Repeated shows with ad breaks

Watching Play Your Cards Right on Challenge the other night, and noticed that when it went to a break, rather than have it's own animation into the logo, the 'card swipe' transition played and faded to black, fading back up after the break without the title - that's something I haven't seen before.

And it makes me wonder why channels like Challenge, Dave and Comedy Central often make their own, messy cuts into ad breaks rather than use the designated link into the break the show originally had. Another example was when Dave used to air Whose Line Is It Anyway, and rather than play Clive Anderson introducing the break, it cut to a Dave slide, and when it returned, it jumped straight into a game.

Is there a reason for this practice?

Presumably the different ad durations and so on - rather than (for example) two 14 minute programme slots with a break in between, there are now three 9 minute ones.

I'm sure if effort was used, along with careful editing, things like links into breaks could still be used from elsewhere in the episode, just moved to another part of the programme. At least that way you'd get the applause, sting and titles going into the break.

A bit like how that interactive website has used footage to create episodes for you to play along to... the names gone but they have Bullseye, Catchphrase, Millionaire, etc.

EDIT: WeDigTV, that's the site.

Cutting out links into breaks is probably better than cutting out other material from the programme though.

I'd totally forgotten about that site. I remember being so impressed when I first went on it!

Nothing really new here. Challenge editing has always been a bit hit-and-miss. It used to be pretty seamless and faithful to the original programme layouts, but recently seems to have acquired a nasty habit of plonking commercial bumpers in any particular place it seems fit to find. They're either losing money or want to maximise their 12min hourly advert quotas. It never used to be a problem before Virgin became involved.



As previously mentioned, Challenge used to be good at this, with the obvious exception of airing of BBC productions, for which they'll have had to force a break. Dave has always butchered the commercial bumpers on Who's Line, though Five USA when airing the American remake make even more of a pig's ear around the original commercial spots with some really bad edits.

To be fair to Comedy Central, most of its output is American sourced, and there's always been an issue with the commercial placings for UK transmission of American material scheduled for 1hr (in the case of 'Lost' it only had 42 minutes of "programme" per episode) or 30 minutes (22 minutes of programme). Sometimes an appropriate break has to be forced.

On the occasions when UKTV screw up and put out an old master tape onto which they have edited 1997 vintage UK Gold programme slides in and out of the breaks, it always looks so much better

I saw an episode of Some Mother's do 'ave 'em on GOLD the other evening. At the start of Part Two they had a UK Gold programme slide but the programme was cut off slightly at the end, probably by the same amount of time that the UK Gold slide was on screen for. Including the slide must have messed up the timing.

It's happened on a few programmes UK Gold decided to edit, the problem is it just looks plain daft considering that UKTV haven't used their original logo since 2001.

I can understand a broadcaster editing an old programme to thrown in an extra ad break (not that I think it's a good idea), but I don't get why breaks get moved, most notably when watching Whose Line is it Anyway? on Dave.

There is another reason for cutting the ads bit out on gameshows, there used to be Comperations phones in just before the breaks on some of the shows, Catchphrase even with Roy had them.

as said, Challenge needs to max out its ad time for the hour, in the good old days there let programmes run for 40mins if the came from the bbc, not now days, small talk and wipeout has to be done within 23 mins.

Actually, in the good old days they showed a 30 minute ITV show (e.g. Family Fortunes) in a 45 minute slot.

The breaks didn't just have adverts they had Prize Time too. I'd like to see them go back to that format, it was something that made it different to all the other channels repeating old programmes.

Every programme that UK Gold used was edited - reversioned - in some way, they didn't (and UKTV still don't) just use the BBCs copies.

The copy of the Some Mothers programme was obviously from the days when they bolted beginning and end of part captions onto the programme itself, presumably it was easier to do it this way. Now they don't use specific programme captions and seem to have edited in fades to black at the point where the breaks should be. If you watch some late night repeats the programme runs across the fade if there's no ad break scheduled