Is the TV cliffhanger dead?

Catch-up and on-demand services mean we can watch our favourite programmes whenever we want rather than having to be sat in front of the telly at a particular time to find out what misery is befalling the residents of Albert Square this week while DVD box sets which always come out the same day the current season ends mean we can just watch all of Game of Thrones in one chunk rather than having to wait a week in between servings.

Even daily news broadcasts – surely one of the unkillable bastions of broadcasting – have been rendered thoroughly irrelevant by rolling news channels.

This is nothing new of course – the advent of the video recorder has meant you could go out to the pub of a Friday night and watch Corrie when you stumbled back home for decades at this point. It’d probably be more entertaining through a drunken haze anyway.

And generally I’m firmly in favour of it – having to be in front of the telly at a particular time every week is a pain but being able to chose when to watch your favourite show is a godsend.

But it has had one unexpected impact – it’s all but killed the cliffhanger ending.

Lost was a great example of this – while the majority of the show was utter twaddle, the writers always somehow managed to slip in something in the closing minutes of each episode demanding you tune in next week.

Even Dr Who – long the master of the gripping cliffhanger ending – has all but ditched it in favour of mostly done-in-one stories.

But when we all watch shows in chunks cliffhangers are irrelevant. Why demand viewers come back next week if they’re just going to press ‘next’ on Netflix and find out what happens immediately.

To its credit Eastenders has hung on with the obligatory ‘duf-duf ’ moment when whats-her-name from the Queen Vic reveals she’s having an affair with that bloke from the laundrette while engaged to that chap from the garage, but there can’t be many more examples.

This may be the future of television, but is it a good one?