It’s obviously too complicated a story for me to comprehend, but some recent scheduling decisions really don’t make a great deal of sense to me.
First of all there’s Saturday nights. No, I’m not talking about Pushing Daisies on ITV1, although that really did make no sense. I’m more interested in the general start and end times of the various primetime BBC1 (and ITV1) shows. Broadly speaking the Saturday night schedule for BBC1 at the moment looks something like this:
The Kids Are Alll Right
Doctor Who
I’d Do Anything
The National Lottery – 1 vs 100
Casualty
Love Soup
The start times for Doctor Who for the seven episodes we’ve seen so far this series have been, in order:
18:20
18:45
18:20
18:20
18:20
18:45
19:00
Next week, there’s a week off to make room for the Eurovision Song Contest. Now, does that make any sense to you? The knock on effect is felt for all these programmes. Check out the start times for all 12 episodes of Love Soup:
21:00
21:30
21:30
21:05
21:05
21:20
21:40
21:45
21:45
21:45
22:10
22:25
You really do need to pay attention, or have Sky+, to keep tabs on that show. It really can’t have helped the ratings especially.
Now I always thought that the schedules were largely dictated by the press times of the listings magazines. Furthermore, the BBC got a slight lead on ITV, as the commercial operator had to set start times a little earlier for the benefit of its advertisers. I’m not sure the latter part of that’s true any longer, but the Radio Times et al still need to go to press something like 8 days before the first Saturday of the week.
And it’s undoubtedly true that the BBC’s done its best to ensure that I’d Do Anything does not overlap Britain’s Got Talent on ITV to too large an extent (although it’s happy to let it over-run a little in the hope of damaging its competitor).
But while I don’t believe that schedules should be so set in stone that they can’t make allowances for big sporting events or other one-offs such as this week’s Eurovision, some semblance of normalcy can’t do too much harm surely? There’s a bit of a debate over at MediaGuardian about the shifting forward by 24 hours of The Apprentice next week due to an England friendly in the regular Wednesday night slot. But shifting one episode for one week is perfectly acceptable. It’s the regular moving around that I dislike.
The other strange scheduling decision is that of what’s shown at 10.00pm on Tuesdays on BBC2. For the last few weeks it’s been Later… with Jools Holland Live! Instead of the usual hour long programme, for this series they’ve made it shorter and broadcast it live at 10.00pm on Tuesdays. Then, if you prefer the longer version, you can still find it on Friday’s after Newsnight Review where it always used to sit.
My question is simple: which one of those should I be watching? On the one hand, I can see a shorter version of the show on Tuesday squeezed in between programmes on abortion and Newsnight. Or I can watch a neater edited version, with more actual music on a Friday. In fact, given that the music performances are the reason people tune in (it can’t be for Holland’s ingratiating interviews), then the Tuesday edition is a waste of time. I suppose it fills a half-hour slot that otherwise would go begging, but that’s not reason enough. And even more so, it’s to get Later’s ratings up. As an aside, it’s worth listening to this podcast with Mark Cooper of the BBC talking about music television on the Beeb.
And now it seems that this pattern is to be repeated with the programme that will share the time period throughout the year – The Culture Show. There’ll be a foreshortened Tuesday show, and then a longer version in the late night Friday slot. In this instance, that’ll simply mean pieces that we didn’t see on Tuesday only making it to air on Friday. On that basis, why would I bother with the Tuesday show aside from it being on a little earlier? There just doesn’t seem to be any logic. Now I will admit that the Saturday 7.00pm-ish slot on BBC2 (with a same night repeat later on) was pretty poor scheduling. But this again feels like it’s in the wrong place in the schedules, and makes little to no sense.