The Andrew Neil Show

SET. YOUR. WATCH. @BBCNews delighted to announce new prime time, weekly, in-depth, political programme with the peerless @afneil The Andrew Neil Show launches next Wednesday 7pm #BBC2 Analysis, forensic interviews with the key players - peeps, this stuff matters

— Kamal Ahmed (@bbckamal) August 29, 2019

Hurrah! Hurrah!

Excellent news

So his wish did come true after all.

Whether it’s based on the This Week format or will share any characteristics, remains to be seen.

Question is: will he have recovered sufficiently from his recent cycling accident? Though I believe he commented yesterday that he was recovering well.

So I guess it will be This Week in all but name? The only reason Andrew left This Week, and pulled the whole programme down with him with his exit was that he just found it too late at night. 7pm, up against the might of Emmerdale, The One Show and Channel 4 News - my guess it will fail after a few weeks, unless they can attract a loyal audience at 7pm.

Surely the whole point of this (and Channel 4 News) is to provide an alternative to the likes of The One Show and Emmerdale at that time.

Yes, although back in the four channel analogue era there was a sort of gentleman's agreement between BBC 2 and C4 not to compete with each other with the same genre programmes in the same timeslot. That's all out of the window now of course.

BBC TWO at 7pm next Wednesday is listed as being 'The Repair Shop'.

Talk about being negative.

Andrew Neil is widely acknowledged as the best political interviewer around right now.

I can’t see him suddenly becoming a failure overnight.

To be fair, they've been looking to plug the Sunday Politics hole for a while... Wednesdays and Sundays will now be the Andrew Show Days. In the words of W1A, 'hur-rah!'

Which I believe are hour long edits of previous editions - perhaps they'll put the 30 minute editions on afterwards?