Yup, it used to lead into Panorama (10:20pm)
Indeed, and for a time Panorama used to be completely integrated into the Sunday night news, it used to be mentioned in the headlines and the newsreader would introduce it. And of course in those days the senior presenters used to read the main news seven days a week, and the Sunday night bulletin was quite a high profile one because it would feature all the political stories that had sprung out of the Sunday morning political programmes. As mentioned, Saturdays were, and are, different and there's no way they could guarantee it being at ten every week, nor would they want to probably.
Moving Panorama to Sundays was considered quite the dumbing down at the time, although the slot before of Mondays at ten was hardly much better. It was at 9.30 on Mondays until 1997 but then they moved it to ten, which was controversial, but the Beeb said it was clear from the ratings that the audience didn't want over an hour of news in quick succession, and it would get a better lead-in from the 9.30 shows. Although it never really worked because you were limited to half hour shows at 9.30 and it was a weird old combination going from news to comedy and straight back to news. One benefit it did have was for BBC2 because Mondays at ten became a key slot for them, with Panorama and News at Ten as opposition, and it became a successful comedy slot for shows like The Royle Family.
Yes and that decision really stems from the ITV "News at When" saga.
When it was announced that ITV's News at Ten would be returning in January 2001, ISTR that ITV wouldn't commit to broadcasting it at 10pm every night. The idea was always that it would be flexible to fit around other programmes. This, of course, led to "News at When" criticisms being levelled at ITV.
Yes, although the fiddling around with the news started when it moved to 11pm because for the first few months, they didn't bolt it at 11pm, and if there was a film before it that wasn't exactly two hours long, it would quite regularly start at 10.50 or so, which was no use as people just didn't know when it was on, and they'd certainly not mentioned that would be the case. They stopped doing that after a while and it would always begin at 11pm, even if that meant editing a film down or showing some filler (episodes of TV's Naughtiest Blunders in numerous durations), but the damage was already done.
Then as you say, when it moved back to ten, they committed it to being at 10pm three nights a week, but it was never consistently the same three nights - it was never on Fridays, and it was often delayed on Wednesdays for sport, but occasionally they'd delay it on another night if they wanted to put on a long drama or film. I remember Lorraine Heggessey who was running BBC1 at the time saying that it always seemed to be the case as well that whenever a big story broke, it was a day ITV weren't at ten.
The other strange thing about that era of News at Ten was that the regional news didn't come with it, and it stayed at 11.20. That presumably was to allow the post-10pm shows to get on as early as possible, but it meant they all started at 10.20 and 10.50, which didn't match with any other channel so they all had to get off to a standing start, and made the schedules look a mess. And if they wanted to show anything longer than an hour after the news, the regional news ended up even later. Such a weird era.
It’s a great "what if" question because there would have been no way the BBC would have gone head to head, it would have been seen as a terrible move for a public service broadcaster to do. So that would have left it at 9pm. Imagine going from something like 14m viewers for a Bake Off final, into the news which would have killed the ratings, to then try to rebuild an audience for a 9.30pm show!
Arguably one of the BBC’s best ever decisions, moving it to 10.
There were examples before that of the Beeb moving their news programmes to the same time as ITV's, in 1986 they moved the lunchtime news to one o'clock where ITV had been for many years (although for the few years before that, News After Noon was on at 12.30 in the winter and one o'clock in the summer) and up until 1984 they both showed the teatime news at the same time, the Beeb getting a tiny advantage by starting five minutes earlier. But I think by the end of the nineties it was clearly a question of when, not if, the news would move.
Certainly for news and drama but always wonder if comedy might have faired better post-2000 if the news had stayed at 9pm as so many of the 90s classics seemed to air at 9.30pm or later, and the BBC initially at least struggled to schedule comedy in the 9pm hour without the news functioning as a clear break pre and post watershed.
That's probably true enough, they did struggle finding a place for half hour shows before 10pm. Of course the whole reason ITV moved the news in the first place was because they saw They Think It's All Over get eight million viewers at ten o'clock on BBC1 and wanted a piece of that, not that they ever found it.
Before the news moved the BBC1 schedules were quite regimented at 9.30 - there'd be Panorama on Mondays, drama on Tuesdays and Fridays, a documentary on Wednesdays and Thursdays at 9.30 was the familiar slot for comedy.
Of course the thing about the Beeb moving to ten is that all their dramas were still all fifty minutes long so for the first few months there were endless examples of programmes either finishing at 9.50, with some filler running up to the news - endless Castaway spin-offs and Auntie's Bloomers re-edits - or they'd start at 9.10 and earlier in the evening Holiday, Watchdog or Top of the Pops would have been extended by five or ten minutes. One great bonus was that The Weakest Link took off which was a convenient 40 minute duration.