BBC One

How on earth do you manage to under-run a TV show by ten minutes?! Surely everything is meticulously planned down the second - a bit of leeway yeah but to get it so ridiculously wrong, there must have been something major that didn't happen (live music act or something?)

Whilst probably not that easy to drop in a filler it's a shame that many minutes of primetime Saturday night had to be filled with trails - although I'm sure those in Marketing were loving it.

The irony is at the end of X Factor, ITV overran by 10 minutes.

Because of the SCD voting problem, the extra ten minutes were the two finalists would dance again and then the judges picking who was the best, was all cut. That left the ten minutes which BBC One had to fill.

It could have been dealt with in a better way I suppose, SCD could have probably shown some footage about next weeks show, or got comments from the judges on what happened, surely?

Ahh yes, just watched the results show on iPlayer with Phil popping up at the end to 'reassure' us. Bit of an oversight there! I guess they probably just didn't have enough material available to drag it out any longer. Still lousy that Pres couldn't have come up with anything more imaginative than trails though.

You'd think they might even use an episode of Shaun the Sheep. There's one on youtube right now.

I wonder if the eight minutes of trails affected the ratings of Outnumbered, which was again hillarious - brilliant show that is! I hope its brought back for a third series.

Why couldn't each couple just repeat there dance?

Because BBC Pres have no interest in showing programmes, they're just a bunch of control freaks, who consider the programming as something to fill in the gaps between trailers, and vandalise the end credits of. They must have thought Christmas had come early last night, being given 10 minutes of 'dead air' to fill, in fact seeing as they've launched their Christmas idents about 11 days too early, perhaps they do think it's already Christmas ?

Partially as it's fantastic, but you'd think even Pres would like them between a few trails - brand consistency with the Wallace and Gromit promotion and all.

Apparently Tess was supposed to speak to the contestants again, but Brucey (who seemingly doesn't wear an earpiece) turned to the autocue and just read what was in front of him - which were the closing comments of the show. Erm.. oops.

It looks a bit like the director might have just copied and pasted the next few junctions, separating each with a sting - which would explain why a few trails got repeated.

As for an appropriate filler - perhaps they should have kept the tape for this handy?

Not even the case of a tape these days, they should have a cluster of 5, 10, 15 and 20 minutes filler programmes sat on the server ready to go.

What happened last night is perfectly acceptable for a BBC English region (c.f. BBC Southampton on the night of the great June 2000 TVC power failure) but not for a UK PSB national network during peak hours.

When Soton did that, each of the trails was on a seperate tape!

In the "good old days" we'd have had the programme menu slide appear which the announcer would have talked over for a few minutes, giving the network director a bit more time to find something suitable to fill the time with.