MUST SEES AND DYING TO DOS: We spend our lives dodging spoilers

Hold on a second — how far are you in it?

As a question, out of context, it doesn’t seem to make much sense. Perhaps if your friend was lost in a maze and rung you from it because they knew you’d already made your way through it and therefore could guide them out, then you would have cause to say it.

But many of us repeat that phrase quite often in social gatherings. It’s necessary because we need to avoid that thing that has the potential to ruin an evening as surely as a bout of food poisoning: the spoiler.

If you think spoilers are just aerodynamic elements, made of lightweight polymers and fixed to the front or back of a Subaru, (a Subaru driven at 7000 revs from the Spar to the Cineplex so its growl can be heard across the landscape like a lion in heat on the Serengeti) then spoiler alert: they are much more than that.

The spoiler is the tiny phrase uttered by someone who has finished the book, seen the match, is further along in the television series than you, and which renders all your future experience of the match, book, TV show moot.

It used to be that the spoiler was largely concerned with football matches. You would tiptoe through the day avoiding human contact so that you could watch Match of the Day or The Sunday Game with no idea what the result was.

Now spoilers permeate every conversation. It’s because TV programmes have become MUST-SEE. And if you haven’t seen them, conversations can become kind of awkward because the other person is DYING to talk about something but can’t because you haven’t been enlightened. They can’t enlighten you. They can only encourage you to access it for yourself, via a computer programme. It’s like talking to a cagey Scientologist.

We’ve had to start watching Making A Murderer whether we wanted to or not. Making a Murderer is a Netflix (internet telly) true-crime series — in case you’re thinking it’s Quentin Tarantino-meets-Make n’ Do with Mary Fitzgerald. But that’s all I can tell you about it because I don’t know how far you are in it.

Because we’ve started that, it means that other series have been pushed further back in the queue. We have a backlog of telly which is more onerous than any neverending TO DO list. And just like the aspirational TO DO lists in work notebooks, we are coming to the sad conclusion that there might just be too much television to finish in our natural lifetimes. We may have to compile a list for future generations.

Do you remember when there was nothing on? Remember those wet summer evenings where the only backlog was one of scattered showers and you wrung every last minute of sustenance of the two channels and TV shows that wouldn’t even pass muster now. There’s no brooding anti-hero, women being targeted by a serial killer who delights in prime-number puzzles, or troubled cop whose biggest adversary is inside his own head, in Jake and the Fatman yet we watched the marrow out of it on bored evenings when regular television was on holidays.

Our minds were lean. We only got steak once a week with something like Robin of Sherwood (the mystical one with Michael Praed). Now we’re all obese on with our recommended weekly requirement of good telly exceeded by Monday night.

And we’re permanently on a state of alert for spoilers.

Spoilers are so feared now they’ve sort of permeated the real world. I recently met a friend who I hadn’t seen in ages. As I was about to fill him in on intervening years, I hesitated. Should I tell him all that had happened in sequential order lest I spoil the series? It was like I was saying: “Hold on a second, my life… how far are you in it?”