News during Euro 2008

Of course one answer would be to put the populist programmes on BBC2 at their normal time.

The average soap fan is so ardent that there is no way they'd miss them.

ITV of course do not have this option.

ITV could always drop a couple of soap episodes when they clash with Euro 2008 - next Monday for example - but they are rescheduling them to Sunday.

Already some idiot writing into Teletext saying it's "scandalous" how "my soaps" are being rescheduled for the football.

What really is scandalous is how soaps will be squeezed into the schedules whereever possible, but broadcasters don't think twice about slashing the news in half to accommodate the football.


It'll be interesting to see how the event is covered in the news this year, as generally in the past it's been pretty much solely from the England perspective.

Though in practical terms it is difficult to reduce the duration of pre-produced drama shows - where the plot lines and story development are designed around 25-29 minute slots.

In reality it is much easier to re-schedule, and relatively easy to alter the running order, of a news show to accommodate a change in duration and TX time - so it is an obvious route to take.

When looking at flexibility in a schedule live shows can really helpful...

True but ITV will surely have known the dates of the Euro 2008 games well in advance so could have made arrangements to drop a couple of episodes of Emmerdale and Corrie per week so they wouldnt have to be moved?

Dropping episodes would cause complaints

I imagine the complaints would go something like:

'Why have they dropped tonight's Coronation Street to show football, Who cares about football, there are dedicated channels for it. England aren't even in it this year...'

In fact moving episodes causes complaints, just like in this thread except change news for soap.

You can never ever imagine ITV dropping an episode of Corrie. Even the death of Princess Di didn't stop them doing so either. ISTR one occassion during Euro 2000 thanks to about two episodes of Who wants to be a Millionaire, Baddiel & Skinner and an overunning England game, that night's episode of Corrie ended up going after 11.00pm.

Due to the sheer amount of complaints they repeated it on the Friday at 7.00pm, I guess even that wouldn't happen now.

It should be pointed out that all this talk of the Six O'Clock News and ITV Evening News moving is a bit of an over reaction

It only takes place twice on BBC1 and 3 times on ITV1 during the entire tournament. I think anyone can cope with that

Thank god for 24hr news channels I say. Some relief from the crappy football!

Agreed. Hopefully by the time we get to Euro 2012 and the London Olympics there will be no need for the BBC to disrupt the schedules on BBC One at all. DSO will be complete and they can put all the sport on a separate channel.

I wonder whether in the future BBC One will end up being national in England much like BBC Two, and the news channel will be re-engineered to cary the opts, given that most of them are news or current affairs.

Now that is an interesting thought. They would have to increase the regional budgets if they are going to have a regional update every hour or every couple of hours.