Radio Times

I'm just going by what Radio Times themselves said in emails. I don't for one minute expect 2018 to be 15th - 28th December. But at this moment in time, as it stands now, the Radio times will be publishing a 16 - 29 December issue next year. As I say, we;ll know for sure in due course once the publication dates are confirmed.

Good god its £4.50 I remember when......

Whats worse is there no New years eve listing or even Jan 1st. so you will have to pay out for those... TV times is £3. Its racket and not worth it. I went with "Whats on TV" A pound but still.

You get what you pay for!

Its great! cheap and tells me everything including the Border Scotland opt outs. I would highly recommend this to all people.

Well, indeed. The Christmas Radio Times is £4.50 and What's On TV is a quid, but you buy the Radio Times because you want to buy the Radio Times. Nobody's standing there umming and erring over which one they want to buy. They appeal to different audiences. It's like buying The Sun instead of The Guardian because one's 50p and one's two quid.

Besides, given The Observer costs three quid, and Doctor Who Magazine is six quid, I don't find £2.30 a prohibitive price for the weekly Radio Times. I get as much use out of it as those two publications, if not more.

Tesco here in NI have the Radio Times in a prominent place in its own stand by the checkouts. No other magazine is there.

Also, how long as the Radio Times included RTÉ for NI?

The fact the RT is a premium product with no competition in its price range seems to be justification for the large price increases that keep happening every year. Will the Christmas issue be £5 next year?

What's on TV competes with TV Choice so seems to go up about 2p a year.

a516 has a good review of the listing options. I went in the middle with Total TV Guide. Better listings IMO than the Radio Times and better features than the soap obsessed £1 options. I've traditionally bought the Radio Times and always accepted the higher price tag but this year that price tag does seem to be pushing it's luck.

http://www.a516digital.com/2016/12/guide-to-listings-guides-which-one-will.html

The Radio Times does have competition, though - the Guardian Guide, the Sunday Times Culture section, the Mail weekend magazine and all the other TV guides in the broadsheets and mid-market papers. It also used to have Time Out before they stopped doing TV listings. That's their competition, so there's plenty of other places for people to go if they don't like it. They don't just put the price up on a whim, either, they're a commercial product and they charge what they think people will pay for it. It's not like the eighties when you were forced to buy it.



Well, this is going to make me sound like an enormous bellend but in the mid-nineties I did actually aim to buy a copy of the Radio Times for every region in Britain - back in the days when they did several editions and they were different enough to be a bit interesting (to me, anyway, not to anyone else). So every time I went to a different region I'd buy one. Within two years I'd got an issue from every region apart from East Anglia, but by that point girls and pop music seemed to be a bigger priority than arranging a jaunt to Norwich. I've chucked them out since (though my main Radio Times collection remains very much intact).

What all this means is that I did have an Irish edition, bought on a daytrip to Dublin. As Tony Currie's book points out, after deregulation in 1991, they rebranded the Northern Ireland edition as Ireland and started including RTE listings - in the space other regions used for regional variations, though in the same larger font that the Scottish edition used for Grampian and the Welsh one for S4C. It livened it up and it meant they could sell it in a wider area. And seemingly they've never stopped. You can see both on both sides of the border, so why not?

It wasn't until C5 came along though that they had a dedicated space for regional listings IIRC - until then they were just incorporated into the ITV column IIRC. I think S4C were put in with briefer C4 listings, so where did they list RTE?

I do think a revamp of the listings in the Radio TImes is long overdue. Probably time now for daytime to be incorporated into the main listings column considering the side bar doesn't offer much - and actually by getting rid of it that could be used to give more space for listings on BBC1 and BBC2, which I suspect most Radio Times viewers care about more than the details of the daytime line up on ITV and C4.

I used to do the same on family holidays in the 70s I managed to obtain three versions of a September 1972 edition, when there was a reorganisation of Radio 3 and 4's MW frequencies (to release 194m, 206m and 261m for the roll out of BBC local radio on MW, and the start of ILR the following year) Lots of regionally tailored juicy Tx maps and LR info pages in the London, South, and West editions.

40 years later, the internet's great for realising you weren't totally alone back then !