I hope Eggheads gets better treatment than a previous BBC Two move to Channel 5, that being Robot Wars back in 2003.
After being given a fairly well advertised move to 8pm on Sundays it was moved to Saturday evening after a few weeks.
Suddenly, after a couple more weeks it was moved again, this time to ever changing mid afternoon times on Sundays.
Yes, Robot Wars was only on Channel Five for six months, but it was in four different slots - Sunday nights, Saturday nights, Sunday afternoons, Saturday afternoons. I always think the problem there was that Robot Wars was declining on BBC2, it had enjoyed enormous ratings circa 2000 but by 2003 it was on the slide a bit (not helped by the ten million spin-offs) and so it had probably run its course. But when C5 picked it up, they didn't do anything differently apart from ad breaks, so it was the same show that was declining on the Beeb, and they did nothing to try and revitalise it or attract new or lapsed viewers. So it just accelerated the decline and there was no point poaching it, really.
This is Your life was BBC for a few years, then ITV (Thames), and then back to the BBC.
Of course, there are differences between shows that move channel while they're still a going concern, and those which have officially ended and just get picked up by a different broadcaster a few years later like any other format. Both of those things happened with This Is Your Life, the Beeb axed it in 1964, much to Eamonn Andrews' disgust as they didn't offer him anything else, which was pretty much the main reason why he went to ITV, and then five years later ITV were trying to find some new entertainment shows and some new vehicles for Eamonn, and someone suggested This Is Your Life would be a good format.
In Will Wyatt's book, he says that Thames' Richard Dunn went to see him at the Beeb in 1991, before the franchise results were known, to ask him, if the worst happened and they lost their franchise, if they might be interested in a few of their shows, specifically This Is Your Life and The Bill, so they had a few options. Obviously they didn't get The Bill, but they were interested enough in This Is Your Life, although when they did get it, the official line was "We're not poaching it, it's coming home".
There was also the complication of the deal with BSB as well wasn't there?
Well, Frost on Sunday was shown on the Now channel on BSB when that started, but it had long ended by the time TV-am closed and Frost went to the Beeb. Breakfast with Frost was repeated on Sky News for a bit, which seems bizarre now, but Frost was such a networker he did manage to do all sorts of deals. At the same time his CPV-TV consortium had lost out to Carlton in the franchise round, but Frost clearly wasn't deterred because he had a show on Carlton when it launched.
