Continuity/Playout video that might be of interest, basically one of Channel 4's announcers, Chris, demonstrating what happens when being cued by the Playout Director for live announcements:
Great video. I would have thought timings were much more strict in broadcasting. There we have The Simpsons, scheduled for 6:00pm starting at around 6:01.30. I assume starting things dead on time or as close as possible has gone now and it's just a close approximation? I can always remember watching the clock on the BBC counting down to announce a programme, usually the news or closedown, and the programme would usually not start until the second hand was exactly at 12.
Great video. I would have thought timings were much more strict in broadcasting. There we have The Simpsons, scheduled for 6:00pm starting at around 6:01.30. I assume starting things dead on time or as close as possible has gone now and it's just a close approximation? I can always remember watching the clock on the BBC counting down to announce a programme, usually the news or closedown, and the programme would usually not start until the second hand was exactly at 12.
The news would, but nothing else ever did. For years the programme after the Nine O'Clock News on BBC1 would always begin at about 9.34. I know in the eighties that they would regularly massage the timings to ensure BBC1 and BBC2 programmes started at the same time. It's always happened since television began that things are rounded down to make things look tidier. It's not like we're catching a train.
It's obvious The Simpsons can't start dead on six because it's a 22 minute programme in a half hour slot. And there was that famous example of Neighbours being twenty minutes at 1.30 and 25 minutes at 5.35 cos at 1.30 they rounded down and at 5.35 they rounded up.
Yeah, there's lots of things schedulers have to take into account when it comes to the start time of a programme, as well as fitting together programmes with different durations, occasionally commercial minutage in the clock hour is another consideration. You do sometimes get things fixed to dead on the hour like the news. I don't know if they still so, but BBC Two always liked to start Eggheads at exactly 6pm, you'll also see it a lot at 6am when many channels start their new schedule.
Of anything, it must have been worse in the past if the wildly fluctuating durations from week to week of programmes like Fawlty Towers and TOTP are anything to go by.
When programmes under/overrun or you get schedule changes and have to cobble together a schedule on the fly, the general rule of thumb everywhere I've been has been that up to 1 minute early or up to 4 minutes past the billed time is ok, anything more than that requires a rebill.
Yeah, there's lots of things schedulers have to take into account when it comes to the start time of a programme, as well as fitting together programmes with different durations, occasionally commercial minutage in the clock hour is another consideration. You do sometimes get things fixed to dead on the hour like the news. I don't know if they still so, but BBC Two always liked to start Eggheads at exactly 6pm, you'll also see it a lot at 6am when many channels start their new schedule.
Of anything, it must have been worse in the past if the wildly fluctuating durations from week to week of programmes like Fawlty Towers and TOTP are anything to go by.
That's more to do with the odd way BBC1 was scheduled in the 70s and early 80s. The evening started at 6:55 and there were American imports, so the programmes were made to fit odd slots, especially those like TOTP and Tomorrow's World which could just fill to accommodate whatever was after it. They'd still have gone out at the billed time, its just the billed time was something odd like 6:55 or 8:25.
Yeah, there's lots of things schedulers have to take into account when it comes to the start time of a programme, as well as fitting together programmes with different durations, occasionally commercial minutage in the clock hour is another consideration. You do sometimes get things fixed to dead on the hour like the news. I don't know if they still so, but BBC Two always liked to start Eggheads at exactly 6pm, you'll also see it a lot at 6am when many channels start their new schedule.
Of anything, it must have been worse in the past if the wildly fluctuating durations from week to week of programmes like Fawlty Towers and TOTP are anything to go by.
That's more to do with the odd way BBC1 was scheduled in the 70s and early 80s. The evening started at 6:55 and there were American imports, so the programmes were made to fit odd slots, especially those like TOTP and Tomorrow's World which could just fill to accommodate whatever was after it. They'd still have gone out at the billed time, its just the billed time was something odd like 6:55 or 8:25.
Yes - when the BBC broadcast US imports in prime-time in the 80s we had all sorts of odd scheduling issues to handle US 'hours' being less than 50 minutes on the BBC. Points of View was used a lot to fill the 'Dallas' gap ISTR...
In the 60s and 70s they used not to round to the nearest 5 minutes for billings in the Radio or TV Times, and you'd see all sorts of odd minutes in the start times for shows.
The afternoon on BBC 1 was always planned by working backwards from the Six to make sure it started on time.
Or that was the plan unless a live Blue Peter was on, which in the Biddy Baxter era would often overrun, which sometimes meant the opt out trail for the regional programmes would be dropped, which was not popular in the regional centres!
I suspect that once CBBC came along that got a lot simpler with the long junction into Neighbours being able to expand or contract as required.
