TV scheduling

One of the great mysteries of TV how do people manage to mess this up so badly? Recently 4 of the 5 terrestrial channels had news on at the same time! Why? Almost every weekend no matter what is on BBC and ITV both try and put the news on at the same time as each other. Will the morons doing this please wake up the news is there to provide us with information not to win ratings there is no need for competition some of us like to watch news from multiple providers and be better informed.

Why can’t the programmes start when they are supposed to? Every weeknight the BBC regional news shows start at 6:27 or 6:28pm the listing says 6:30pm these are followed by The One Show 7pm according to the listings, the shows presenters and anyone else you care to ask. The show actually starts at 6:57pm. You may think my clock is 3 minutes out I wondered this as well so I checked it with 5 independent sources and confirmed it was correct one of those sources was the BBC! They can’t even run the programs to their own time I also watch my ITV local news at 6pm during the week unlike the rest of their programmes this starts at 6pm and runs to 6:30pm on the dot so when I switch over to BBC I’ve already missed a fair chunk of the top story on whichever show I watch that evening.

Also after the shows mentioned there is the 8pm news update which as you may have worked out by now isn’t actually on at 8pm normally closer to 7:56pm I’ve tested it by watching a show on BBC2 that ran till 8pm and switched to BBC1 to find the news long finished.

This problem also happens with the BBC local news shows at other times. When I had a chance I asked one of the presenters about it as her show was listed to start at 12:10pm she said the show was due to start at 12:07pm. Why don’t the viewers get this information after all we’re the ones that are supposed to watch the show would it not help us to know when it actually starts?

ITV have the same problem. In the afternoon there is always a cheap daytime TV show of some variety or another listed to start at 2pm. Regular viewers of the lunchtime local news know that it doesn’t finish until 2:02pm so why list 2pm? The following show scheduled for 3pm then starts early as well.

The ITV local news suffers at weekends often with times of 35mins past the hour listed for start time. Once again I asked one of the presenters about this and was told the show was actually starting at 39minutes and 10 seconds past the hour!

This sort of thing from broadcasters causes a problem for those of us that Sky+ the news (other forms of PVR are available) I have my Sky+ set with recording extended by 2 minutes at either end as that’s more than enough for any shows on satellite channels but routinely I miss the start and/or finish of the news on BBC or ITV due to their useless time listings. Why should I extend my recording times to cover for the complete and utter incompetence of whoever is in charge of timings?

If a show is meant to start at 6:27pm then just tell us and tell the people who put the EPG’s together they can list down to individual minutes without problem or better still just start the programs when they are listed surely it makes more sense to start at 6:30pm than 6:27pm