When BBC commissions go to 'retire'

Ok. So for the first time in ages, I've been stuck at home for a few days (please, I'm fine. No food parcels or calls to the emergency services) and done a fair bit of flicking around the channels, and stumbled upon a Rick Stein series on Good Food channel, which was on BBC Two a couple of years ago.

Because I remembered he visited a couple of places around Venice, where I've been in this show - I gave it a watch, and, of course the section I wanted to see was the one of two sections cut to make way for the 7 or so minutes of ad breaks required by Good Food/UKTV.

So, it set me thinking. Who or how is the advertising break placement within a BBC commission decided?

In this case, did the production company - Denham Productions - deliver the full 57 min version to the BBC, and then made a cut to time re-edit for BBC Worldwide with ad break gaps, so they can 'sell' it to Good Food or other overseas broadcaster sales?

Or, do BBC Worldwide make the timing edits for each sale they get? And if so, are the original production team consulted (or they suggest timing edits themselves) about which scenes/sections should be cut, so as not to accidentally ruin the narrative of the programme?

Or, is the ad break placement, and content edited out to make time for them done simply down to a unilateral decision by someone at UKTV, and 'all decisions are final'?

Be really interested to know the process. Thanks

I wouldn't be surprised if there's two versions, the original 57/58 minute version for BBC Two and a shorter version of c.48 minutes for commercial networks.

Although why Good Food do this is a mystery because UK Gold and whatnot are happy to run with 40 minute programme slots for BBC programmes. Mind you I think Dave has shown Dragon's Den before and 1hr DD episodes ended up pruned in the same way.

You can usually tell now on some BBC Programmes by the use of the phrase "coming up" and a summary of some sort that an ad-break would be about here if this were BBC America or whatever. Its so noticeable now I find.

In my experience, the broadcaster's Compliance/Versioning department dictate what needs to be cut down to make allow space for adverts (i.e. a BBC programme that's going to be shown on UKTV). The original programme is delivered to the broadcaster. In fact, those 40 minute slots (A BBC 30 minute programme) can be quite troublesome in terms of scheduling, as they don't want to break hourly advertising limits.

The BBC seem to have 30, 45 and 60 minute edits of many daytime shows now, presumably with the 45 minute version intended for commercial resale.

In 2006 or so, I was working on playout for Challenge - they'd fit Eggheads into a 30 minute slot with a centre break by unceremoniously dropping one of the rounds, so you'd come back from the break and find an extra person in the sin bin.

Under Virgin ownership a large chunk of contestant introductions across a range of shows were also trimmed. Family Fortunes and certain Bullseye episodes were affected for some reason (despite these two coming from commercial networks already), but also Wipeout with Paul Daniels was trimmed in this way to fit it into a Challenge 30 minute slot.

They even cut most of the titles from Family Fortunes towards the end of the Virgin era.

Wheel Of Fortune was horribly cut too.

Cut out the gloating from the Eggheads and that should fit in a 15 minute slot.

You should see the UK episodes of The Chase when they're shown in Australia - there's so much cut to make way for ad breaks the show runs at absolute light speed, non-stop questions with any contestant chat/Chaser banter removed. Bradley pretty much just says "Hello", "Goodbye", "The next contestant is X!" and the questions.

The Chase is ITV - how come it needs cutting for breaks? Is it in a shorter slot or are there more ads?

That's even stranger since running time of the show can deal with 12mins full on adverts. Challenge does it with nothing cut. Tech oz can screen up 16mins... But most have 13min? So what's the deal..

Years ago they used to have to re-edit live programmes for showing on Prime and World the next week. They were quite basic edits done by a network director. They used to have problems with Blue Peter in particular because once they'd got rid of anything topical that wasn't relevant a week later, or overly UK centric, or any competitions, or otherwise couldn't be shown abroad... it was often too short to show!