BBC1 to drop Saturday night Lottery draws

Smart move from the BBC. In an era when the corporation is trying to show how it's different from its commercial rivals - and scheduling Planet Earth is a perfect example of this - a cheap and cheerful bland quiz show with a tenuous link to the lottery adds nothing. Regain complete control of that part of Saturday night and see what else you can do with it.

There would be a case for continuing the draw on its own, but to be honest having seen it in other countries it just adds an unnecessary and untidy junction - people just want the numbers and can get them from any number of sources these days.

It's a long way from the days when ITV was so terrified of losing viewers it would flash the numbers up during Blind Date.

Haha, you've just reminded me that the BBC also made a bit of a thing about the Saturday night draw also being simulcast live on Radio 1 as well. Seemed an odd outlet for it at the time, and still hard to make sense of now.

Oh God, I completely forgot about that. You'd go straight in from some full-on dance track into Bob Monkhouse welcoming "listeners to Radio 1".

Yes, exactly!

It's part of the wallpaper now but when you stop and think about it everything about The National Lottery being on the BBC at all is a bit dodgy.

France's 'Loto' draw has gone between PSB France 2 and currently on TF1 and the Swiss Lotto is on the PSB channels. However, they're very basic productions, Switzerland is done by a voiceover and the French version has a real set, but is around 1'30.

And of course, they wouldn't be allowed to anyway because Camelot are only allowed to operate games of chance, not games of skill. The only format where they did provide the prizes was Big Ticket, and of course that was a bloody awful show because it meant the actual contestants were by law obliged to do nothing at all, and celebrities had to play the games on their behalf.

Not totally sure I agree with that. Sure, it is gambling, but it's gambling run by the state and the Lottery has actually been a force for good in terms of the money it has raised for good causes. I'm currently working for an institution that is just about to undergo a major building project that simply wouldn't have been possible without a £4m Heritage Lottery Fund grant. It's not like the BBC were promoting privately funded and run lottery games.

Having said that, the concept of money changing hands for the BBC to have the 'rights' to the draws did strike me as a misuse of licence fee money.

They should have kept the draws but not do the gameshows around them.

Why?

The whole reason we didn't go down the whole 'full draw programme instead of an insert' was because an unnamed BBC executive (Alan Yentob) wanted to include the lottery draw show in the BBC One Saturday night viewing figures/audience share against ITV. If it had been a stand alone 90sec insert, BARB wouldn't have counted it.

Sure it's legit but it's still gambling and known as "a tax on stupid/poor people" for a reason. What's murky is how the BBC dressed it up as frothy, family friendly light entertainment on primetime Saturday nights.