Erm... not it wasn't. I've seen the Nine O'Clock News start at 30 seconds past - WITH a clock! Late starts of the Ten O'Clock News are the exception rather than the norm. The clock was probably dropped because it was felt to be an outdated form of presentation.
A shame, in my personal opinion, cos I liked clocks, but hey-ho!
So basically BBC1 ran EastEnders past the 8.30pm finishing time, no doubt to try and stop viewers turning over to ITV1. Yes this is the lengths that the people behind the nation's supposed main broadcaster will go to, stooping to ITV1's alleged lower level!!
Then they ran late all night, although there was probably a good 5 mins of trailers between 8.30pm and 10pm that could have been taken out, no doubt the same trailer for Little Britain that was funny the first 10 times we'd seen it. At least when ITV1 run late it is because they are running adverts, not endless promos!
Maybe this is the real reason why the Heggasay women dropped the clock!!
Calm down, you're not doing your blood pressure any good.
I expect the reason was they allowed EastEnders a bit longer as it was a special episode, so it would have been fine in a 35 min slot. However it did start at 8. And if it was to try and scupped the Corrie thing - hey, that's TV. ITV do it all the time, BBC do it all the time with rival scheduling. That's what makes it so interesting.
I thought (though I don't know why) that the clock was dropped because it could never be accurate with the different delays caused by broadcasting on DSAT, DTT, terrestrial etc.
Then they ran late all night, although there was probably a good 5 mins of trailers between 8.30pm and 10pm that could have been taken out
Back in my day (cue wobbly DVE transition and tinkly harp gliss) the house rule was that if they were running more than 5 minutes behind billed time, they would start dropping trails etc to catch up. If that rule is still in force, presumably the news at any time up to 22:05 would not be considered cause for alarm.
I thought (though I don't know why) that the clock was dropped because it could never be accurate with the different delays caused by broadcasting on DSAT, DTT, terrestrial etc.
Yep - plus the fact that latterly the clock was normally shown just before the One/Six/Ten and was a regional opt, so played out from a dodgy Beta SP copy (in most regions) This meant it was only as accurate as the person who pressed play on the VTR anyway...
There was also the issue of latency in the digital network feed to the nations which meant that although the news started bang on the hour in London, by the time it had got to the nations and been demultiplexed it was a fraction of a second late. The presentation clocks were set to run three-fifths of a second slow in order to be able to cut from the second hand on the twelve to presenter in vision without clipping the network clock.
By the time this had been multiplexed again and sent to the DSat uplink and back down, clearly the clock made very little sence as a timekeeper!
No, because when it's finished they'll just turn over :S
Yes, but people are more likely to turn over to watch the last 27 minutes of a half-hour programme than the last 3 minutes of the previous one, followed by adverts before the start of the programme they actually want to watch.
