This Time with Alan Partridge

Well to be fair. Those numbers look better on BBC Two than they do on BBC One.

A bit like the local branch line service from my railway station. Just a bit silly for the two carriage train to use the main 12 carriage platform for its departures, which it does sometimes.
Doesn’t affect the number of passengers using it though.

You need to live up north, almost all trains are two carriages!

Anyway, All what happened was that people who hadn’t watched Alan Partridge before watched the first one to see what all the fuss was about, didn’t get it, and then stopped watching. So they’ve just ended up with the same pot of cult Partridge fans but with BBC One’s larger audience expectations.

When This Time was filmed (last May?) the expectation in the interviews I read at the time was that it would air in 2018. This is borne out by the feminist guest in episode 5 stating the current year as being 2018. Yet in episode 2, the tributes to John Baskell on the screens in the studio have 2019 as his year of death.

If they presumably went to the trouble of filming two versions of the John Baskell tribute scenes in case it was broadcast in 2019, it's odd that they didn't dub 2019 over the feminist's line (a relatively easy job as she wasn't even in shot when she said it).

I imagine the text on screen was superimposed rather than the scenes reshot.

Ever though it was possible that the 2018 date was just a character error? Like real life people, characters in TV shows aren't perfect and get dates wrong in conversation.

Fictional characters don't, though, do they? Or if they do, there's a reason for it and it will be commented on by other characters.

It just got overlooked, that's all.

Fictional characters get dates and facts wrong quite a lot throughout the history of TV and film, and are not always picked up on. Admittedly a lot of the time this is down to sloppy research or poor writing but at the end of the day its still a character error. Richard Attenborough's character got the opening date of Disneyland wrong in Jurassic Park but you didn't see Jeff Goldblum correct him, since they had more important things to worry about at that point of the movie.

1.9m last night, I think it’s dropped every week since it launched.



This Time will surely have been given a bigger budget on account of it being shown on BBC One rather than BBC Two. Although in this case it could have had a smaller budget and still had 1.6m viewers on BBC Two. The BBC bosses clearly thought it was going to be more popular than it’s turned out to be. Very few programs do as badly as 1.6m on BBC One.

May and June, I believe. A couple of jurnos were invited to Wimbledon Studios to see some of the studio scenes being recorded, and they commented how hot it was outside, and rather stuffy inside the studio.

You can date a couple of the shots in the opening titles. The one of Jennie getting out of the taxi, which is in front of the anti vehicle barriers at BH, looking down Portland Place. There's bunting up across the roadway, so that was around the time of Prince Harry and Megan's wedding last May.

Would like to see the reason the air date slipped from the press release, which indicated it would air in the Autumn last year. Wonder if Steve having to do all the pre-publicity interviews for 'Stan and Ollie' on both sides of the Atlantic would have caused a clash, if the BBC released it the series towards the end of last year?

I think consolidated figures will be interesting - as the figures quoted here are just overnights. I wouldn't be surprised if it picked up a lot of viewers via iPlayer etc.

Aaron, I think we all get that you don't like it and you're no doubt going to keep putting the boot in but there is nothing to dictate that a programme on BBC One has to have a bigger budget than BBC Two.

I'd make an educated guess that I'm Alan Partridge had a much larger budget than This Time consider its multiple sets, larger cast and more location work.