The TV Question Amnesty Thread

This is an idea I saw on another forum, it’s basically a thread to ask questions about television which might be obvious to some but not to others.

I will start the ball rolling, What’s time do the presenters and behind the scenes people of breakfast shows or live daytime shows like This Morning or Lorraine for example have to be there.

I believe Holly and Phil get in around half 8, and Loose Women around 9.

I'm happy to be corrected by I believe This Morning's production meeting is after the show, whereas Loose Women's is before.

I wonder if they have to schedule emergency meetings after the show to deal with fallouts like the Kim Woodburn incident on Loose Women a few months back.

If your name is Piers Morgan you can arrive five minutes before the show actually starts.

I think it's documented that one has to get up at Stupid o'clock to get ready for Breakfast TV (and radio). 3:30am seems to be a common time.

I think back in the TV-am days they were in make-up for 5am and that actual breakfast was closer to brunch time.

I have a question. Why is SD television worse quality than it was 15 years ago?

It probably isn't, HD TVs stretch and double up things in a vain attempt to "upscale" stuff, so you're blowing all the artefacts up. Probably not helped by people who don't watch non-widescreen stuff properly on a widescreen TV.

I would say in the case of Freeview, they’ve compressed things to fit more channels, either HD or SD. The cynical side of me thinks it’s a deliberate ploy to get people to upgrade to HD

It's often very blocky. If you watch BBC News SD for instance you can see how compressed the graphics are.

I believe Eamonn Holmes used to arrive 5 minutes before the show started when he did This Morning during holidays when he was presenting Sunrise.

The simple answer is it's due to more channels being crammed in to the limited bandwidth available, so the service video bitrates and therefore the picture quality has been reduced over the years to free up space for more channels.


This is particularly the case on Freeview, which has very limited bandwidth, so most channels now run at low bitrates. Excluding the PSB's channels, pretty much all the SD channels now also use the lower 544x576 picture resolution, which lowers the horizontal resolution in an attempt to reduce the compression artifacts caused by the low bitrates. This results in softer SD pictures, especially for 16:9 widescreen programming, which is practically all programming these days.

It's not (as far as I know) a deliberate attempt to convice people to upgrade to HD, it's simply the more channels Arqiva can fit in the better their balance sheet looks.

Satellite has significantly more bandwidth available, and so the SD services on Sky are generally higher quality as they don't have to squeeze the channels in as much.

The fact the majority of us now watch on bigger HD/UHD TV's doesn't help, the upscaling helps to show all these flaws, especially when compared to HD services.

There was one day he arrived late and Richard Madeley had to stand in with Ruth for the opening segments.