Substitute programmes

Why is the John Prescott factory programme not being shown and instead something about beans?

This is the programme on Channel 5, right? No idea and you might not get a specific answer because it tends to be sensitive, but the reasons programmes are dropped late are usually either technical (e.g. something's gone wrong with the file transfer) or compliance (e.g. a legal issue has come up at the last minute).

A complete guess, but no idea if it might have anything to do with us now being in an 'election period' before the European Elections..?

Anyway, a lot more people are about to ask the same question about tonight's Have I Got News For You...

Channel 5 very often pull programmes due to ratings, and reschedule them at random on different days and times.

As you also say HIGNFY seems to have gone missing, replaced by Mrs Brown’s Boys according to the Freeview EPG

Sorry everyone. The BBC have pulled tonight’s edition of #HIGNFY - no, we didn’t book Danny Baker. We booked Heidi Allen, a member of a party no-one knows the name of (not even the people in it), because the Euro elections, which nobody wants, may or may not be happening.
Sorry.

— Have I Got News For You (@haveigotnews) May 10, 2019

Election Periods haven't affected Have I Got News For You before have they?

When it's been on during an election, they have gone out of the way to give equal time to the parties in the jokes.

But you are right - Episode 6 from Series 57 (i.e Friday 10th May) is missing from the upcoming editions list..

Massive cockup by the producers then, we’ve known for quite a while that the EU elections are coming up in two weeks!

O...K...
So a candiate in the Euros. Understandable.
But, the campaining started on Tuesday - more than 48 hours before recording at Elstree last night.
Someone non policital must have been available to step in at short notice?

I don’t think that was the issue. Obviously it was a rather big oversight on their part.

Yup. If you look at the run up to previous elections, MP guests tend to disappear for a few weeks.

How far in advance are HIGNFY guests booked?

You’d have hoped that, having had the new that the elections were definitely going ahead, the producers of such a long running show would have been aware of such matters. Very strange.

I expect many weeks in advance, before the series starts.

But if they’d booked Danny Baker, they would have easily dropped him and drafted in one of the regular comedians at short notice.