing of Psycho after the curtain had gone up so they wouldn’t miss the big moment.

But even before that, he had persuaded Paramount to finance the movie even though he banned executives from reading the script so there’d be no leaks, and the story goes that Hitch even bought up every copy he could find of Robert Bloch’s novel from which he adapted the story.

Movies, perhaps, are a different kettle of fish to TV shows (and football matches, come to that). Perhaps when we choose not to watch a TV programme on at a fixed time, available to all, then it is incumbent upon us to avoid spoilers and not complain when people, quite naturally, want to discuss the show openly.

But films have a much longer shelf life, and it can be weeks or even months from the day a movie goes on general release to when a lot of people get the chance to see it. Back in the 1990s, there were a lot of movies with big twists, and as far as I can recall, I managed to avoid learning about most of them until I actually saw the film.

I didn’t know that Bruce Willis was dead at the end of The Sixth Sense, I didn’t know Edward Norton and Brad Pitt were one and the same in Fight Club, I didn’t know that Kevin Spacey was Keyser Soze in The Final Suspects, and I didn’t know that Dil was transgender in The Crying Game.

And if you didn’t know any of that, then now you do. Because there has to be another element taken into account in the spoiler debate, and that’s the passage of time.

All those films are twenty-odd years old; can you reasonably expect word not to get out about the big twists? But we didn’t have the internet in the 1990s, and it was a lot easier to avoid spoilers, whether accidental or malicious.

Malicious, because some people do take perverse pleasure in spoiling new movies for those who haven’t seen them yet. I think I managed to avoid the mention that Han Solo died in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, for the two weeks it took me to see the movie after it was released in 2015, but it took a lot of deliberate effort, being careful about what reviews I read and actively bypassing certain internet search terms.

Brad Pitt and Edward Norton in 1999’s ‘Fight Club’ (20th Century Fox)

The great, late film critic Roger Ebert was an early adopter of putting a “spoiler warning” message at the top of his reviews that went online, and in a discussion on his blog around 2005 he talked of how he developed a policy that he put into place with his review of 2004’s Million Dollar Baby, which read: “It is a movie about a boxer. What else it is, all it is, how deep it goes, what emotional power it contains, I cannot suggest in this review, because I will not spoil the experience of following this story into the deepest secrets of life and death.”

Ebert then explained that, “Later, after the story was widely known, I intended to come back and discuss it from a different perspective.”

In other words, he gave people time to see the movie, and then after a certain period had elapsed, felt more able to discuss the finer plot points in depth (in this case, the debate and final decision to administer a mercy killing to Hilary Swank’s boxer left quadriplegic after an illegal sucker punch).

How long is an appropriate time to discuss twists and plot points is one for discussion. Mercurio, tweeting about Bodyguard, explained: “We apply a soft three-day rule on trailers for next episodes, ie media that can catch the audience off guard and unintentionally give away spoilers.”

The spoiler debate will no doubt rage as long as there is popular culture to be consumed, and as our viewing habits fracture even more and further away from the simultaneous viewings that TV especially used to be about.

But a general rule of thumb seems to be if it’s on at the pictures, then it’s up to those that have seen it to try to keep quiet, while if it’s on the TV, the onus is on the tardy viewer to avoid online discussion.

Of course, we haven’t even discussed books, and the treatment of spoilers on the printed page, but I’d hazard that a similar rule should apply as the one for films. And the further you get from publication, the less you can expect to be kept in the dark.

For example, if you’ve never read the short Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual, published in 1893 by Arthur Conan Doyle, then guess what… the butler did it.