Farscape is back on BBC2

Hi All, 1st post and I'm glad to have just joined

Farscape is back on BBC2 late night/early morning over the weekends. On Saturday night/Sunday morning at around 1:30am (check your TV guide for exact times!) the BBC is showing two episodes back-to-back and again the following Sunday night/Monday morning at around a similar time .

a great show I highly recommend

These unnecessary double bills are reducing the time available for Ceefax. Cut it out BBC2.

On that note, why is Ceefax on BBC2 midweek anyway? I don't remember the Learning Zone taking a summer break before...

The Learning Zone returns on 11 September. From now on, it will only broadcast during "academic" times of the year (a victory for some after 12 years).

Out of interest, is there someone directing BBC Two until closedown? Last night for example they went to N24 around 2am but closed at 4am with a trail (never a missed opportunity) and ident (wouldn't it be nice if they bothered to play out the full 30secs each night?)

Or is the BBC One director asked to manage the closedown junction?

How long the ident plays for depends on the anno. Becky Wright usually knows what we want(!) Unfortunately, the trail either side of Ceefax now seems an immoveable (thanks to our dear friends in Marketing) and there have been some appallingly violent jump cuts out of Ceefax into the Doctors promo recently.

I would rather see Farscape, and I suspect I'm not exactly alone there...

Agreed. Not so hard, if one was that desperate, to put Ceefax on for oneself, and play some lift muzak. Teletext was always an extra on top of the tv channel for me. Not something to put ON it.

You Farscape fans don't seem to understand it is a REPEAT, something there are far too many of on BBC2 at present. Downtime helps keep the number of these to a minimum.

I know. Early S3 - if these were new eps (and Peacekeeper Wars still hasn't been shown on the BBC to my knowledge...) and they were being punted out at half-one in the morning, I would be crying bloody murder. It's hardly displacing anything worthwhile

What, pray tell, is an infinitely looping short series of Ceefax pages if not repeating the same thing umpteen times an hour, however? If it was downtime, it would be nothing, just a page of static.

Proper programming is always preferable to blank screens, "Pages from Ceefax", Make Your Glitterballmania, etc.

Would you like to see channels going back to only being on air from around 3 till midnight?

Welcome to the wonderful world of TV circa 1979

Now you mention it...that's where BBC2 and C4 were in 1987 and for the reduced hours they both offered a lot more worthwhile stuff. No derivative quizzes or property shows to pad out the schedules.

As someone once said (in reference to the need to keep the screen filled at all hours) "if you've nothing worth saying, keep quiet"...