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”.