Royal Institution Christmas Lectures

Weren't they all up in arms about Channel 5 moving in on the lectures?

Indeed contrary to how you might expect, the lectures were built around the commercials as opposed to what you might think of editing them in later:



Presumably it was the same for the Channel 4 years, though of course for both networks it effectively chopped the length of a lecture by about 10 minutes.

Well, it was during that era when they were trying to position the channel as more upmarket. That was around the time they had an arts strand, for example.

Channel 5 often did some good quality factual stuff back in the day. There were some excellent Paul Merton travel docs back in the day ISTR.

In those days I think they were being offered around to anyone that wanted them. C4 poached the lectures in 2000, and that year BBC2 did a similar programme in its place introduced by Gary Lineker - https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbctwo/england/2000-12-25#at-11.15

I get the impression that C4 weren't that bothered about keeping them on after the contract expired so the RI searched for another broadcaster, and finally they came back to the Beeb.

I would probably argue they're higher profile now than in most years, I know they used to be on BBC2 but always during the day, shuffling around the schedules. Whereas now they're in primetime, and they seem to fit pretty well on BBC4 as well.

They were actually cut down by a bit more than that.

During the Channel 5 era, the length of each lecture was around 35-37 minutes long, and in the More4 era from 2009, it was around 48 minutes long.

http://www.rigb.org/christmas-lectures/watch

Although each lecture is now an hour on BBC4, there have only been 3 lectures each year since 2010, but up to and including the Channel 5 era (including the More4 era), there were 5 lectures, so although the Channel 5 lectures were shorter than the previous BBC 2 lectures, the total duration of each series was around the same as it is today.

Notable that the Channel 4 lectures aren't on that site so there's a gap between 1999 and 2005, do the RI not have the rights to those ones?

The 1999 ones are listed as 1998 as well for some reason.

when the Channel 4 contract was up the BBC said they specifically didn't want them and I suppose Channel 5 got it relatively cheaply. I dare say folks thought there was a possibility of them being dumbed down. However an outlet is an outlet, even if it is Channel 5. Then the entire thing went full circle and now we're back on BBC on BBC Four.

I notice the Channel 4 years are not on the RI website "watch" section but the More4 year (2009) is as are the Channel 5 years. That being said there are still gaps in the BBC years so I presume they'll pop up at some point.